Surprise: When You Are Slightly Off Keel You Are At Your Best!

Surprise: When You Are Slightly Off Keel You Are At Your Best!
By
Bill Cottringer

“Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.” ~ Oprah Winfrey.

I am sure I am not the first person to discover this powerful reality, but…You are poised to be at your best when you are slightly off center. The odd part about this surprise, is that we are taught all through our lives that just the opposite is true—that we have to land in the sweet spot before we can be successful. And what is even odder, is how long it takes you to see the propitious place at which you really are: Slightly off balance and poised for real success without recognizing it because of all the discomfort of worrying about falling off the balance beam.

Recently, the Chairman and Owner of our company brought in a high powered CEO to be a buffer between him and me partly because our revenues were flat and he felt certain this person could bring valuable business with him and partly because the reality of the old saying, “familiarity breeds contempt.” In short, after a decade we were getting bored with and tired of each other. Well, this move shoved me way off balance and terribly out of keel. And the worry, anxiety and fear of my future started giving me a migraine headache needing a double dose of Tylenol PM.

In another dimension of my journey, I was on a productive path of looking for positive benefits from negative events that were bothersome. I had read this so many times that I finally decided to try to apply it in my own life. Suddenly this path arrived at this amazing realization: When you are uncomfortable enough being in an uncomfortable situation (sometimes it takes a long time to get here!), you confront yourself at a very important crossroad in your life—keep trying or quit. But, as it turns out this “either-or” solution is an artificial one because you haven’t quite figured out how to solve the most important paradox in life.

The cross-road you are trying to decide how to approach is the old paradox of “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” But the problem is, you know deep down you can if you just get smart and clever enough to get past the road block of believing the false injunction of this hostage-holding paradox. Unfortunately, we tend to over-focus on the problems in life and miss seeing the solutions that actually precede these problems. Sometimes the obscure takes a while to see and the obvious even longer.

The ultimate solution to turning failure into success is to begin to notice what you have been failing to notice all along—where you are and what you are doing there. This picture is a hard one to see, but you are always exactly where you need to be to get to the next stepping stone in your life (Like Oprah says in the opening quote). If you could step outside your own skin you could see that reality a little easier. But you can’t. So what do you do in the meantime?

To find out if you are slightly off keel and really poised to do your best work, try these simple discovery suggestions:

• Look at yourself in the mirror and put your hand aligned flatly and perpendicular to the tip of your nose, dividing your face in half. If your eyes are very different, that is one strong clue. The sad part is they may have been this way a long time and you may have been here longer than you want to think.

• Are you overwhelmed with unusual fear, anxiety, defensiveness and insecurity about a potential change in your life? Does your heart lean in one direction and your mind in another? Head-heart disagreements are another clue. The trouble is, following either is no guarantee of happy consequences, unless your expectations are open-minded. Then you can’t lose from winning.

• Be brave and ask the significant others in your life. Are you perceived as being off keel and possibly ready to run a 8.5 100 yard dash or win an Academy Award? Other people can see where you are standing in life better than you can. Their perspective is more objective and they have less invested in it.

If you are sensing that you might be off keel, it may be for a good reason. Good feelings confirm you are headed in the right direction, bad ones are trying to tell you to slow down and consider changing your course so you can return to feeling good again. But don’t get caught up in the illusion of the grass always being greener on the other side of the fence, because your course may just need a slight mental correction, not a major physical one. Put another way, you can get to the finish line quicker by doing two things simultaneously—running faster and bringing the finish line closer. You can have your cake and eat it too.