Ep #67: Impossible Goals

You are listening to The Life Coach Business Podcast, episode number 67.

Welcome to The Life Coach Business Podcast, a show for coaches who are ready to up-level their business and take their impact, leadership, and results to a whole new level. If you’re ready to start taking powerful action and become the leader your business needs in order to grow and thrive, this show is for you. I’m your host, Amanda Karlstad, certified life and business coach, and entrepreneurial leadership expert. Now, let’s get down to business.

Hello and welcome, everyone. I hope you’re doing well. I hope you’re staying healthy and warm, wherever you are. I have to tell you; I had a first recording this episode.

So, I recorded this episode, as normal, leading up to the actual day that it drops. Normally, I record at least a week, if not more, in advance and submit that to my podcast production team. They do the editing, all of the behind-the-scenes stuff, and it gets dropped every week as normal.

And what was interesting is, as I was getting ready on Monday morning, getting ready for literally a full day of coaching back-to-back coaching sessions, full day, I get a Slack message from my producer saying we’re going to need to likely re-record.

I had recorded the entire episode using the wrong mic, essentially. So, I was using the mic on my computer instead of my podcast mic. And so, if you have any experience recording a podcast or recording videos, or anything of that nature, you know how terrible it can sound when you’re using, sometimes, your computer speakers.

And so, I wasn’t about to drop the episode with that type of audio quality, so here I am. I am re-recording the entire episode. And what was really interesting, the reason I wanted to share this with you, number one, it was a great lesson for me to double check.

So, I could have made this mean a whole lot of things. I could have allowed this to derail me a bit. I could have allowed this to, I guess, just throw things off. And instead, I chose to practice what I preach to you all and decide that this was all in my best interest and it was all for a reason and it’s all – I’m choosing to believe that this version of the podcast is going to be even that much better because of it.

So, there you go. So, I’m excited to talk to you all today about impossible goals. And this is something that I think is an important conversation, just given the time of year. We are obviously starting the new year, we are looking ahead, full year of 2021 ahead of us.

I don’t know about you, but I am so looking forward to this year. I’m so looking forward to my clients and what they’re creating and their success and all the plans. It’s just been amazing. And I’ll be sharing more of that in the coming episodes and likely having some of them on the episodes coming up here in the next several weeks.

So, I do think that this is a natural time of year to, of course, be looking at our goals and be looking at the year ahead and really deciding what it is that we want to create.

And so, I want to talk to you all today about what I believe impossible goals are and why they’re so important. And I’m going to give you some tips as well on how to set them for yourself, how to set them for your business and really talk about the difference that this has made in my own business. And when I look at my most successful clients, it’s absolutely part of the equation.

And so, I think a good place to start with this is to first talk about what an impossible goal is. So, you don’t have to belabor this. An impossible goal is a goal that feels impossible.

So, in the context of your business, in the context of building and growing a coaching practice, for most coaches in the industry and most coaches that I work with, usually the goals that we’re setting in many cases revolve around a revenue number. They revolve around a financial goal in your business. So, for a lot of coaches especially when they’re starting out, that first kind of big benchmark, that first kind of big impossible goal is $100,000.

Now, some of you listening, I know, have maybe made that much already in your business and maybe you’re looking at your first million. And so, it doesn’t really matter in terms of your business, the concepts that we’re going to talk about here apply. And I think the more that you can really adopt this in your business, the more that you can really put into practice what we’re going to talk about today, I think is really going to help you over the long-term.

So, let’s just use, for purposes to keep it easy in terms of math, let’s just use $100,000 as our example. And so, for those of you that are starting out in your business and you are working to build our business at that first six figures, it probably feels impossible. And if it doesn’t feel impossible, I want you to pick a number that feels impossible. That’s the goal.

So, pick that number. Think about December 31^st of 2021. I want you to fast forward to that date and I want you to think about the number that if you were to reach that in your business, if you were to create that in your business, that would completely blow your mind, that literally seems impossible to achieve right now.

And so, when you think about that number, what I want to point out that the reason that setting a goal that feels impossible is important because it requires you to start thinking and doing from a whole new level. Let me explain this.

So, in our society, when you really step back and look at how most of us have been raised, when you look at most of us, how we’ve been conditioned, when you look at how we’ve been taught to set goals in our lives, it’s really coming from a place of setting them, in most cases, around what’s achievable, what seems to be reasonable.

And I’m really challenging you here to do the opposite. And the reason for that is because when we set goals that seem achievable, when we set goals that seem realistic, what happens is, we’re not really challenging ourselves to step beyond that and to grow beyond that.

So, there’s a ton of benefits of essentially being unrealistic. And when I look at, again, myself, when I loo at clients that have really gone after impossible goals and really committed to creating that result, in every case, they’re so much farther ahead having set those goals than setting a goal that seemed realistic at the time.

Because the truth is, when we set goals that seem realistic, when we set goals that seem achievable, what we’re actually doing is setting goals that are based in our past. We’re setting goals based on evidence our brain is offering to us based on our past track record. So, I want you to really think about that.

This is why setting impossible goals is important. Yes, the destination, making $100,000, making a million dollars, making $25 million is amazing, is exciting. It’s fun to think about. And I’d encourage you to think about and to feel that emotion.

But this is really about who you become in the process of achieving that goal. Because that you that achieves 100K, $1 million, a $25 million dollar goal is a much different version of yourself than not, than achieving what’s within reach.

And so, by not setting an impossible goal, you risk losing the experience of becoming who it is you really are meant to be. And I want you to all consider that for a moment. that’s the reason setting impossible goals is so important.

It’s not merely just to make the money. The money is great, of course, the money helps. But it’s really about who you become in that process of working towards and achieving that goal.

Alright, the next piece that I want to talk with you all about as it relates to impossible goals is the importance of failure in this process. Because again, this is something in our society that we’re actually conditioned away from, we’re conditioned to not fail. We’re conditioned, as parents, to try to prevent our children from failing.

And I want to challenge you all to understand that in order to reach an impossible goal, in order to create the result of an impossible goal, you’re going to fail along the way. And the truth is that the sooner that you can fail and the more that you can fail, the quicker you can fail, the closer that actually brings you, the closer you’re actually getting to your goal.

Because if we’re not failing, if we’re not up against these edges where we’re really stepping into these new levels of ourselves, we’re not expanding. We’re not becoming who it is we really can be.

And so, I want to encourage you to think about failure as a benefit in this process, as a requirement in this process, and reframe what failure actually means. And I’m a firm believer in just, even outside of this conversation, in general, I don’t really believe in failure.

I believe in only learning and really looking at any quote unquote failure as a learning experience. And I really do think being able to frame it that way – and I really believe that – it allows me to move through things so much quicker than if I were to sit in the narrative of failure.

So, know that failure is an integral part of this process. And the more failures that you have, the closer you’re actually getting to that goal.

Alright, so let’s talk for a minute about how you can set impossible goals. So, I want to offer you some tips and some strategies on how you can actually implement this in your own business.

So, the first step here is that we have to really get clear on what it is we want to achieve. Think about what that is, what that goal is, what that impossible goal is and make sure that it’s specific. So, we want to make sure that it’s measurable.

And the reason we do is because we want to know, at the end of that time frame – and I would highly encourage you to use this year and I would look at December 31^st 2021, that’s really kind of our deadline with this. and I would use that and think about this through the lens of being able to think about what it is that we want to really achieve this year, what it is that we want to really create that we can look back a year from now and really blow our minds as to what we did.

So, that’s actually where we want to start. And with that, we want to make sure that it’s specific. We want to make sure that it’s measurable so that we know, without a doubt, whether or not we achieve that. Okay, so that’s step number one.

Step number two is to understand the reaction that your brain will have. Here’s what I mean by that. Our brain’s job is to keep us safe. Our brain has literally been wired to keep us in our safe zone. So, what that means is when we set a goal that seems impossible, that feels impossible to us, our brain is naturally going to start scanning all of our experiences, all of the past evidence and offer us ideas and thoughts and sentences as far as whether or not it’s achievable.

So, the second step here is to just understand that that is normal, that that is what your brain will do. And the key with this is that we don’t want to buy into the narrative. We don’t want to buy into what it is our brain is offering to us. Because, if we do, essentially what’s happening is we’re actually then creating our future only based on our past.

So, I want you to understand that. When we’re using our past as evidence, when our brain is offering us those past experiences, those past facts, what seems as though they’re facts in our minds as evidence, we’re actually creating our future from the past. That’s a really important distinction to make.

So, understand that your brain is going to do that and get clear – I can highly recommend that you get clear by journaling out what that evidence is that your brain is offering. So, write down all of the reasons, all of the thoughts, all of the beliefs in terms of why your brain thinks that it’s impossible. So, that’s step number two.

The third step, once we have our list, once we can see all of the reasons why we think it’s impossible, all of the reasons why our brain is saying, “No, don’t set your goal there, that’s way too high or that’s never going to happen,” whatever those reasons are, that’s where we want to then start creating our strategies to overcome those obstacles.

So, to use an example, for some of you, it might be, I don’t have an audience or I don’t have an email list or I don’t have a lead generation system in place. Again, using that as a simple example.

So, a strategy then would be how to overcome that. And that’s where we can get into some of the tactical pieces here. So, if it’s not having an audience, then it’s a matter of deciding and listing out what are the strategies that you’re going to commit to in order to build that audience.

And it might be putting a freebie funnel together. It might be doing some guest interviews. There’s all sorts of things that could fall under that. So, that’s what we want to do for each of those obstacles that our brain is presenting to us. We want to come up with a clear strategy.

Alright, the next step to this is we then want to start taking massive action. So, what I will say about this is it’s all well and good to set an impossible goal. And in fact, it’s a lot of fun. It’s been my experience that it’s a lot of fun to set impossible goals. But the real difference is being able to then show up every day and take action from that place.

So this, my friends, is a really important piece to this puzzle, is being able to show up from that place, from that result of it already being done, taking the actions on a daily basis towards that result. Really, really important. And I’ve got to tell you, this is something where I see a lot of coaches especially get hung up. And they get hung up for a lot of different reasons.

I think, in many cases, there’s a lack of clarity, there’s a lack of confidence in terms of the goal. There’s a lot of lack of clarity surrounding the how, which is again normal. Our brain is going to automatically want to understand the how.

So, whatever that is, just know for you that the important thing is that you’re moving forward, that you are showing up, that you’re deciding to take action and move your business forward, even on the days where you might not feel like it, even during those times where you’re not sure, you don’t have the evidence yet that whatever it is that you’re doing is even working.

It might be the first time you’re launching something, launching a new program or launching a new marketing campaign. When you don’t have that evidence yet, that’s when it becomes even more important to step forward and take that action.

Because by doing that, what you also do is you’re conditioning your brain in a new way. You’re conditioning your brain to find new evidence to the contrary, to find that evidence to support you in meeting that goal. So, that’s really, really important.

And the last piece that I want to say here is that when you’re going through this process, when you’ve set your goal, when you’ve gotten clear on all of the reasons and the obstacles and you have decided what your strategies will be to overcome those and you show up and do the work every day, I’m going to tell you, there’s still going to be a great deal of time that you’re spending kind of waffling back and forth, where you don’t yet have the evidence and you’re going to feel like you’re doing all of the things and you’re going to feel like you are taking massive action. And you may be.

But I want to tell you that when you’re in that part of the process, what’s really important is to continue to believe and to cultivate your belief in achieving that result while also not having the evidence and being willing to step forward and do what’s required. That is the gamechanger.

And what I will say about this is that it’s very common to want to avoid failure. It’s going to be, when you’re in this process and don’t yet have the evidence but also are working to cultivate your belief and take action from that place, your brain is going to offer you all sorts of reasons as far as why you should try to escape failure.

And some of those examples could be changing the goal, could be offering you some confusion, or possibly lowering your standards, your intensity in certain areas, not following through on commitments, being able to justify inaction, all sorts of reasons that your brain will likely offer to you that essentially is trying to get you to escape failure.

Alright, so there you have it, there is out conversation on impossible goals. I hope this served you. I encourage you to do this exercise. I’d love to hear what you come up with. Go set some impossible goals. Let’s do this. Let’s go 2021. Alright, have an amazing week, you all. I’ll talk to you all again very soon. Take care. Bye-bye.

Hey, if you’re ready for a real breakthrough in your business and want to grow and scale your business to at least six figures or more in annual revenue, I invite you to apply for my exclusive program The Mastermind atamandakarlstadcoaching.com/the-mastermind. I look forward to seeing you there.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Life Coach Business Podcast. If you want to learn more about how to build, grow and scale your business and accelerate your results, visit amandakarlstadcoaching.com.