Widen the view

A big part of coaching is helping people make their belief systems explicit.

They want one thing to happen, but they end up doing something else.

Somewhere in between, the wires are getting crossed. This is usually where the belief lives.

It might be something like: “I’ll look stupid”, “It’s never worked before” or “I’ll get found out.”

Challenging the worldview of the belief is one way to proceed. A coach might help trace its operating assumptions and ask if they’re really true.

Here’s a lesser-known way of approaching this.

Whatever the belief, see how it grasps you through a kind of narrowing.

Our sense of what’s possible is crumpled. But this also happens on a perceptual level—your sense of your body and environment dim or disappear. Poof. Suddenly, most of you is absent.

It’s hard to appreciate this until you snap out of it and feel your perception regain its elasticity and breadth.

The good news is that you can train in this anti-narrowing.

You can allow your face to relax whilst noticing the edges of your field of vision. You can tune into the body’s awareness of itself. Note: tune in–this awareness is already happening; you don’t have to force it.

From this wider view, you can feel spaciousness even as strong emotions rise up. You can anchor in the wider environment whilst still paying attention to a particular part of your body. You can steep in the joy of experiencing life panoramically. And you can become more resistant to the velcro nature of narrowing beliefs.

What’s interesting about this approach is that it’s something you can do in real time, and that it doesn’t require debating the belief. Yet it can still unbind you in powerful ways, simply by adjusting the view. The belief is still there, but it fades in significance. It loses the narrow frame that makes it feel big.

Precision in thought is a wonderful thing. But without the ability to inhabit life panoramically, we feel tight and constricted in our thinking and feeling. We lose touch with the open-ended, spontaneity of life.

The next time you feel locked into a belief or conundrum, try widening the view. See how you feel and think differently.

h/t to River Kenna in conversation with Jonny Miller for helping me refine my thinking on this.