Harken back to the heyday of newspapers and pretend for a moment that you are a newspaper reporter in a two paper town, and it’s your hometown. Further imagine that you have worked for both papers and they both fired you.

Your goal is to remain a newspaper reporter but you refuse to move anywhere else to pursue your career. You’ve petitioned both your former employers and you got the “When Santa Claus moves the North Pole to Hell” speech.

Sticking with your current strategy keeps you stuck.

That’s a place many of us find ourselves at some point in life. “If it can’t be this way, it will be no way at all” seems to be the battle cry. Our stubbornness becomes our biggest obstacle to progress.

Digging our heels into an untenable position suggests that we are heavily into denial. (Think of a person who continues to lie when everyone knows they are lying).

We become like a horse with blinders. Our vision is so focused on that which is unavailable that we fail to see any other potential possibilities.

The difficulty becomes even more tragic when our self-imposed limitation becomes a belief. That makes our tunnel vision laser focused.

Is there a way out? Yes, it’s called willingness.

Willingness is the grease that gets the gears moving again. Willingness is not determination or a commitment to a specific strategy; it’s a soft piece of magic that opens the door to possibilities.

Willingness is not an agreement to do anything other than to entertain options.

Options open the barn doors wider giving you a clearer vision of the entire landscape. If we can only see what’s right in front of us, we corral ourselves into the barren land of one option.

Willingness opens our eyes. And all we need to do is be willing to be willing.

What makes willingness such an attractive option is knowing that you don’t have to choose any alternative that surfaces during this process. You create a safe haven for your limiting belief, knowing you can go back to it at any time.

It’s like wearing your comfortable, worn out, old slippers to the shoe store. No one is asking you to trade them in for a new pair, only inviting you to look around and try things on if you like. No pressure; just options.

When you determine that it can only be one way, you have demonstrated the limitation of obstinacy and hubris rolled into one. You have decided that your un-compared selection is more applicable than infinite choices. That’s a major case of what Dr. Dave Dobson diagnosed as RCV (Rectal Canal Vision).

Willingness will bring you in to the new millennium. It will help you find what’s truly available now versus what you locked into back then.

There are no contracts to sign, no new beliefs to adopt, just a quick visit to the shoe store.

Willingness is my favorite brand of shoe. I request you try on a pair and see how well they fit on you.

All the best,

John