Una's Blog

by Una Hearne.

Does it bug you when coaches and inspirational speakers tell you that you can do anything you want? Absolutely anything, with no limits? It really bugged me over the years. We all know there are limits. Time, for example, is a hard limit, we cannot create any more of it than we have. We have to prioritise what we spend our time on because we simply cannot do everything. No matter how many secrets we read.

Having said that, the idea that life is just the way it is and we are powerless in our own destinies bugs me just as much. The limits are much further out than we think. This realisation crystallised for me while watching Mark Pollack give a talk a couple of years ago. Mark went blind suddenly in his early twenties. He can’t have his sight back as far as he and his doctors know. So there’s a hard limit which seems to imply a whole raft of limits to what he can do with his life. But Mark defied expectations and demonstrated how far out the real limits are. His response to blindness was to set off on ridiculous expeditions to inaccessible parts of the planet – the type of adventure we all know is impossible if you are blind – like racing across deserts, up mountains and to the poles of the planet. The difference with Mark was that he didn’t believe those things were impossible. http://www.markpollock.com

I see my clients do amazing things all the time, I’ve achieved things I never thought I would. We can, in fact, be, have and do incredible things in life – far more than we habitually think. Most of the time we don’t even bother to dream for ourselves, we just assume we can see the limits of our little lives. Usually we cannot. Even if we get as far as daring to dream, we talk ourselves out of it as quickly as possible. Or we tell our families and they talk us out of it. When we just allow the dream to be and disallow the immediate avalanche of assumptions about why it won’t happen, it creates new real possibilities in our lives.

There are limits to what we can do, of course there are, but they are much further out than we think.