A New Week

Well, another Easter has come and gone, and to me that holiday seems to always mark the beginning of spring, even though it's not the official start of the season.

I hope you had a great weekend and took some time to share pleasant moments with the people you love. I had a super weekend with my husband and our yellow lab.

It's late on Sunday night as I write this, and normally I would have waited until Monday to post this, but I wanted to capture the thought before it slipped away. Things sometimes flit in and out of my mind too quickly and this time I wanted to be sure to write it down.

Earlier this evening my husband and I were talking about some recent lessons we've learned, some paradigms that have shifted in dramatic ways, and how we're managing some disappointment from things that didn't turn out the way we hoped they would.

As we were talking, it occurred to me once again that every bit of happiness, contentment, success, whatever, really does depend upon our perspective. Ok, I know you're thinking, "Duh. Is she just now figuring that out?" But bear with me, I think this is worth re-learning several times.

The world is an exciting place. There's a lot of unknown out there, and depending on your approach to uncertainty (one of Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions) it's either scary or exciting. I've mostly been in the exciting camp throughout my life, and actually like uncertain situations. I think all kinds of fantastic things could materialize, which may not be very practical at times, but as my mom would say, "it's certainly a lot more fun to think of it that way than the other way."

Of course that's not always the case for me...I'm definitely lacking in the perfect category. Sometimes uncertainty is really scary, especially when the path isn't very clear.

On Friday I talked about choosing to mentally "flip the coin" of perspective as a mechanism for dealing with challenging situations and people, but maybe that's also what's needed when approaching uncertainty. I've never really tried to understand what it's really like to always live in the uncertain = scary camp, and I can see that's an area of my life I need to try to understand so that if called upon I can be of help to someone about to make the move to the flip perspective.

What about you? What's your approach to uncertainty? If you're already living in the exciting camp, then keep on truckin', neighbor. If you're in the scary camp or hanging out somewhere in between, then consider this your invitation to pack up and change your address.

As always, I'd love to hear (read) what you think about this idea. Go ahead, click the comments link below and share your thoughts.

This is a new week. Anything can happen!