She said, “Oh no, I can’t use that arm” and in that moment everything changed.
- How often do you fight for your limitations without realizing that’s what you are doing?
- What might happen if you stopped?
Last week three seemingly unrelated parts of my life converged into one moment giving me clarity on stepping beyond limitations in both my business and my personal life.
A world of possibility opened.
The Pool Epiphany
I swim most weeks. I was very competitive in my youth and stopped for the better part of 30 years, and a few years ago I found my way back to the pool.
Last week I had a conversation with a woman in the pool who was eying my kick-board as a way to support her arm. After suggesting a few things (a floatie, a kickboard, the floating weights they have, etc.) I asked “have you talked to someone about actively using it so that you build it up?”
She said, “oh no, I can’t use that arm”, and in that moment, I saw myself.
Two memories flooded my awareness and I left the locker room a different woman.
Back in my 30’s when I was climbing the couples competition dance ladder and teaching couples dance. I had one student that was really struggling. Week after week we’d work on something, I’d ask him a question about it and he’d pause, screw up his face and respond, “I don’t know”.
After repeating the same dynamic again and again, I took it to my own coach who said, “I have a sneaky coaching question that really works”. Great, I thought, what is it? Because I’ve exhausted the tools in my toolbox.
He said, ask him “What if you DID know?”
Mic drop. Simple and powerful.
And it really does work.
But, WHY?
Imagination – the Untapped Superpower
In our culture, we’ve been taught to worship knowledge and dismiss imagination. When we ask someone a question, their brain searches its depths for THE answer, the ‘right’ answer.
One of the greatest minds of our century, Albert Einstein, said that imagination is more important than knowledge. It wasn’t just a statement to him. He had his own regular practice of doing ‘imaginal’ mind experiments, which led to most of his discoveries.
Unwittingly, the rest of us have a censor in place. Our brains have been trained to seek ‘correct knowledge’ and to reject all the things it deems ‘wrong’. We’d rather ‘not know’ than be ‘wrong’. So the response that comes back is – “I don’t know”.
Asking the question “what if you did know?” is freedom.
It frees the imagination to kick in AND it frees us from the inner judge and the critic. There is no ‘right’ answer if we’re just pretending to know, right? So the sky’s the limit. We are no longer subject to the conditioning and rules of limiting belief systems.
At that same moment a quote from Dr. Gay Hendricks’ book, the Big Leap, crowded into my consciousness – “If I cling to the notion that something’s not possible, I’m arguing in favor of limitation. And if I argue for my limitations, I get to keep them.”
“If I argue for my limitations, I get to keep them.”
~ Dr. Gay Hendricks, The Big Leap
Stepping into Freedom
So when my swim buddy said, “Oh no, I can’t…”, that was me talking. I was poignantly aware of all the places I tell myself “I can’t” all day long. That night, I dedicated my flow writing to the question “what if I did know?”
To be clear – it was NOT another ploy to find the ‘right answer’, it was an exercise of awareness, curiosity and development of that elusive skill that Einstein said was so important – imagination.
What If I did know –
- how to find the clients that seem to evade us?
- why I keep running into the same glass ceiling?
- which of those 5 things on my to do list would create the most momentum?
- the exact best next step for me to take?
This one shift literally changed my relationship to myself overnight. PLUS, I saw positive changes in my business and my relationships immediately.
I invite you to join me and watch shift happen in your life.
Each time you catch yourself saying, “I don’t know”, get playful and turn it into a question – “what if I did know?” And then have lots of fun exploring a part of you that likely got squashed early in your life – your powerful and empowering imagination.