What If?

For most of us, life is an ongoing search to uncover opportunities. Even though they are happening all around us: all the time. There is a constant battle inside us, trying to figure out whether something will work, whether we would like to actually do it, and whether we could actually manage to do it.

The common denominator through this whole process is that we are trying to manage and in some cases change our lives. But that’s stupid. Trying to manage anything, rarely if ever works, mainly because it’s impossible to foretell what may come from change, as soon as a change is made it creates its own direction going forward. Without knowing that direction, ahead of time, there's virtually no way we can manage it. All we can do is create change; in doing this, we stay ahead of the change that will happen, rather than trying to follow.

 We create change by thinking ‘What if?’. Each time we ask ourselves ‘What if?’ the answer is uniquely our own and based on our own understanding, experiences, wants,  needs, and abilities. It’s created by us, for us— no other person’s answer can be exactly the same. At that point, we are creating change and you are out in front of it because it is yours. We are defining it, rather than trying to manage what someone has started.   Once you make it a habit of asking ‘What if? You won’t want to go back.

When we are young we have very little sense of what is happening around us. Our world is small and we look for things to do within that world. As we grow and learn about new things in our world, our wants and needs increase drastically along with our abilities to do more. Most of us eventually arrive at a point where we have more to do, than time to do it. We fall victim to time poverty. It happens to everyone. Every time we turn around we are being asked or asking ourselves to do something else. It’s not our fault it’s the way we’ve chosen.

The trick becomes not to try and do everything but to do what matters most at that given point in time. We need to be sure that we are not majoring in minor things. There simply isn’t enough time to do everything. But there is enough time to do that which is most important to us. We have to decide for ourselves what those things are. What will make the largest impact? What do we need or want the most? It’s not about having a challenge, it’s about how it could impact the outcomes we are looking for. 

‘What if?’, can help us in a big way. Because it helps us to change our thinking. It helps us to become possibility thinkers instead of reactors. When we open our minds to the possibilities around us by asking ‘What if?’, we are taking a problem and using our uniqueness to come up with an answer. If we do this by making it an exercise of fun. This allows life to be a little easier to deal with. What usually happens is we place problems on a pedestal, ‘Oh the problem’; ‘look at the problem’.

We don’t want to diminish the importance of problems, but if we can make them fun it helps us to distance ourselves from them, stand outside of them, and obtain a different and often better perspective. Hence, a better solution, one that is uniquely ours. We don’t want to look at things as problems, but as an opportunity, instead. We hear that all the time. But how does a problem become an opportunity? Through you and me, by stepping away from them, we look at them from a different perspective. In a way that has never been done before, ‘What if I could?’. We open up our creativity. We embrace it and use it.

We are all creative; only in different ways. We have to learn about that which lies within us. That wellspring of imagination and creativity is within us all.