Search for opportunities in your life.
They happen every single day. We just fail to notice them most of the time. An opportunity can sometimes mask itself in a bad situation, but it is the people who are able to search for opportunity regardless of a situation, that come out ahead. Being solution-focused is mandatory if you want to seek out opportunities. It is often easier to focus on the problem, but by doing that you get nowhere. This is a practiced skill and needs to have consistent time given to it throughout the day in order to develop it. If you want more help in developing a skill, click this link to go back to the blog post “Learning a New Skill”.
Have you ever noticed how some people seem more optimistic than others? We can almost guarantee that these people are opportunity/growth driven and not a problem/fixed mindset driven. We want to use an example in the gym to help you understand this concept.
For Example
You are well into your fitness journey, and loving every minute of it. One day during your workout, you step funny and roll your ankle. Obviously this situation is not ideal and you would never hope that this would happen to you or anyone else. A trip to the Doctor and you’re told that it needs 4-6 weeks of rest. Bummer. Now, you have two different options here.
Response #1
In the first scenario, you feel upset for a while and dwell on this feeling for the 4-6 weeks. Stopping your workouts completely because it seems unfair. You are focused on the problem. You have every right to feel upset, for a moment of time. However, by continuing to dwell on your unfortunate circumstances you failed to see the opportunities in this.
Response #2
The exact same situation has happened. You are told to rest your ankle for 4-6 weeks. Here is one of your other options. You feel upset for a while, which is totally justified. But, unlike the other response where you stayed in that upset state, you instead begin to search for the opportunity in it all. You think to yourself, “this may be a good time for me to work on my upper body strength.” You give the ankle a few days for the initial swelling to come down and you hit the gym again. Full upper body movements, focusing on the goal of becoming as strong as you can without aggravating your current limitation.
Outcomes
You can see by having the slightest perspective change, you are going to have two totally different outcomes. You are faced with the same problem but how you respond to them can greatly change your future circumstances. Here is a handy analogy. You are on a plane that is going to fly a straight path from Edmonton to Vancouver. For simplicity sake let’s say that to get there the pilot needed to keep the course of direction exactly straight. What if the pilot turned the control wheel 2 degrees to the left and kept it there during the duration of the flight? Without having to do some math problems, we can all agree that we would not arrive at the same destination. The very slight mindset shift can have an enormous impact on your future destination. Where are you steering yourself?
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