Focus on insight

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I had a great reminder this morning that sometimes it's not about listening to others, but validating our own experience of a situation, person, challenge, or life as a whole.

The Met Office forecast said FOG, and my eyes told me otherwise.

It reminds me of a card in the Frameworks for Change Coaching Process (FCCP) that I use in coaching:

The forecast is based on hindsight - the data of the current situation, past experience, and forecasting based on what's the most likely outcome based on that past data. The forecast is also based on beliefs about how things work, and an interpretation of the data. In life that's further confused by hindsight using our memory of the past to determine our next steps. A post entitled "there's 3 versions of a story - yours, theirs and the truth" explains more about the difficulty in relying on our memory to do this. That's before we even start to consider the impact of all the oughts, musts, and shoulds we carry around with us in our daily life - from others, and those we've picked up ourselves.

My eyes are using insight - the current feeling in the moment based, in this instance, on what I can see. At other times this insight might be a feeling, or conviction to step away from convention and try something different. To realise that to embrace a new paradigm all the conventions of the old paradigm are no longer valid.

What would focussing on insight rather than hindsight look like for you today, and what difference might that make?

Alison Smith
Landscaping Your Life
Using nature to inspire change inside and out 

* The insight card used here is from Frameworks for Change © Innerlinks - www.innerlinks.com.