Flashes of Obviousness: What Are You Not Seeing?
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Ever have a flash of obviousness*?
Something so right under your nose, so head-smackingly self-evident you wonder if the part of your brain in charge of common sense might actually be damaged?
A quick story.
One morning last week I woke up, got out of bed, and raised the blinds on the bay window in my bedroom.
They are made out of some neutral-looking material. Maybe bamboo or jute, but also just as possible — plastic. Or asbestos. Who knows? They were cheap and the least ugly Bed Bath & Beyond had to offer that day, so we bought them. There are three of these blinds. And, as my husband and I found out shortly after installing them, they didn’t match. One was lighter in color than the others, and the texture was smoother — and it wasn’t the bigger one in the middle so it would look like we mismatched them intentionally. It was the one on the right, which just looked like a mistake.
We decided it wasn’t bad enough to go through the hassle of uninstalling it, reboxing it, finding the receipt, renting another Zipcar, and trekking across town to return it. (We can talk about our laziness in some other post!)
That was eleven years ago.
We have raised and lowered that one mismatched shade almost ten thousand times since then (I did the math). Every time I looked at it, I was all, “Ugh. Weird shade, I hate you.” And then last week, as I was raising that one weird shade, I was hit by a flash of obviousness. I looked at the dog on the bed and said to him, “We can just get new blinds!” I sounded so excited, he ran to the door thinking we were going somewhere.
In the eleven years since we put them up, that thought had not crossed my mind. It struck me as new and novel and brilliant.
Except it wasn’t. It was just practical. And OBVIOUS AS HELL.
In my coaching practice, I get to witness my clients get hit by far less trivial flashes of obviousness regularly. Moments like this happen all the time:
OMG...
I can stop hanging out with that friend who doesn’t support me!
I don’t have to go to art school to make art!
I can stop dating that person I don’t actually like all that much!
I can buy a plane ticket to that place I've always wanted to visit!
I get to decide!
I can shop for some pants that actually fit the body I have right now!
I can ask for help!
I don’t need to have all the answers!
I can talk to my boss about the kind of work I’d rather be doing!
I can say no thank you!
I don't have to keep working here!
Another quick story. When I was little, maybe 8 or 9, I woke up in the middle of the night with horrible stomach pains. My mom took me to the ER. After sitting in the waiting area for a really long time, long enough for my mom to make a really thorough mental list of the worst possible things wrong with me, a doctor came over and casually asked my mom what I last ate. She said, bean soup. We started laughing. Of course it was the bean soup!
What are you struggling with right now? Where are you stuck? Where are you unsure? What are you not seeing? So often the answers are already here. In many cases it's the most likely thing. It's the bean soup. It's getting new blinds. It's OBVIOUS AS HELL.
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*I thought ‘flash of obviousness’ popped into my head as an original thought (is there such a thing?), but it seems Scott Adams of Dilbert fame beat me too it.