Last July, I took a challenge offered through Michael Neill called “Creating the Impossible“. The rules of the challenge:
1. You must believe you have a less than 50% chance for success in the 30 days of the program.2. You must be so passionate about what it is you want to create that you will be glad of any time you spend invested in creating it, regardless of how things turn out!
I decided that my Impossible Goal was to “lose 40 pounds in 30 days”. I didn’t declare my goal to anyone other than on the Creating the Impossible challenge forum and on my Creating the Impossible-specific Twitter account. I could not believe the response that I got from one of the non-challenge participants that I was following through the new Twitter account. She declared that “she could not follow me” because the goal was “setting [me] up for failure and [she] could not support me.” Clearly, she had not read the challenge pre-requisites and I had triggered something within her. I’m sure I triggered that with more people, but she was the only one to verbalize it.
What I had done was to not only challenge myself, but I was challenging the notion of what is “possible”. In those 30 days, I shifted my mind to what I believed it would take to lose 40 pounds in 30 days and I did those actions. I had to think about what I knew was effective for weight loss and my body and seek out new information to find more efficient ways of shedding weight that I would be willing to apply. Making up my mind to do those actions was most important in creating the environment for success even if it were highly impossible.
Fast forward through the 30 days and I lost 16 pounds! Sixteen pounds! I had never lost more than 11 pounds with any “sensible” plan, shedding 45% more weight in the same time frame. Yes, I didn’t achieve the “40 pounds in 30 days”, but what do you think that did to my psyche? What do you think that did to my knowledge of what was “possible”?
What I learned was that sometimes doing the “possible” and “sensible”, one can lose interest in the day-in-day-out choices and actions necessary to achieve a goal that requires more than a day’s worth of attention. I learned that I was capable of doing far greater than I allowed myself to believe. I learned that I am willing to do what it takes and apply those actions.
Many times, we are gung-ho in the onset of a new goal. We clean out the junk food from the cabinets and refrigerator. We sign up for a 2-year contract at the gym. We find an accountability partner to keep us on track. Yet, after 12 days of implementation, we find ourselves on the sofa when we wanted to be at the gym, going to Subway and buying the Meatball Marinara with extra cheese instead of the turkey on wheat–hold the cheese, and letting our accountability partner’s phone call go to voicemail.
Why is that? I believe it’s because that initial preparatory activity was exciting. It was swift. We were making huge changes all at once: We went ALL out!
In those 30 days in July of 2009, I went all out and shed 16 pounds of the 40 that I set as the impossible goal. Now, when I’m goal-setting, I use this experience to look for the “impossible”. I look for ways to “go all out” that are within my control.
- I can choose too get up at 5:30 AM to bust out 30-45 minutes of exercise before I hop in the shower to prepare for work.
- I can choose to repeat that again after work.
- can choose to not go out to eat or choose to be wise about my food choices when I do.
- I can choose to be the accountability partner that will call you on your “shit” or choose to be challenged by a mentor who has already been successful and give them permission to call me on my shit.
Where within your goal (weight loss, debt relief, time management) can you make a choice to do the impossible?
What is that?
Are you willing to do that?
Share your responses in the comments section.
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