Designing Your Impossible Future: Why You Need One and How to Do It

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“extraordinary result...or transformational goal”. 

An Impossible Future (IF) goal looks more like this:

•    Meet the needs of serious woodworkers and gardeners as one of the leading mail-order and retail suppliers of woodworking tools, gardening tools and cabinet hardware (Leonard Lee, Lee Valley Tools);
•    Better Leaders. Better World (Leadership coach Robert Hargrove);
•    A computer on every desk and in every home (Bill Gates).


You can construct a small, safe, predictable future or something more meaningful and challenging. Your Impossible Future will most likely have a longer time frame, and one Impossible Future can lead to another.

Longer time frame


8 Steps to Designing Your Impossible Future

1.    Start by taking stock of your current reality, but with a twist.
Instead of focusing on what is wrong or missing, look for the best of what is now. Identify your current strengths. Reflect on your career high points, positive experiences and accomplishments. Find similarities, themes and lessons across your positive experiences.  What is working well for you?  What do you want to keep?  Describe in detail your positive core.
Personal- empowering people to take control, growing leaders, leading professional learning, leading and motivating for change, developing collaborative teams, connecting with and motivating teenagers,
Team- commitment to the success of the school, diversity of experience and interests and backgrounds, passion for learning, passion for the community we will be working with, experience wealthy, professional capital, energy young, sense of caring and recognition of peoples needs as individuals, growth as a culturally responsive team, acknowledge that we don't know it all, 

2.    Become an explorer into your future.
With your positive attributes and strengths in mind, imagine your ideal future in broad strokes. Generate images of possibilities.  What would someone who respects and loves you want for your future?  How would you express your highest and best self? If there were no obstacles, what could you accomplish that could make a positive difference for you and your community? 
Personal- Be a challenger, Passion for looking at existing patterns and challenging them
Team- Creating a team and a school that challenges existing notions of 'good/best practice' education and  particularly schools and models some. 
As a collective leadership team what do we want to be seen as? capacity builders, cohesive, empowerment of others, collective decision making

3.    Paint a detailed picture
Now add plenty of detail to your future. Define it as clearly as if you were standing in your Impossible Future now. Use present tense language. What does it look like exactly? Where are you? Who is there? What are they saying about you? What are you doing? How are you feeling?  Make it real in your mind.  Remember, you are forming the image of your future toward which you are going to grow.

4.    Pay attention to the language you use.
Scientists today recognize that how we use language creates our social reality. Optimistic, possibility-generating language drives people to take action in a positive direction far more than negative, critical, cautionary approaches.  

5.    Declare your future to others.
It is important to give voice and intention to your future. You need to tell people where you want to go and what difference you want to make. Making your goals public will increase your commitment. As well, if people know where you are going, they just might help you. 

6.    Look for aspects of your Impossible Future that you are already living.
If you have a clear vision of where you want to go, your brain will unconsciously look for opportunities to move toward that vision. Doors will open that you did not see before.  It is likely that you have already started on the path toward your future.  It will give you confidence if you are able to notice what progress you are making now.

7.    Develop a broad action plan but leave room for experimentation.
Turn your Impossible Future into a plan with stepping stones, but look for opportunities to experiment. The focus is to expand your capabilities and learn new things.  This will mean looking at your beliefs and assumptions, getting help from others to see your blind spots, and trying new ways of tackling obstacles. 

8.    Stay flexible, persevere and celebrate.
Impossible Futures, like Rome, are not built in a day.  Keep faith when the going gets tough and celebrate successes both large and small. This will help calm your doubting self and your inner critic.