How many sides are there to a coin? Two? Three? I suppose it depends on how you look at it and if you count the side or not. It’s interesting, the saying “there are two sides to every coin†is often used to help reframe options – to demonstrate that there is often more than one way to do thing. Another great saying “there is more than one way to skin a catâ€. Now why would you go and do that? 🙂
A few months ago while working with a client who was ‘tired’ of his job in sales I helped him to see that there were indeed more than one way… In his mind he had to quit his job and find a new profession. This one specifically he had been doing for about 5 years, and previous to that he worked in a different industry doing something different. And now, he was looking to do something again, different. Do you see a pattern?
InNLP Land there is a Meta Program that works with the dichotomy of sameness or difference (matching or mismatching). While questioning this man, I was able to find out that when he was happy in his job he was noticing more of what was going right, what was the same as what he desired in a job, what matched his expectations. And, you guessed it, when he move to an unhappy flow he started to mismatch.
Within our coaching conversation I purposefully had him stretch onto the ‘sameness’ side of the coin and asked him what about his current job matched his desires, what was going right and what matched his expectations. We then started talking about other roles (sales or otherwise) in his current company in the same industry that he could possibly move into rather than jumping to something different and again starting over. Starting over wasn’t out of the question, but the thought of lower pay, learning a new industry or product was not an appealing one. But, if he could find an alternative, some options within the same company with the same products and services but doing something ‘different’ that was much more appealing.
Throwing it all away just to make a change isn’t always the answer. Sometimes, it is a useful task to identify the options that might be right in front of you. After all, there possibly more options than you can shake a stick at!