Landmark Forum Leader Insights

A portal to the domain of possibility

By Jane Wright

Something happens. Immediately, we assign meaning, categorize importance, draw conclusions, identify action to be taken, form opinions that linger. This collapse between what happened and the meanings we assign takes place so instantaneously that we forget that what happened and how we hold it were two independent and totally separate occurrences. One reinforces the other, and a “vicious circle” gets set in motion. What’s disempowering here is that in that collapse, realities unwittingly get set.

We then see our lives and ourselves in terms of those realities (“truths,” really) and we map our behavior and future experiences onto those “truths.” And it’s from here that we create the stuff and story of our lives—with a few basic themes playing themselves out over and over. We can spice up or water down our stories, tell the long or short version, add drama or subtlety, but regardless of how clever we are, or what new or different set of circumstances we put into the vicious circle, what we get out of it is only more of the same.

Knowing our stories are an interpretation (no more true or false than another interpretation), and that that’s not who we are, produces a portal to a third domain. Possibility exists in this third domain. Possibility moves things around until our experience and our circumstances are a match for what we’re out to create. Distinguishing that is transformational. It shifts the horizon of what’s possible.