Why You Keep Circling The Same Question.

You can’t see the forest for the trees. My dad taught me that saying when I was young. He was full of them. His point was that you cannot gain perspective when you are too close to something.

I find myself in that place more often than I would like. Recently I spent three hours with a dear friend. We used a whiteboard. We talked through everything I had been working on, struggling with, and frustrated by. I walked away with greater perspective, if not full clarity. There were things she said that were not profound in themselves, but that were perfectly timed to help me see what I could not see on my own.

It is not that I had not been trying to get clear on my own. I had been. But I kept circling the same items and could not seem to gain the perspective I needed to include new thoughts and new ideas among those I had already been circling.

What she gave me was perspective. And this is the strange thing about perspective.👇

You cannot manufacture it about your own life the way you can about someone else’s. You need someone or something outside you to help you see it.

Psychologists have a name for this. They call it Solomon’s Paradox, after the king who gave wise counsel to everyone else but governed his own house poorly. 

It took us weeks to find those three hours. My friend and I have the kind of relationship where we have chosen to do life together, which means we keep working on finding time until we make it happen. Ours is a slingshot partnership, and it is one of the relationships I hold most dear. But that kind of time and focus is a rare gift, and one I do not take for granted.

Not everyone has a friend who can give three hours, or a relationship where that kind of gift is even on the table. But we are living in an age of tools that can help create that same distance. AI in particular, used well, can act as a pure logic thinker that helps you see patterns you have missed and consider ideas that would not have occurred to you.

🤏TINY TWEEK Challenge

Take one small step to look at your crossroads from outside it. Write it down as though you were writing about someone else. Describe it out loud to a friend. Or download the free AI Clarity Prompt using this link and paste it into whatever AI tool you use. Any one of these will manufacture the distance Solomon’s Paradox says you need. Pick the one that fits your week.