Discover What You Blame
“While all truth is true, not all truth is helpful.” This thought-provoking statement is made by Jason Jaggard in his excellent book, Beyond High Performance. He is drawing a contrast between blame and ownership. He acknowledges that “blame is often appropriate” but “almost never helpful.” He gives the following explanation: “While a fact may make us feel better, not all facts are useful for helping us improve our lives. This is the great seduction of blame: it lures us into truths that don’t help us advance in our lives while ignoring the truths that will. The more we give ourselves to blame, the less agency we begin to experience in our lives.”
So how do we discover what we blame? Jason and his team of coaches use a tool called the “intuitive fence.” (You can read about this tool in more detail here.) It involves picking some outcome you’d like to achieve in your life and stretching it until your intuition starts to judge it as impossible. Jason uses a financial example to illustrate. For most people, making $1,000 is well within their intuition; but, if you expand this number to $100,000 or $10 million or more, then at some point you will get to a number where people’s intuition is that the number is impossible. Here’s where the tool gets interesting.
Once you reach the impossible outcome, you can begin to examine why you think the outcome is impossible. In our example, someone might say they can’t earn $1 million next year for a variety of reasons:
There’s not enough time.
I’m not talented enough.
I don’t have a good enough idea.
I don’t know the right people.
Because the future is dynamic, with multiple non-linear variables at play, our intuition is often wrong. The reasons we give for our intuition often involve blame. Once we see what we blame, we can retrain ourselves to focus on truths that increase our agency.
This week, I invite you to consider:
What is something I’d like to achieve this year? How would I improve this outcome so that it occurred to me as impossible? What are my reasons for why this outcome seems impossible? Which of these reasons involve blame? What other truths would I need to focus on in order to make achieving the impossible more likely?
God bless,
Dan
