One of the best things I’ve ever done is find and hire mentors, coaches, therapists, and counselors to work with me. There are tons of reasons for this, but a big one is that they are, by definition, a little bit removed from my situation, which means they can see things that I can’t see. I can’t see the forest for the trees, but they can zoom out and see what’s actually going on. This is a HUGE benefit.
Case in point, I e-mailed a mentor of mine not that long ago with what felt like a crisis. We got on a video call and spent an hour talking through all the ins and outs and at the end of it he said, “hey, it sounds like actually everything might be ok.” And he was right.
Case in point #2: I had a goal review recently with an athlete who said they were struggling with motivation. They were working out twice a week but they used to do more and it’s so hard to rally and focus and find/make the time to get in more than two workouts each week. I said: “Why do you need to work out more than twice each week?” And it turned out that they didn’t. Everything was fine.
And all of this is a roundabout way of bringing me to a question that I stole from the author Tim Ferriss. He wrote a post once called “17 Questions That Changed My Life,” and it included this one:
Could it be that everything is fine and complete as is?
There is a massive amount of societal pressure to change, to grow, to improve, to buy, to rage, to watch, to consume. And not all of that pressure is bad. Daily growth, forever, is something I aspire to. There are things in the world that need changing. There are things that I enjoy consuming. It’s not all bad pressure, but it all mounts up.
What if, though, everything is OK?
I don’t mean that everything in all of existence is ok. I mean what if, in this moment only (or this day, or this week, or this specific situation), what if things are OK?
What would that feel like? What would that look like? What would you do?
In other words, and not to get too philosophical here, but what if instead of figuring out how to get what you want, you realized that you want what you already have?
Achievement, growth, goals, etc… all of those are great. And not just great, they might be excellent. But the endless pursuit can lead to anxiety and unhappiness. And every once in a while, it might be worth pausing and seeing if there’s a possibility that even if nothing changes, you might just be worthy of dignity and respect and love and joy and hope and happiness anyway.