Who built the box

We live and work in boxes of our own making, and we pretend that someone or something else put them there. What boxes are you living in? What beliefs, habits, and fears are confining you today? 

What happens inside you when you acknowledge that you built this box?

Have you ever noticed that your best thinking will sometimes leave you feeling flat or even trapped? Do you ever worry that if everything you were working for came about your life would be smaller than you might wish?

In business and in art, also in life, we sometimes feel as if acting on our best ideas will box us in. If we hold this fear as a problem, we get stuck. We assess that we lack motivation or that we have a problem with procrastination. We become preoccupied with what's wrong with us and we stop participating in our lives. In short, for fear of being boxed in we end up in the box!

I have good news. You can get out of the box, and the way out of the box is in.

Here's the deal. Instead of struggling with your inability to take action, embrace it. Look head on at what is bothering you and at what makes the box too small. Name what is missing for you in your imagined future, and then reframe your situation to include that missing something. Stay with your competing priorities, engaging the tension between them until they morph into a new field of possibility.

Essentially, you will be looking at what concerns you instead of looking away from it, and you will be thinking in AND terms ("I want to create this AND this AND this.") instead of OR terms ("I can create this OR this.")

For example, I've been resisting focusing my work on service professionals and artists. I was afraid that this focus would leave out much of what I am passionate about: leadership development, personal transformation, somatic learning, Improv as a team building and communications tool. In short, declaring a niche felt like building a box, yet not declaring it was equivalent to standing still. That's no way to build a business.

I took my dilemma to my coach, and he helped me to name my concerns, the walls, if you will, of my box. I looked head on at the passions that I was afraid of leaving behind and I also looked at my fear of rejection. AS soon as I realized that my own assessments and assumptions had built this confining vision, the walls of my box dissolved and I saw a virtually limitless vista, a range of possibilities that incorporates all of my talents and passions in service of this niche.

I cannot overstate the clarity, focus, and excitement that accompanied this shift. Once I knew that I had built the too-small box, I was free to design a dream-box, one that gives me structural support and room to grow.

We build boxes that limit our relationships, our careers, our dreams. Fortunately, we can deconstruct our boxes and engage creatively with our apparently competing priorities. Sometimes the solutions arise quickly, sometimes slowly. Yet they will always arise if we are willing to let go of our old ways of seeing.