When Big Goals Become a Way to Escape Reality
I had a moment in coaching recently that stopped me in my tracks.
You know those moments where someone says something simple, and suddenly you see your own patterns with a level of clarity that is both uncomfortable and freeing at the same time?
That happened to me.
We were talking about goals. Big ones. The kind of goals people love to talk about.
The next revenue milestone.
The expansion.
The dream home.
The life we’re building for our families.
The version of ourselves we’re working toward.
And my coach said something that landed hard.
Sometimes we set big, audacious goals as a way to escape reality.
Not intentionally. Not in a manipulative way.
But because the problems in front of us feel too complicated, too messy, or too overwhelming to solve.
So instead, our brain goes somewhere else.
Somewhere bigger.
Somewhere more exciting.
Somewhere five steps ahead.
And I sat there thinking…
Oh.
That’s exactly what I’ve been doing.
When Vision Quietly Turns Into Avoidance
For months, I’ve been focused on the future.
The next level of the business.
The impact I want to create.
The long-term vision.
And none of that is wrong. Vision matters. Dreaming matters. Having something that pulls you forward matters.
But what I realized in that moment was this:
Some of my focus on the future had quietly become an escape hatch.
Because the current reality felt impossible to fix.
There were operational gaps.
Team structure that wasn’t quite working.
Financial pressure that made everything feel tight.
And when something feels unsolvable, your brain does something really interesting.
It stops trying to solve it.
Why We Start Living in the Future
When our nervous system registers something as overwhelming, it looks for relief.
For entrepreneurs, that relief often looks like building something new.
A new offer.
A new idea.
A new plan.
For moms, it can look like imagining the next season of life.
“When the kids are older…”
“When things slow down…”
“When we get through this phase…”
We start living mentally in the future because the present moment feels too heavy to hold.
And the tricky part?
It can look like productivity.
It can look like ambition.
It can even look like clarity.
But sometimes, it’s actually avoidance.
The Moment Everything Shifted
Recently, something happened in my business that forced a structural change.
It wasn’t planned.
It wasn’t comfortable.
And if I’m being honest, it wasn’t something I initially wanted.
But a decision had to be made.
And the moment that decision happened, something shifted in me.
Instead of feeling stuck, my brain started moving at a completely different speed.
Solutions.
Conversations.
Changes we could implement immediately.
Not six months from now.
Not someday.
Now.
And that’s when the real insight landed.
The problem was never that there were no solutions.
The problem was that I had labeled the situation as impossible.
When Something Feels Impossible, We Stop Looking for Answers
Once your brain decides something is “impossible,” it stops generating solutions.
You don’t fix the problem.
You work around it.
You adjust.
You tolerate.
You manage.
But you don’t actually solve.
And the moment that belief cracks, everything changes.
Suddenly, ideas start showing up.
Paths become visible.
Momentum returns.
Not because the situation changed overnight.
But because your relationship to it did.
The Real Work: Turning Back Toward What’s Hard
Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do isn’t set a bigger vision.
It’s turn back toward the reality in front of us.
The messy middle.
The operational issues.
The hard conversations.
The tension in our relationships.
The financial pressure.
The decisions we’ve been avoiding.
The things we’ve quietly decided we “just have to live with.”
Because often, the thing that unlocks the next level of growth in our lives isn’t a better plan for the future.
It’s fixing the constraint that exists right now.
And once that starts to move, everything else moves with it.
Vision Is Still Powerful… But It Has to Be Honest
I still believe deeply in big goals.
I believe we need vision.
I believe we need something that pulls us forward.
But I’m also holding this truth now:
Vision can be powerful.
But avoidance can disguise itself as vision if we’re not paying attention.
And sometimes, the bravest thing we can do isn’t look five years ahead.
It’s pause and ask:
What is the one problem in my life right now that I’ve decided is impossible?
Because chances are…
It’s not impossible.
It’s just uncomfortable.
The Unlock
That was my biggest realization this week.
Not a new strategy.
Not a new idea.
Just this:
The path forward wasn’t somewhere far in the future.
It was sitting right in front of me.
Waiting for me to stop looking past it.
