“It’s okay to be unreasonable – it’s part of how we grow!” 

~ Jim Sebastian Sharman

Unreasonable: a word with so much negative connotation. However, being unreasonable can, in fact, become your greatest strength! Let’s break this down.

Looking up the dictionary definition of “unreasonable”, you would find something that does not look at all positive – quite the opposite – the inference therein is one of unfairness or even unacceptability. One definition says, “not guided by, or based on, good sense”.

Let’s challenge all of that right away because, in doing so, we’re already being “positively unreasonable”!

This concept of positive unreasonability was introduced to me at the very beginning of my career as a coach at a company called ‘The Merchants Group’, which was breaking new ground in the way businesses and people communicate – and the place where I learnt to be a coach.

The invitation to everyone working there was to defy conventional thinking, and to be more creative and intuitive, using techniques that blended cutting-edge psychology with a renewed sense of spirituality. That blend proved to be explosive in terms of people’s personal growth.

To quote one former colleague and mentor, Steve Shellabear, “The concept is founded on evolution being based on challenging the rational and accepted status quo. So, progress depends on unreasonable people because what’s reasonable is already known and accepted.”

Another, Helen Chilvers, described it to me as, “Being reasonable can get you a reasonable outcome, as you are working within the norms of rational thinking and planning. However, if you want to achieve something excellent, or truly extraordinary, then you have to move through your limiting beliefs and ask yourself what else could you do to achieve what you want? You could say being unreasonable is being outrageous in your thinking and action.”

Both definitions still make perfect sense to me and my original understanding then is the same as it is now – in order to grow, it is required at times to be utterly unreasonable. Operating within limitations rarely grants you the freedom and spontaneity to excel.

Take something you want to achieve that feels out of reach – how can you get there? By stepping outside what you believed was possible and by stretching your ability.

Take something that works for you – how can you better understand it? By taking it apart and working out how and why it works. Then you can improve it.

This isn’t an act of destruction – it’s deconstruction followed by reconstruction, an excellent mechanism for growth.

In this sense, it’s ‘reasonable’ to be ‘unreasonable’.

You might recall in Chapter 2 of my book, we saw that “cannot” sometimes really means, “I don’t think I can!” At times, that might well be a totally “reasonable” proposition, given the circumstances you might find yourself in. It seems like a sensible option, but it can be based on self-limitation.

What if, instead, you flip that by tapping into resources that are either new or you didn’t know you had? What if you made the “unreasonable” decision to do it anyway? Just making that decision alone could be the energy required to move things along.

You can learn a lot more about yourself than you realise when you find the positive energy to do so. When you tap into that, you get back towards achieving a goal. The act of practising a new skill becomes a positive experience in and of itself and, as a result, a catalyst for growth.

The challenge is to focus on how the strengths you already have can help you overcome the obstacles you now face. Whether you know or merely believe you can’t do it, the next step is to look at what you can do instead – no matter how unreasonable it sounds. Options! Options!

And when I am coaching people to reach seemingly insurmountable heights, there’s a great NLP exercise I do with post-it notes; you’d be surprised how high you can reach when given the proper motivation and when asked to do something that feels “unreasonable” at the time!

Being unreasonable not only helps you grow – literally – it also prevents you from stagnating, remaining in one place or state. When everything is changing around you, stagnation eventually becomes the opposite of evolution. In relative terms, you may as well be going backwards.

Defying convention at times is therefore not only healthy, it’s necessary!

Which part of your life do you want to improve, develop, evolve, grow, but have been struggling with making happen? Have you been too ‘reasonable’ about it?

Try being unreasonable instead.