That’s impossible. We can never make that work.
How many times have you heard these words?
Perhaps from those around you. Perhaps you’ve even said them.
Impossible is an interesting word. It’s a word that gets used a fair bit. A word that needs to be challenged.
Let me ask you a question.
Have you ever had a brilliant idea, something you got really excited about?
And by the end of the day, you’ve talked yourself out of it, overwhelmed with all the “why not” reasons. And the idea quickly slips away.
Worse still, six months down the line, you see someone else has taken your exact idea and created something incredibly successful out of it.
“That was my idea”, you hear yourself say.
I truly believe that great ideas are never lost, they are simply found, and actioned by someone else.
So, then, what’s the difference between having the idea and having the success story?
I believe it all comes down to our mindset.
How we think about that impossible idea.
Some years ago, my wife and I had an idea to sail the world with our young family.
The reasons why it was impossible raced to our minds:
- We didn’t have the money
- My wife had only been on a boat twice and had been seasick both times, and…
- We didn’t have a boat.
It would have been easy to give up at that point.
It would have been easy to say lets go on a 2 week sailing holiday.
Instead though we created the mindset shifts that enabled us to embark on a 2 year transformational round two world voyage.
It’s those exact mindset shifts which have become my obsession and have led me to study some of the greatest leaders and minds on our planet to explore that gap that sits between that space of “Why” this must happen, and “Why Not”, what are all the reasons why this could fail.
It’s these insights for both individuals and teams that I believe are one of the most important skill sets we need in business today.
McKinsey, in 2023, said the pace of change will never be this slow again.
We now live in an age of exponential change, and yet we are still using linear thinking to try and solve the problems we face.
I want to share with you and your audience these incredibly important and small human shifts in the way we think about the future that you can use in your teams to create huge shifts in the results you get.
There is such incredible magic in thinking bigger.
When we do this, we stretch what we believe is possible and it’s in this stretch that we create the space for fresh ideas, creativity and new ways to solve the hardest problems you face in your business.
I call this shift in thinking The Big Bold Mindset, and it follows a set of simple principles rooted in a better understanding of how we, the human animal, operate.
The next time you hear the words “that’s impossible”, catch yourself.
Here are three simple ideas you can start with to challenge that thinking:
1. Has someone else overcome a similar challenge before? If yes, then there will be a way for you to overcome your challenges. You’ve just not run enough experiments yet to figure out the best path forward.
2. Think about WHY achieving this idea matters. Create an emotional connection with the future picture of what solving that problem looks like – become immersed and invested in that future picture.
3. Walk towards all the reasons why it might fail, the WHY NOT’S. Specifically, don’t try to answer them today – if you try to answer them now, it invites the feeling of being overwhelmed and giving up. In time, you will prioritise these challenges and, one by one, figure out the skill sets that you and the team need to bring to bear to be able to solve each challenge.
The future belongs to those who solve the hardest challenges in your sector and solving what others call impossible is one the of single best places to start.
Caspar Craven is a leading authority on the Mindset needed to achieve Big Bold Goals and leadership speaker.
Caspar delivers transformational, thought-provoking experiences that will leave your audience feeling inspired. He provides actionable takeaways to help you achieve your big, bold goals by putting people first
