What doorway are you standing in front of?

I've spent quite a bit of time recently thinking about doorways. Not the physical kind, but those moments in our lives when something starts asking for our attention.

Sometimes it's work. We know we're unhappy, but we're not sure whether we should stay or leave. Sometimes it's a relationship that doesn't feel quite as it once did. It might be our health, a business we're carrying, a change we didn't expect, or simply the feeling that the life we're living no longer quite fits.

When we find ourselves in these places, I think our natural reaction is often to look for an answer. What should I do? Which way should I go? What's the right decision? We want to know what's on the other side before we've even decided whether we're ready to walk through.

But I've been wondering whether we're sometimes getting ahead of ourselves.

Perhaps the first thing isn't to find the answer. Perhaps it's simply to recognise the doorway.

To acknowledge that something has changed, something doesn't feel quite right, or perhaps there's something ahead that we're curious about. We don't necessarily need to make a decision about it today. We don't even need to know where it might lead.

I've realised this through coaching as well. People don't necessarily arrive thinking, I need coaching. They arrive because something is happening in their life. They're questioning their career, carrying the weight of a business, going through a transition, struggling in a relationship, feeling the expectations of others, or wanting to take back some agency over their health.

The conversation begins with where they are, not with where they should go.

And perhaps that's true outside coaching too. We don't always need to rush through the doorway. Sometimes there is value in standing there for a while, looking at what brought us to it and allowing ourselves the space to wonder what might be on the other side.