Last week I told you conversation has always been at the center of how I think and work.

This week, one conversation proved it again. I had a conversation with someone who is trying to figure out what comes next.

He's built and sold businesses. Earned a demanding professional credential. Worked inside one of the largest consulting firms in the world. Launched products. Lived in several countries.

He has a lot of experience.

Which, strangely enough, can make it harder to explain what you do next.

When you have spent decades accumulating skills, stories, successes, failures, interests, and ideas, it can feel like standing in front of a buffet and trying to decide what to put on the plate.

Which pieces matter?

Which ones will people understand?

Which ones should you leave out?

And what happens when the very experience that makes you valuable also makes you harder to categorize?

We talked about storytelling, personal branding, artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship, and the pressure to package yourself into something that other people can quickly understand.

Then, somewhere in the middle of the conversation, I asked him a question that seemed to come from a completely different direction.

"Do you have any kind of spiritual practice?"

He paused.

Not really.

He had tried meditation, but his brain never stopped. Logic had become one of the primary ways he navigated the world.

But as we kept talking, something else emerged.

Earlier in his life, he had trusted his intuition. He followed ideas before he could fully explain them. He started things. He traveled. He made unconventional choices. Opportunities seemed to appear, and he moved toward them.

Then, at some point, that changed.

He became more technically trained. More analytical. More rational.

Those skills served him.

But he began to wonder whether, somewhere along the way, he had stopped listening to another part of himself.

I often hear something similar, when I ask a client about spiritual practice.

Because when something stops working, most of us assume we need to add something.

A better plan.

A clearer strategy.

Another qualification.

More information.

More certainty.

But sometimes the answer isn't to add more.

Sometimes it is to reconnect with something we trained ourselves to ignore.

Our instincts.

Our bodies.

Our curiosity.

The part of us that existed before we became so concerned with being correct, responsible, professional, or impressive.

I often ask people to find a photograph of themselves from childhood. Not because childhood was necessarily easy or idyllic, but because a photograph can sometimes remind us of an energy we have lost contact with.

A boldness.

A playfulness.

A sense of possibility.

The essential parts of us do not disappear. They get covered.

Covered by disappointment.

Covered by expectations.

Covered by everything we have learned about how life and business are supposed to work.

The light may still be shining at full strength. There is simply a lot piled on top of it.

The work, then, may not be to create an entirely new self.

It may be to clear away enough of the debris to see what has been there all along.

Before we ended our conversation, I gave him a very small assignment.

Don't solve your entire future.

Don't force an answer.

Just get quiet for a minute or two.

Breathe.

See what comes back.

That may not sound like much of a business strategy.

But sometimes the next move does not arrive through more thinking.

Sometimes it arrives when we finally become quiet enough to hear ourselves again.

Until next time,

Kevin

P.S. What conversation have you been avoiding because you've been trying to solve it using your mind instead? Sometimes the way in isn't more thinking. Reply and tell me what it is.
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​Kevin Urban​
​The Possible-ist™ | From Setbacks to Comebacks
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