Easier by Chris Westfall

Author:Chris Westfall [Westfall, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119834595
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2021-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

Three days later, at 4:40 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, the Coach's phone rang. He was walking into the house, back from a quick trip to the store. The FaceTime call was from the Client. Quickly, the Coach entered the house and set the grocery bag on the kitchen counter while his thumb responded to the call. “Hey there!” he said, looking at the screen, “I didn't expect to hear from you so soon. How was your weekend?”

On the screen, the Client was grinning from ear to ear. “I did it. I really did it!”

The Coach asked if he had quit his job.

“No, not yet. Nothing like that! I have had the most amazing weekend – you're not going to believe it.” The Client was sitting at his kitchen table. The background of white walls behind him was a simple frame for the FaceTime conversation.

The Client relayed a story of how he recognized that the layers of thinking around this last-minute request were suffocating him. If infinite creativity were always available, he reasoned, why wasn't he able to tap into it? If he were wired and built to adapt and really operated inside of a universe that had his back, why couldn't he see it?

“Well, new ideas are always available, except for my thinking,” he said. “My concentration on the utter hassle of this redundant assignment was just filling me up with so much … anger! So much indignation! And when I found myself getting frustrated … ” his voice trailed off.

“What did you do?” the Coach interjected. He was putting some blueberries into the refrigerator while he held the phone in his left hand at arm's length.

The Client was on a roll. “I found myself. I found that I was more than my thinking, my feelings of being wronged, or inconvenienced, or hassled or whatever. We were going to the wedding – my wife agreed to drive, which was a huge help, and we were talking about my frustration in the car. My girls were in the back seat, and as I was going on and on about how I had already done this work before, my ten-year-old says, ‘Dad, they ask us to do the same problems over and over in math class. Why can't you just do the problem again?’”

“What did you make of that?” the Coach inquired.

“Well, I was creating this massive story of injustice and repetition and just all kinds of head trash and my kid just simplified the whole thing for me. I decided to drop my story.”

“How did you do that, exactly?” The Coach was really curious.

“I didn't do anything! It's what I stopped doing that made everything easier,” the Client explained. “Sometimes kids can see things in a way that is so much purer than the way we process stuff. They come from a much more natural state. Really just … honest, you know what I mean? And from this natural state, she was saying, just do the deal, Dad – do what your boss is asking you to do.

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