Introduction: Recognizing Opportunities in Everyday Life
I’ve worked with people for close to 20 years now. I have been a social worker, a graduate TA, an adjunct professor, a campus mentor, a meditation teacher, a therapist, a life coach, and now I’m an executive coach and consultant.
My Journey: How I Learned to Walk Through Open Doors
I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 19. I tried the medications, but they created more problems than they fixed. I’m a pretty all or nothing guy, so giving me pharmaceutical grade speed, especially when I was first coming out of addiction at such a young age, was a recipe for disaster.
And it was disastrous.
Because of this, I’ve learned how to manage my ADHD without any sort of medication. One of the best ways of doing this is by making sure there’s a lot of variety in the work that I do. When I worked at a small private university I was a campus mentor, a therapist, and an adjunct professor. I also had a meditation group and a pornography addiction group, and I was also going through grad school for counseling at the time, so there was enough to keep me interested. I got to meet a lot of different people and do a lot of different things. It was cool.
I left the university to open a private practice. Being a therapist was a good fit for me. I got to have intentional conversations with 6 or 7 different people every day. I started another meditation group that met weekly. I also started my blog, podcast, and posting on social media during this time. This was all enough to keep me interested.
The same has held true for me as a coach. I started off working with different people and expanded into helping people with their businesses. Now, I work with people, teams, and businesses in a bunch of different industries and get to address a bunch of different issues. I help people launch and grow their businesses, I help companies strategize and plan their next steps, and I get to teach and do trainings on different topics that interest me.
This is all well and good and might even be necessary to keep me from changing careers again, but it has led me to one consistent problem: I’ve never known how to tell people what it is I do beyond saying that I am an executive coach and consultant, and nobody really knows what that means.
This was the problem when I was a therapist and people would ask what I specialized in. I never pinned myself down to any one thing, so I always had trouble answering that question.
Doing a little bit of everything isn’t too much of a problem until you are trying to market yourself online and you need a quick way to grab people’s attention when they see what you do. By doing so many things and not being able to sum it all up into one phrase that helps people understand what it is I do better than anyone else, I was all over the place, and this made me look unfocused and kept people from connecting with me.
That all changed over the last few months when I started working with a media partnership company that found me online and reached out. One of their recruiters saw me on a podcast and thought I might have something worth sharing. After an obsessive amount of due diligence, I took the leap and started working with them.
The process started with an initial interview where we talked about my life and the work I do. If you know me personally or have followed me for very long, you know that the last 20 years have led to a lot of change for me. I spent the first part of my life struggling with mental health and a variety of behavior and addiction issues. I was a nightmare of a human being—I don’t say this with any sort of self-deprecation or self-criticism; it’s obvious in retrospect.
The cofounder of the company stopped me as I was talking about younger James and told me he could not understand how that person became the person he was talking to now. He said he could not see the connection between the two.
I appreciate hearing that from people because it’s a sort of validation of the changes I’ve made in my life, but I’ve never had a good answer for it. I don’t have some sort of defining moment that changed everything for me like you see in Sandra Bullock movies.
It was a slow process of evolving away from who I was and into who I am, so I said what I always say: “I just walk through open doors when I see them, and I don’t waste my time trying to kick down doors that are closed or get into rooms where I don’t belong.”
The Power of Open Doors: What It Really Means
I’ve said this to people a bunch of times. Nobody’s ever dug into it before, but this guy did. He stopped me and started asking questions about what it looks like to walk through these open doors, how I can tell when a door is closed, and what doors I’ve walked through on this path that got me to where I am now.
One of the first examples I used of seeing an open door and saying yes was the initial consultation with his company. I told him that after meeting the recruiter, I was excited to work with them, but if something did not work out, I would have accepted that and looked for other opportunities. I wouldn’t be upset about it. I wouldn’t cry about it. I wouldn’t say it was unfair. I wouldn’t wonder why someone else got the opportunity instead of me. I would just look for another one.
He carried the idea over to my work with people, pointing out how helping people recognize opportunities and take advantage of them seems to be a central part of what I do. He suggested that we home in on and try to perfect this idea and Walk Through Open Doors was born.
I’ll be honest—I wasn’t completely sold on this being the primary driver of what I do from now on at first. It felt too simple and reductive of everything I’ve done (because I’m soooooooo special), but as I started working with it, it became more and more clear that he was onto something.
Like so many of the best things in our lives, it turned into one of those hindsight-is-20/20 moments. As I began to look back at the last 15 years of working with people, I realized that this should have been clear to me all along.
When I first left counseling, I kept getting messages from people asking me to recommend a counselor who was “like me.” When I would ask what they meant by “like me,” they would tell me that they wanted someone who helped them look at options and take concrete steps toward change instead of reflecting their feelings back to them.
I realized that one of the reasons I’ve never been super helpful to people who are dealing with depression is because I am always looking for opportunities to do something, and that can drive them up the wall. I have a hard time sitting with a situation that is not as good as it could be, and I’m almost pathological in noticing and assessing different options to change things.
I realized that some people had (usually jokingly) accused me of toxic positivity because of my belief that there is always an option and that we can always do something no matter the situation. Viktor Frankl saw this in the Nazi concentration camp he was confined in, recognizing that no matter what our circumstances are, we always have control over our response to them. There’s always something we can do. I always say I don’t get to argue with the guy in the Nazi concentration camp.
The “OK, Cool” Mindset: Reframing Challenges as Opportunities
I realized that I’ve articulated this to myself and others by saying, “OK, cool,” no matter what happens.
I lost my job? OK, cool. Does this free me up to pursue a different career now? Does it mean there are new opportunities I may not have looked for when I was comfortable? I wound up having my own counseling practice, which led to my coaching practice, because the job I thought I would have for life went sideways.
I messed up the tendons in my elbow and can’t lift weights or work out hard right now? OK, cool. What other kinds of exercise can I do? Now, I wouldn’t trade my morning walk for anything.
I’m experiencing anxiety and dread. OK, cool. I’ve learned that in times like this, my ego is stripped away, and I am forced to rely on something bigger than myself. I always come out the other side better because of it.
The Danger of Waiting: Why Perfect Conditions Never Arrive
None of this is meant to dismiss the difficulties and struggles inherent in life. None of this is meant to dismiss the fact that things happen that are not good and that we cannot accept very easily.
I don’t need to tell you about those things, though. The news, social media, blogs, and every other medium is dominated by things telling you that life is particularly unfair right now and that it’s not your fault. It’s difficult to find a website that doesn’t have something on it about how awful life is.
I’m not here to dispute that. I don’t have a perfect life. I’ve been honest about my struggles, particularly the difficulty of the last few years. I’m not here to say that there is no difficulty in life and that everything will be fine if you look for the good in it, but I am here to tell you that there are a lot more opportunities available than people think there are.
There are new opportunities in every situation. They may not be the opportunities we want and may require difficult things of us, but that does not mean they are not there. We often confuse not getting what we want with not having any options.
Let’s say you are hungry. You want a sandwich, but you are out of bread. This doesn’t mean you have to starve.
That sounds ridiculous, but a lot of people live their life that way.
You’ve heard me talk a lot about how our self-obsession is the primary source of our suffering. This has been getting worse since the 1960s and is now on steroids because of the hyper-personalized form of capitalism we exist within and the echo chambers of social media.
It’s important to understand that the people who want you to click on their articles and buy their products have learned that it’s a lot easier to get you to do this by telling you that they understand how much everything sucks and that they are sorry you are trapped. This is a way for them to fake empathy and then offer you a solution that just so happens to benefit them.
A lot of this is done under the guise of good things. Some of the people telling you that everything sucks may have good intentions. Still, in the end, they are robbing you of your ability to make the changes you need to make in your life.
It is true that the opportunities in our lives are impacted by factors beyond our control and that there are people who have a lot more opportunities than others, but this does not mean that you do not have any opportunities. This is the false dichotomy they’ve been shoving down our throats for the last 60 years, and it is crippling people.
Letting Go of Struggle: Why Some Doors Open When You Stop Forcing Them
They also tell us that opportunity has to be a struggle. They tell us we have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, hustle, grind, and live a miserable life in order to seize opportunity. To some extent, this is because people all want to believe they fought hard and made their own way, but none of us have ever done anything completely on our own. It doesn’t have to be hard. Many opportunities don’t require anything more than the ability to see them and a willingness to step into them.
That was one thing I liked about the idea of walking through open doors – there are often opportunities all around us that we aren’t seeing because we are so focused and intent on struggle. I thought that leaving the job I had before opening my own office was a struggle, but as I look back, I see that what I needed to do could not have been clearer. It didn’t require me to pick up and carry some kind of load; it actually required me to put one down.
I still remember the moment that I realized that the situation would not be addressed and that I had done everything I could to make it right. This moment of clarity allowed me to go home for lunch and submit my letter of resignation without turning it into an angsty struggle. I hadn’t realized it at the time, but I was carrying so much weight that it was preventing me from walking through an open door into something completely different. I just had to put it down and leave.
This is what we’re going to talk about going forward. Learning to recognize the open doors in our life, knowing how to assess them, how to tell if we want to walk through them, how to identify closed doors and not waste our time on them, and the kinds of things we need to do and be every day to set ourselves up to see the open doors that are all around us.
Journal Prompts
- In what areas of my life do I feel trapped?
- What is the story that reinforces this idea of being trapped?
- If I had a magic wand, how would I use it to escape being trapped?
- What are my options to escape whatever it is that has me trapped?
- (This question is important. Make sure to catalog every available option, even the bad ones or the ones you are unwilling to consider. It’s important to recognize that we do have agency in situations.)
If you recognize options and then weigh them out and decide against them, this will help you see that you are, to some extent, choosing to remain where you are, and that has power in and of itself.
👉 There’s always an option. If you’re ready to recognize the doors in your life, let’s talk. Schedule a free coaching consultation today.
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