My good friend Kat posted an awesome video about the actor Will Smith which is very inspiring to me. Among the things Will talks about is that being unrealistic is okay if not an ideal to really go for!  As I swam my mile laps this afternoon I thought about what it meant to be unrealistic and what Will was trying to communicate to us about not setting limits on ourselves about what we can accomplish.

It occurred to me as I was swimming and thinking (135 laps gives you plenty of time to mull things over!) that I had many people to be grateful for pushing past what was unrealistic.  Take the pool I swim in for example! We bought our home 15 years ago pretty much because of the pool.  It’s not a little kidney shaped pool….it’s nice and long and conducive for swimming many laps.  I would imagine that the people who built it had to have been told how unrealistic it was to even build a pool (“you’ll never make the money back on what you put into it”….) much less the kind of pool they built for swimmers. But boy am I glad they did!

During Will Smith’s video montage he talks about working and focusing hard on what you want in your life.  As he was talking to the host he used the example of each of them getting on treadmill’s  and that either the host would get off first or Will would die trying to be the last one off.  I so understand that kind of  drive and mentality.  I couldn’t say that I’ve applied that kind of desire to my coaching in a traditional way, meaning I’m not going to bowl everyone over who I think is in my path and keeping me from being the best Coach ever.  But I do have a drive to attract a specific kind of client—the kind who has already done a lot of growth work on themselves mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically and who wants to dive in deep to get the most out of coaching they can.  In a way, my usual hard-headed, unrealistic approach to the kind of work I enjoy doing has allowed me to carve out a pretty nice life for myself.  I’m not driving around in a fancy car or wearing designer threads all the time but I am directing all my decisions and actions towards being able to live and work in a way that is more in alignment with who I am.  Let’s face it, having my dogs curled around the edge of my chair while I type this is much more preferable to me than driving to a beautiful office up in the sky everyday.  Not that I don’t appreciate the beauty and excitement of an office like that, but having my home office, dogs and sometimes husband around me stirs my creative juices like no other place I’ve ever worked.

How will you go beyond the unrealistic today?  Have you already been going for it and if you have, tell us how?!