Stacking your evidence
Photo: Belinda Fewings
We are so good at spending our time and energy. Unfortunately, though, it’s easy to spend it in ways that aren’t necessarily serving what we really value and want to create. For most of us, that takes a little more intention and a lot more practice.
For example, you can use the same amount of time to work towards something or to resist doing the work. You can put your energy into believing thoughts that will support your goals or thoughts that will derail you. The same amount of time passes whether we’re engaged in charting a new course or stuck in a holding pattern.
In reality, we humans can waste a lot of time and energy. In my experience, this is, in part, because we need a bigger vision — and the evidence to back it up.
That's why, when I came across this passage in Rolf Gates’ book, Meditations on Intention and Being, it resonated with me.
"My ideal has been made out of the lives of ordinary women and men. I am inspired by the heart-stopping manner in which each of us has the potential to turn an ordinary moment into an extraordinary one, an ordinary action into something of lasting beauty. I am inspired by moments in people's lives and by skills and habits that play out over their entire lifetimes. I consider whatever success I meet with on a given day due in part to the way others have taught me to live by their example."
I've long had a practice of looking for those examples, and a coaching tool to help my clients do the same. I call it "stacking up the evidence". Like Gates, I find plenty of inspiration in real people doing real things out there in the real world.
Whatever we want to create, experience or be, an example exists somewhere. I know this because I have continually found them whenever I’ve taken the time to look.
Examples of people who trusted, who worked at it, who succeeded.
Examples of people who believed they could, so they did.
Examples that light the way to move forward when we're not sure.
Examples of skills, strategies and habits to make our own.
Examples of people who said hell yes and hell no.
Examples of people who not only survived, but thrived, when faced with difficult challenges.
Examples of empowering ways of thinking and resourcefulness.
Examples of taking the unexpected path and succeeding.
Examples of fulfilling careers, sustainable balance, successful businesses, nontraditional career paths, you name it.
Chances are very good that someone, somewhere, is creating evidence that you can achieve the result you're working towards, too.
When you look for them and find that they do in fact exist, then you know that:
You can always make a new and different choice than the one you have been making.
Your thinking about what's possible, practical or attainable may need to be challenged.
The excuses and fears that are telling you "no" have just been unmasked for what they really are.
If they were able to become your evidence, they are likely not the only evidence out there.
Inspiration is yours, but so are strategies, skills, habits, resources and beliefs that will support you.
It's small moments and large accomplishments that lead us where we want to go, but we often need our evidence to keep ourselves in action. We can all turn an ordinary moment into an extraordinary one; we have that ability. We can nourish ourselves and each other. We can create beauty out of thin air. We can teach and lead by example. We can design lives and work that excites us. Over and over again.
We make simple everyday choices and big life decisions, all based on the evidence we've stacked up to this point.
We'll continue to create evidence to back up what we believe, whether we're intentional about that or not. This is how human brains tend to work. We're also able to challenge that evidence and present new evidence (if we are willing). Our brains work like that, too.
What are your examples? Where are you stacking the evidence? In support of what you most desire to create next, or against it?
Try this: If you're lacking inspiration or struggling with belief that yes, you can do the thing, go find the evidence. If you're resisting the work, go find the evidence. If you're wondering how, go find the evidence. If you need a more empowering mindset, go find the evidence.
Pile it high. And if you've been compiling evidence as to why your situation is different and why this would never work for you, well, why not try stacking the evidence on the other side and see what happens?