(Christopher here. We are grateful to Bevilledge.com for allowing us to re-publish this post for you.)

Getting Out of My Bubble…It’s a Big World Out There

It was 4 am on a Thursday, and I found myself driving to the airport. It is early in the morning like this when my brain is the least conditioned. Deep thought comes easy when the rest of the world is still quiet or asleep.

As I entered the airport expecting to see a ghost town, I was surprised to find a line of at least 25 people waiting to get to the same airline counter I was attempting to reach.

Naturally, I went into Denial – how could so many people be aiming for the same goal I was so early in the morning on a Thursday? It didn’t seem like a realistic possibility.

This thought process stuck with me as I got through security, found my gate, and boarded my plane. I couldn’t stop looking around, counting hundreds, maybe even thousands of people that were all at the airport trying to go to a new destination.

If this many people were in this one location, I couldn’t even begin to imagine how many hundreds of thousands were still in bed, going to work, or finishing their night shift. It seemed almost unreal.

It was up in the air that I started to expand my accepted reality. Half-asleep I glanced over at the window to find a majestic, gigantic, puffy cloud set in front of a rose-colored sunrise.

In comparison to the cloud, the massive jet engine looked more like a toy than an elegant piece of machinery. My first thought was how many millions of billions of particles it took to make up that one cloud and then the one next to it.

I began to realize just how small I am. This isn’t a reference or boast about weight — it is an awareness event of the size of my reality compared to the incomparable size of the planet we call home, let alone the solar system it calls home.

I get so consumed with my own world and my belief that I am at the center of it — when in reality I am a speck on a rock flying through the universe.

The correlation I am starting to make is that the more narrowly focused I am, the more my leadership style relies on command and control tendencies. Basically, the more self-centered I am, the more I turn into a control freak.

Hello my name is Jessica Soroky, and I am a recovering control freak.

The wider I allow my brain to get, the bigger my thoughts get. It is here in this place of surreal freedom that innovation lies for me. It sparks inspiration and typically a blog post or two.

In a world where our every want, demand, and desire sits at our finger tips it is easy to fall victim to our narrow-minded thinking. My boss talks a lot about this idea of expanding your thinking and even your practice and understanding of integration. He calls it “Live Wide™.”

To me “Live Wide” is much like love, something that is natural and at our core but still requires work to unleash. It is similar to the idea of “love” and continues being difficult to truly define and articulate – it is a little different for everyone.

Up in the clouds, watching the sun rise, I allowed myself to accept how petty I can get.

Coaching teams can often lead to becoming the complaint post for team members and the center of all the gossip.

I choose to get sucked in from time to time, ignoring everything I’ve been taught, and it takes moments of overwhelming big thought to break me of the constraints I put on myself.

I was going to challenge you – but instead I am challenging myself to raise my awareness when I am in a narrow-minded place, and finding that “cloud” to remind me how big my little world is and start looking at that picture.

It is only in a place of extreme wonder and imagination that we will uncover the innovation we’ve been looking for.

Jessica Soroky, CSM

Only 21 years old, Jessica is already a Certified Scrum Master with two years of practice in agile delivery and team leadership. She is also the youngest participant in The Leadership Gift™ Program and its growing worldwide community of leaders and coaches. After five years of non-profit development through Nellie’s Catwalk for Kids, Jessica continues her leadership journey in state government, not-for-profit, and private sector leadership studies.

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