Goal setting – why are we so self limiting?When goal setting with clients, I regularly challenge them on the limited extent of their aspirations, on their limiting beliefs. Such beliefs are not facts, though they act as if they were fact. Beliefs form our version of reality based on what we feel and perceive about our experiences. There is never any hard evidence to support these feelings. However, we build the results of our experiences into beliefs that become a set of rules by which we conduct ourselves. Such beliefs frequently defend a view that something can’t be done. So how powerful might it be then, if when in the process of goal setting this was turned on its head and there was a shared belief that something that was once considered impossible could be done? Up until 1954 there was a general belief shared by the majority of athletes and a section of the medical profession that it was not possible to run a mile in under four minutes. It was even said that the blood would effectively ‘boil’ in the brain and the brain would explode! Amateur athlete and 25year old medical student, Roger Bannister had a different goal and believed otherwise. With team support from fellow athletes, Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway he did it in 3mins 59.4 seconds. Once Bannister had proved that that ‘it could be done’, just one month later, in June 1954 Australian John Landy clocked 3mins 57.9. It has since been bettered seventeen times and is now the standard for professional middle-distance runners. The world is full of other examples of what can really happen when a team has belief. Not only that, but when it uses that belief to the whole team’s advantage remarkable achievements become possible.
So don’t limit your own beliefs. In the words of Brian Littrell
“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."
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