THE LIFE COACH SCHOOL PODCAST – Episode 253
While we are talking about money and about improving ourselves and about abundance and about adding value to this world, let’s talk about impossible goals.
Here is one that I heard on a podcast about marriage recently. This podcasting couple’s goal – the hosts goal – in creating their marriage podcast, was to decrease the rate of divorce in the world. What?! That is impossible! Right? That is an impossible goal for a single couple to set out to attain with their one podcast. But looking at the number of followers they currently have – thousands and thousands – maybe it isn’t impossible. Maybe they have, in some way, done just what they set out to do. Incredible! This blew me away, my friends!
Let’s talk about no limits. Let’s talk about dreaming and working and hoping and failing and getting up. We are going to fail and fall short in life, anyway. It’s very much a part of the human experience. Why not have that experience while reaching for something big, something that will stretch ourselves, and recreate ourselves – intentionally.
“It’s funny because sometimes people tell me that it’s irresponsible of me to tell people that they can achieve impossible things. And I’m like, irresponsible? How is that irresponsible? I think it’s irresponsible to tell people that they can’t achieve what they currently think is impossible. So I’m never changing my stance on that. I will never soften my message.”
In this episode, Brooke talks about goals, and Brooke inspires me as to my own goals. But Brooke is also realistic – all impossible goals are reached on a pile of failures, she says. You have to be willing to fail – maybe every day.
One of my favorite talks I’ve heard in church about failure – growing from failure to failure – came from Lynn Robbins:
“Learning to skillfully play the piano is essentially impossible without making thousands of mistakes—maybe even a million. To learn a foreign language, one must face the embarrassment of making thousands of mistakes—maybe even a million…”
Maybe, instead of using the work “mistakes” we could use the word “experiences”. Those mistakes – those experiences – are often more valuable to us in our pursuits than the success alone would have been. Do you remember Oliver Granger? “When he falls he shall rise again, for his sacrifice shall be more sacred unto me than his increase” (Doctrine and Covenants 117:13).
“We may wonder—if both Nephi and Moses (and Oliver Granger and you and me) were on the Lord’s errand, why didn’t the Lord intervene and help them achieve success on their first try? Why did He allow them—and why does He allow us—to flounder and fail in our attempts to succeed?”
- First, the Lord knows that “these things shall give [us] experience, and shall be for [our] good.”
- Second, to allow us to “taste the bitter, that [we] may know to prize the good.”
- Third, to prove that “the battle is the Lord’s,” and it is only by His grace that we can accomplish His work and become like Him.
- Fourth, to help us develop and hone scores of Christlike attributes that cannot be refined except through opposition and “in the furnace of affliction.”
Those are from Elder Robbins.
Tomorrow let’s get into more specifics of Impossible Goals, how to fail, how to succeed.
“It is good that it’s impossible … but we also want to make sure that you are having next actions be possible.”
No Comment