6 Billion Realities

Unsurprisingly, a lot of people come to me to help them set and achieve goals. I use my own method that I have adapted from SMART goals and an NLP system called Well Formed Outcomes and I call them SMARTER goals. Cute eh? I’m not going to talk about them per se today because you can go here if you want to know more or maybe even go crazy, buy my book (now available in eBook format folks!) and help me know where my next meal is coming from. What I am going to talk about though is that first ‘R’, the evil ‘R’ of Realistic.

I spend so long explaining to clients why I don’t like the ‘R’ that every now and then I’m tempted to just take the damn thing out altogether and have SMATER goals, but it just doesn’t have the same ring to it. I know what you’re thinking, it’s either “Why doesn’t he just take the ‘R’ off the end and have SMARTE goals” or “Where’s the back button, I’m bored” In the former case, the second ‘R’ is so fundamental and so important that is has to be the LAST thing the goal setter thinks of. If you still have no idea what the hell I’m talking about you now really do have to go and read up on them. If it was the latter thought, it’s top left and I wish you bon voyage my attention challenged friend.

I’m going to tell you a secret; realism doesn’t even exist it’s just a concept. In fact, it’s completely unrealistic to believe in realism.

There are 6 billion people on this planet give or take and every one of us sees things in a slightly different way. That’s 6 billions disparate ways of viewing things and 6 billion different realities. Who says mine, yours or even Pope Benedicts for that matter is any more accurate than anybody else’s?

We’re conditioned through life to see things in a certain way. As kids we’re told what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s good and what ‘s bad, but what makes that reality? Pretty much nothing, other than our belief that it is, because that’s what we’ve been told. Not only that, but we then go on to perpetuate the belief by passing it in to our kids without ever stopping to question it. Every time I hear a parent telling a kid that they are being unrealistic I cringe. What right have they got to impose such restrictions at such an impressionable age? I know they usually mean well and they want to shield their kids against future disappointments, but they actually end up impeding them from fulfilling their true potential.

People told Walt Disney he was being unrealistic when he put forward his ideas for Disney World to be built on a swamp. People told John F Kennedy he was unrealistic when he set out his goal to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. People told Gandhi he was being unrealistic when he set out to defeat the British Empire without the use of force.

I was going to list another 4 or 5 examples, but what’s the point? There are millions of cases of ideas coming to fruition that people couldn’t wait to say were unrealistic beforehand. I’m sure you even have your own; I know I have. I had people telling me that I was unrealistic when I said I wanted to emigrate! Yeh right, because nobody’s ever done that before! Then I was unrealistic to think I could get a book published – wrong again. Now I suppose I am being realistic to think I can grow gills and go and live in an underwater castle with a mermaid called Colin. We’ll see about that one, but I’m quietly confident.

Be in no doubt, when you try to introduce radical change into your life there will be people forming a line ready to tell you why you’ll fail, why you are being unrealistic and why you should leave things as they are. When they do, smile, thank them kindly and move on, because that’s their version of reality and you don’t ever need to make it yours.

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