Finding the Right Angle…

Alters Perspective

It is so simple and so incredibly complex. Especially as age begins to put you on the cautious side of bold and the accumulation of difficult experiences start to shrink wrap possibility.

Present fear about the future seeps into the crevices of joy and fun.

There is nothing more debilitating to dreams than adventure fatigue.

And I have recently come to believe, the solution has everything to do with angles.

I feel like I have been endlessly adjusting my proverbial umbrella from the wrong side. Per the brilliant National Geographic frog in rain photo, there is simply no way to stay dry in a westward slanting rain shower if you hold your umbrella to the west.

No matter how many different-shaped leaves you find, no matter how much you adjust the length of the stem, no matter how you bang your head against the same wall, transformation is only possible when you step back and consider alternatives.

Consider the opposite of what you know to be true.

I must stay busy checking off boxes on my list to do or something will fall through the cracks and catastrophe will follow.

Adjusting the angle on this for a full whopping four hours this past week meant a hilarious long game of Taboo with our boys, painting leftover gourds and writing Gestalt stories for a tree ornament we each picked out before packing them all away.

Dreamy.

And… no follow-up catastrophe.

If I am not religious about counting my calories every day I will blow up like a blimp and become a house-bound blob.

The angle adjustment here? I cut out desert and soda and decided I would not even think about calories but rather eat anything and as much as I wanted if it was pretty healthy.

And… I have not become a blob at all.

Business-wise we have been hitting a wall for while regarding landing the amount of new business we have been pitching.

So instead of pitching more or pushing harder, we changed our pitch.

And… there seems to be a positive flow.

A serendipitous momentum.

People talk about how just shifting your perspective makes all the difference. I would beg to differ. This approach assumes if you fail it is a matter of not being optimistic enough. Or if you have trouble, it is merely a case of raising your enthusiasm.

Maybe this works, sometimes.

I find perspective is easier to adjust if I adjust the angle of my approach first.