there are always more choices...
Transcript of this video:
The other day, the English footballer, Lauren James, put the ball in the back of the net three times during a Women’s World Cup match.
Unfortunately, the second time the goal was disallowed by the video referee.
And after the match, people were saying, oh, oh. but for that second goal, if that, that second time had been allowed, that would’ve been a perfect hat trick.
My friend Chris Rodgers wrote about this on LinkedIn and pointed out that the trouble with that narrative is that if the second goal had been allowed the subsequent dynamics of that would’ve been inevitably different in subtle but important ways.
No doubt the morale of each side would’ve been shifted unexpectedly.
And the exact circumstances that allowed Lauren James to score her third goal would never have arisen. So the perfect hat trick could never actually have happened.
Now, of course, some people would probably find it quite annoying that Chris raises this objection because we’re very attached, aren’t we, to our simplified stories of life.
And indeed we have to simplify life because the amount of information that our brain is receiving all the time is overwhelming.
And so it inevitably has to edit it, so that we focus on certain things. And that creates, I think Chris calls it big dot thinking, where we inevitably have to have simplified narratives of our life, but reality is actually always much more complex.
Now the upside of that for me, I think, is that when we feel that we are stuck, and that things are trapped, actually there are more choices open to us.
And a question I often try to ask myself in those situations, and sometimes to ask others when I’m trying to be helpful, is, what else is possible here?
Because there are actually always more choices available, and sometimes we have to pause and open up our imagination to see what they are.
And I think one, of the principles of Unhurried, this project I’ve been working on for the
past few years, is about slowing down enough to see that there are other possibilities.
Photo by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash
