During a much-needed weekend getaway with my BFF, we laughed about how significant we make things that are important but not as bad as we think. During her years at a refrigerator and food delivery start up, my BFF never forgot what her boss said during a very stressful time –remember at the end of the day it’s just a refrigerator.
We use this line whenever one of us needs to lighten up. Think of significance as focusing with clenched jaw or wringing fingers. It’s undue stress because we are making more important than it might warrant. And we may be laboring in the misconception that if we are significant about a problem, we have full control over it. The opposite is true.
Yes, significance has its place especially when we experience the joy of life’s wonderful moments. We capture them on Facebook or Instagram with posts and photos so we can hang on to the joy for a long time.
However, when we give this same significance to life’s little bumps and bruises, we invite worry, stress, and anxiety. And we feel a heaviness that drains our energy and affects our choices for a more balanced reaction. According to neuroscience research, when this happens your amygdala – a part of the brain that assesses threat – activates an automatic reaction in response to a perceived danger. This is vital when we’re facing a life-or-death situation but from repeated use, we react as if a late deadline, disappointing raise, or rejection is a matter of life and death.
This often shows up in the topics our coaching clients bring to a session. As we listen to their story, we are picking up the mindsets or perspectives that are getting in the way of what they want. Significance is often called catastrophizing – believing that they’re in a worse situation than they really are or exaggerating the difficulties. It can be the root of their anxiety or worry or inability to make a decision.
Coaches are not immune to this automatic reaction. How often do we blow out of portion or make significant our role in a session that didn’t do well? Moving into, what Coach and author, Marion Franklin, MCC call the crappy coach syndrome.
This is the benefit of lightness as an alternative to significance. And we invite our clients and ourselves to exercise our power to shift our perspective. Remember the 1997 movie, Life is Beautiful about a waiter and his son who become victims of the Holocaust and lightens this experience for his son by making a game out of their imprisonment. The message of the movie is our capacity to see the good in the worst of times. It’s about hope. About the natural human conviction that things will get better.
We want to take the time to identify where significance might be the reason we are stuck – closed off from new and more effective choices and action steps. As my BFF and I are fond of saying, at the end of the day, it’s just a refrigerator.
