My Reality Check Bounced! - Jason Ryan Dorsey [23]
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BOUNCED:
I don’t see any opportunity to get what I want.
CASHED:
Once I believe opportunity is everywhere, it appears!
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CAN YOU SPOT OPPORTUNITY?
When you believe opportunity is everywhere, the world becomes one big phonebook. Consider whether you see the following four situations as great opportunities or time-consuming dead ends:
Situation 1: Twice a day on your commute you pass an abandoned, run-down house. It has a collapsing roof and you think people are dealing drugs there at night. You see a…
• dead end—an eyesore that should be condemned by the city and demolished.
• great opportunity—a house ripe for revitalization. Maybe you could turn it into government-subsidized housing or a homeless shelter.
Situation 2: You unexpectedly get fired from your first real job. You see a…
• dead end—worst thing that could have ever happened to you, because good jobs are practically impossible to find.
• great opportunity—permission and freedom to finally pursue your dream career.
Situation 3: You watch the evening news and learn that an overseas natural disaster has killed one hundred thousand people. You see a…
• dead end—another reason to stay home and change the channel.
• great opportunity—an undeniable call-to-action to get off your couch and start doing what you can to help the victims.
Situation 4: The stock market drops 20 percent in one year. You see a…
• dead end—take whatever money you have left out of the stock market and swear never to invest again!
• great opportunity—realize this type of market correction could be normal and might actually signal it’s a great time to invest more money.
As these four situations show, opportunity is always right in front of you, but you must tune your senses to recognize it. You must choose to see beyond your physical surroundings and through your insecurities into what you can create. I call this mental state of heightened sensitivity to opportunity your Opportunity Radar. Three specific actions can help you create it:
1. Coach yourself.
2. Apprentice yourself.
3. Challenge assumptions.
Opportunity Radar Step 1: Coach Yourself—The Voice in Your Head Controls What You See
Admit it, you constantly talk to yourself. Sometimes you do this out loud in elevators and make strangers standing behind you feel uncomfortable. Sometimes you do it in front of the mirror to build up your self-esteem. But most of the time you carry on this nonstop internal conversation without ever making a sound or really even paying attention. This constant internal conversation is your commentary about the world and your place within it.
You can use this internal conversation to your advantage by coaching yourself to see opportunity. Start by inserting into your internal conversation thoughts about all the incredible opportunity that exists in the world. Tell yourself that a stranger sitting near you at a coffee shop might be the contact you need to open the door to a more rewarding career. Tell yourself that an empty storefront in a cute shopping center might be the perfect location for the boutique you’ve always dreamed about starting. By telling yourself that opportunity is camouflaged all around you all the time, you can begin to see opportunity in places and events where you normally wouldn’t look.
Twenty-nine-year-old Rahul knows how coaching yourself for opportunity can dramatically change the course of your life. For three years, he managed fancy restaurants in hip cities such as Las Vegas. However, he always had a dream of one day becoming a professional golfer. Everyone who knew Rahul knew about his love of golf, but they also knew he didn’t have the courage to make it a full-time career.
One evening a famous movie star was hanging out by himself in the restaurant Rahul managed.