By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

I don’t think pigs wear lipstick but the phrase is used with regularity to describe something that we are dressing up, making pretty yet, doesn’t do anything to change the reality. It’s still a pig. They may be cute, but they’re not pretty.

“A pig in a poke” is another great pig expression. It comes from more than five centuries ago when piglets were sold in sacks, sight unseen, and not all the piglets turn out so well.

“As fat as a pig.” We all know what that means and almost all of us to our darndest to avoid that appearance even though we may have the habit of eating, “high on the hog.”

But, “when pigs fly,” is often about our own self-limiting beliefs and to stop being true for so many things.

We take air travel for granted.

We take driving for granted.

In sports, we take the four-minute mile for granted. We take the idea of athletes playing late into their 30s and maybe even into their 40s for granted.

In the time of the Bible, high-tech communications was the ability to write. It progressed to the printing press, radio, TV, do I need to go on with all the various forms of communications that have been created that allow everyone to express themselves.

Professionally, you may think something is impossible but it isn’t.

Few things are impossible.

There may be steps in the way of accomplishing something, technology may need to be worked out in the creative mind may need to see the connection between things that many don’t.

Our own self-limiting belief causes us to claim that it will happen when pigs fly.

I suspect that there is some lab somewhere in the world that will start working on that idea and make it happen.

Then many in the world will go “hog wild” with excitement for what has been accomplished.

Ⓒ The Big Game Hunter, Inc., Asheville, NC 2020, 2021

ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER

Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a career and leadership coach who worked as a recruiter for more than 40 years. He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with more than 1900 episodes, and is a former member of The Forbes Coaches Council.

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