Yesterday I posted about a process for taking a methodical approach to moving through the challenges that life throws your way (from the book The Adversity Advantage). In it, I took a description of the process from the book.
As I was writing the post, two questions jumped out at me:
- If we allowed ourselves to think outrageously, what is the best thing that could happen?
- What things can we do to maximize the upside of this situation?
They seem innocent enough at first, but then I started thinking, "Whoa. This is really turning the traditional perspective on its head."
So often when we come up against a big hairy problem we default to thinking, "How can I get past this?" Obviously that's an important piece of the puzzle, but it also limits our focus to the immediate problem. What if we started factoring the uber-upside into our picture?
So instead of only saying, "How can I solve this problem," we say both, "How can I solve this problem" and, "How could this propel me even further? How could I create an outrageous best-case scenario out of this?
One of the things that often happens when we're up against it is that our horizon starts to constrict. As we narrow our focus to the problem at hand, the problem at hand starts to take up more of our view. Asking, "What's the outrageous best result" and "How can I maximize the upside of this" can take us out of that blinders view and expand the possibilities.
It also transforms the mindset from, "I have a problem" to, "How can I use this problem (or the solutions/skills/connections/etc. I develop in order to get past it) to take me to the next level?"
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by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst
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