One of the things I’ve learned through asking is just how limited my imagination can be sometimes. There’s a quote from the Broadway musical Auntie Mame that describes exactly what I mean: “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!”
If you wish to activate the possibility and opportunity setting in your life, it helps to do three things:
1. Ask for what you want.
2. Don’t get overly specific.
3. Keep your eyes open.
Consider this analogy: You’re hungry. You walk into the nearest restaurant, sit down at a table and tell the server, “I’m hungry.” Without any additional information to go on, the server would go to the chef and bring you pretty much anything. Oysters Rockefeller? A tuna salad sandwich? A banana split? Whatever the chef has over-ordered that week?
Next, imagine that you get a bit more specific and tell the server, “I would like a soup and sandwich.” This is better, but you’re still not sure that what you’ll receive is what you’re really after. The server could bring you lamb stew with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich; potato soup and bologna; split pea and chicken salad; French onion and bánh mì, chicken noodle and roast beef on rye…
By now, I’m sure you appreciate the power of specificity. So you ask the server for tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. Sounds good. Specific, right?. Here’s where Step Three comes into play. Keep your eyes open—be open to what’s possible.
Let’s assume that when you ordered your soup and sandwich, your frame of reference was a bowl of reconstituted tomato soup from a can, paired with a sandwich made from square, commercially-baked white bread and cheese that came wrapped in plastic.
That’s not necessarily a terrible lunch—it featured prominently in my childhood.
But if you want to get more than what you want, I invite you to be open to what’s possible. When you attach your requests with the expectations based on your learned experiences, you are by default excluding a myriad of possibilities that exist outside your frame of reference.
The chef may send out a delicious roasted tomato basil soup, made with fresh Roma tomatoes and basil snipped earlier that morning from the restaurant’s herb garden. The cheese sandwich may be a four-cheese blend, grilled on freshly-baked bread. And since this chef grew up in a household where extras were part of the presentation, your soup and salad is joined by a bowl of apple wedges.
You may not have even known such a combo existed. In order to get more than what you want, drill down to a level of specificity that gets you in the ballpark of what would make you happy. Then include the magic phrase, “I am open to this, or something better.”
Trust me when I say that something better is ALWAYS not only possible, but by your inviting it, it’s already on its way to you.
Bon appétit!
P.S. To buy me a coffee, subscribe to my free weekly newsletter, or book a coaching session and more, click here.
