Coaching, reloaded - Coaching question of the day #268. - Your version of possible, your version of impossible

"That's impossible", they say. And they often mean it.

Even if they may be wrong. Or even if maybe it is true for them but it doesn't have to be true for you.

What is possible and what is impossible is often a construct of our minds, like Muhammad Ali (1942-2016) beautifully said (even in just an Adidas ad, the copy was actually by copywriter Aimee Lehto):

Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.

[You know, all those things where you usually go:
"If someone would have told me that one year ago

I would have never believed them"]

Coaching question of the day: 

"What just happened that you considered impossible not that long ago?"                         

                                                    

Tags: Coaching question, Self-coaching, Self-awareness, Self-reflection, Impossible, Perception, Quotes from advertising, Growth mindset, Belief system

What to read next:

Coaching, reloaded - Coaching question of the day #35. - Your life motto

Visiting the blog for the first time? Aloha!

Where to start, if you are new

The kind of questions that can leave you speechless, make you smile and force you to grow

"Who do you feel would benefit least from your work?"

The question that coach Travis L. Wilson has kindly thrown at me, as we are talking about which kind of change I want to make, as an intercultural consultant on her way for getting certified as a coach and willing to work as a coach for diversity management, leaves me puzzled and a little bit speechless. Speechless, moi!?

Being speechless never occurred to me, if we keep out the first 18 months of me learning German after moving to Berlin without speaking (back then!) a single word of German and a (back then!) incredibly broken English that soon became an even worse Denglisch. 

But this would be another story, even if one with a linguistic double happy ending, and I digress. ;)

[Speechless, moi!? No way!

I do speak up if I need to. No problem there.

One of my personal issues is...

having often closed eyes in pictures. 

Pics: Me, November 2017 

at Berlin's street art museum

Urban Nation © Radoslaw Kosiada]

And suddenly, I smile, because I realize that I am in the right place and that giving myself Seth Godin's The Marketing Seminar as a Christmas present - even if I don't celebrate Christmas at all and I was just looking for a good excuse for enrolling in the workshop - has been a very good decision.

"Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?", or the one about 16 (yes, 16!) cool t-shirt slogans that can make people smile or think about life

Most of us like to think that very deep thoughts and life-changing ideas have to be long, complex and difficult to get. Otherwise, everyone would get them, right?

Well, sometimes.
And sometimes, it is really so simple.

A story is the expression of how and why life changes. 
A story begins with balance, then something throws life out of balance, then a story goes on to describe how balance is restored.  

Robert McKee

Sometimes, something tiny can make all the difference: a sentence or a question may be enough for creating a new mental landscape, for showing a new perspective to someone willing to get it and able to see it, for playing with a challenging and yet refreshing suggestion.
In other words, for providing someone with a very valuable piece of information or a moment of pure and precious serendipity.

Oddball brainteasers have been a big hype in the recruiting style of big internet companies for a while, and then they started to fade out. My favorite one?

"Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?"

Whole Foods Market meat cutter job candidate (Lexington-Fayette, KY)

The question sounds crazy, I know. (even more because now you are visualizing 100 duck-sized horses, and if you tell me that you don't, I won't believe you anyway).

And yet, how you will reply and react to it tells a lot about you.

The color of nostalgia is... Cultural differences in color psychology, featuring green fairies, pink cakes, and kawaii hair

Months ago I read somewhere that Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was accustomed to write while using green ink instead of the more traditional black one, because to him green represented hope.

Probably it is not any longer possible to know with 100% certainty whether this piece of information is accurate or not, and yet it would be wonderful if it would be true.

Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.

(Love is so short, forgetting is so long)

Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada

by Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto

better known as Pablo Neruda [1904-1973]

Colors, both natural and artificial ones, are everywhere around us.

We speak and communicate through colors all the time, not only visually while choosing specific nuances for our clothes, accessories, cars, commodities, and goods, but also metaphorically through idiomatic expressions.

[Retro ink bottles by Iroshizuku in different colors...

just as stylish and elegant as expensive perfume bottles would be

Image source: Writer's Bloc]

Green is, for example, the color of hope, relax, peace, nature, harmony, luck, and youth.

And at the same time...

Singleness made in Berlin - #2. Or how to recognize if you spent too many years flirting in German

Taking big decisions, changing life, switching from a situation to a new one, starting a new business or trying out a different hobby or activity can be challenging and scary, but also very rewarding, in the long run, if one is ready to accept the pain, the discomfort and the uncertainty in the first place, as Mark Twain beautifully said:

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails.

Explore, Dream, Discover.

Mark Twain [pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910]

Something like this can be mind-blowing, but it is for sure not everybody's cup of tea.

[One popular motivational Internet meme:

The magic happens outside the comfort zone]

Same same but different, they say. 

We are all human beings, we have the same needs, we know the same feelings and we experience the same emotions, even if we learn to show and express them in different ways, depending on variables like culture, country, familiar situation, education, gender, age, etc.

And yet we all are going to die at some point and so we should take the most out of our days. 

'Position, Promotion, Placement and Price' are the famous four P of traditional marketing. How many of them do you need in your relationships?

Position, Promotion, Placement and Price.
You know them for sure: they are the famous - and sometimes infamous - 'Four P' that have ruled traditional marketing in the last century in practically all Western countries.

People into marketing, and people not into it but forced to deal with it anyway, should also read and cherish  that seminal marketing book about the fifth P that Seth Godin published back in 2005:

[Purple cover of one of the many different edition of Purple Cow
How cool is that!?]

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable (Paperback)
by Seth Godin
Penguin, 2005
160 pp., ISBN 978-0141016405

What's a purple cow, besides a mainstream cow painted in lilac for some Milka chocolate advertising campaigns?

[Seth Godin playing with the funny special promotional packaging of his book

Purple cow milk is, of course, delicious... and dairy free!]

Take the common cow, a ruminant with coat colors varying from red to black to brown and to white with colored points...

To eat = Sex, or the A-ha moment that you didn't have even if you knew something already

A friend of mine told me yesterday something really interesting I already knew and yet it was kind of an A-ha moment anyway.

To cook = Love
To eat = Sex

[What are you going to have tonight?
Amazing purple food composition
by Swedish food stylist Linda Lundgren for supermarkets Hemköpf]

I always knew that how a person eats - and how a person dances! - tells a lot about how this person could probably be in other situations... but a small Wiederholung is always useful. And funny. Do you agree?

PS. If I think about how people cook and eat in Berlin... well, suddenly everything makes sense.

What to read next:
What does it mean to love someone? Orson Welles was used to saying...

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Where to start, if you are new

What if shock advertising would show what we don't want to see? Are you in?

After having the impression that everything has been already seen, showed, tried, experienced, and consumed... 

What can still shock the consumers and the audience?

Shock advertising is usually the answer. The answer most marketers are going to give.

[Domestic violence for a coffee, anyone?

Shock advertising is usually related to a specific culture and time:

what is shocking or gross now, 
could have been socially accepted in the past and viceversa]

What do you think about shock advertising? Does it make you feel uncomfortable or inspired?

Do you find some advertising campaigns interesting, original, funny, ironic? Are they pure genius and are able to start a conversation or are they just gross and unpleasant?

[Advertising promoted by IndyAct.Org

for the "Stop the Carnage" campaign]

Even if not always, I have overall a good opinion about very aggressive advertising campaigns because they force people to reflect on topics and subjects too often forgotten, such domestic violence, children abuse, racism, discrimination, organ donation, endangered species, human and animal rights, pollution and so on.

One of my favorite campaigns ever is a frightful portrait of a French anorexic girl created a couple of years ago by Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani: