WIGs or Wildly Improbable Goals* is the name of a concept by Martha Beck, author of Finding Your Own North Star. As the name implies, they are goals we set that seem so outlandish and improbable, yet somehow come true. Beck writes, “Whether our WIGs are the cause or the effect of our actions, they have a peculiar power to lift us beyond what we thought to be our limitations.” Beck talks more about WIGs and provides helpful exercises to find them in a past Oprah Magazine article.

On the last day of my career development class in May, I asked my students to consider an exercise from the article, one where your wise, happy future self comes back to mentor you on whatever questions you are facing in the present.

It turns out one of my students had an amazing WIG experience. Earlier in the semester, this student had written a paper about why pop star Ciara was a role model to him. When we did the WIG exercise on the last day of class, he volunteered that his present self was uncertain about his ability to achieve his dreams but his future self reassured him that he was on the right path. This is when he revealed that a WIG had actually come true. At Ciara’s concert in NYC, a week before our last class, he had the opportunity to interview her on stage, live, before hundreds of fans! (He had been with other fans backstage when he was asked to do the interview. Realizing if he didn’t do it someone else would, he made a split second decision and said YES.)

This student’s experience is a great reminder that Wildly Improbable Goals are achieved, and probably more often than we realize. It also reminded me that we can’t always predict what we or others are capable of. I never would have guessed this student could have created the circumstances to make this happen so quickly. But he did.

So, is it time to start dreaming up some WIGs and believing in them? Why not?

*Thanks to Jennifer Macaluso-Gilmore and her Something Different for Women classes for first introducing me to WIGs.