"But this isn't possible Satu."
"It's a pipe dream Satu."
"I mean, ideally, yeah, it would be great, but it's not realistic."
I've heard these statements from clients so many times, I sometimes find it a bit frustrating. Essentially they come up when we're going over what their ideal career/life might look like. They start to uncover something that's exciting and different, and bang. The small little voices in their heads start going into overdrive. Most things have changed in this world, when a good majority of people found it ‘not possible', and one or few people said: what if it was possible?
Just this week I was talking with a client about gentle-paced working environments. She described to me what she wanted and then said: "but that's like never going to happen so why should I waste my time?" Now interestingly enough I have another client working in the same industry in a gentle-paced environment, so in this case I'm lucky, because I have concrete proof that it is possible. But even if I didn't have this ‘proof', if it doesn't exist, why not try and make it happen?
The dangerous trap that my client was walking into was assuming that her ideas were ‘facts', as opposed to what they really were, ‘assumptions'. And guess what?  Our assumptions usually stem out of our old friend - fear. There are very few facts or things that are really ‘real'. We create our own reality - and yet we take it as being the only possible reality. It's not.
There's a whole world we know we know. There's another part of the world that we know we don't know (well, not everyone will admit to this, but you get the drift). But the world that we most need access to, and that our assumptions often prevent us from exploring is the world we don't know we don't know.
So what are your assumptions of ‘what's possible'? How do you know they are real? What could you do to test that assumption? And better yet, what could you do to make your dreams real?
If you think of how our knowledge of the world has developed - most things we take for granted as givens today (the globe is round, women can vote, mobile phones, you name it!) were deemed impossible thoughts at one point in time - and yet someone decided to test this assumption, figure out a way around it, and voila, look what all of a sudden became possible.
So what assumptions of yours are standing between where you are now and where you could possibly be?
"But this isn't possible Satu."
"It's a pipe dream Satu."
"I mean, ideally, yeah, it would be great, but it's not realistic."
I've heard these statements from clients so many times, I sometimes find it a bit frustrating. Essentially they come up when we're going over what their ideal career/life might look like. They start to uncover something that's exciting and different, and bang. The small little voices in their heads start going into overdrive. Most things have changed in this world, when a good majority of people found it ‘not possible', and one or few people said: what if it was possible?
Just this week I was talking with a client about gentle-paced working environments. She described to me what she wanted and then said: "but that's like never going to happen so why should I waste my time?" Now interestingly enough I have another client working in the same industry in a gentle-paced environment, so in this case I'm lucky, because I have concrete proof that it is possible. But even if I didn't have this ‘proof', if it doesn't exist, why not try and make it happen?
The dangerous trap that my client was walking into was assuming that her ideas were ‘facts', as opposed to what they really were, ‘assumptions'. And guess what? Our assumptions usually stem out of our old friend - fear. There are very few facts or things that are really ‘real'. We create our own reality - and yet we take it as being the only possible reality. It's not.
There's a whole world we know we know. There's another part of the world that we know we don't know (well, not everyone will admit to this, but you get the drift). But the world that we most need access to, and that our assumptions often prevent us from exploring is the world we don't know we don't know.
So what are your assumptions of ‘what's possible'? How do you know they are real? What could you do to test that assumption? And better yet, what could you do to make your dreams real?
If you think of how our knowledge of the world has developed - most things we take for granted as givens today (the globe is round, women can vote, mobile phones, you name it!) were deemed impossible thoughts at one point in time - and yet someone decided to test this assumption, figure out a way around it, and voila, look what all of a sudden became possible.
So what assumptions of yours are standing between where you are now and where you could possibly be?
