When being too focused impacts your vision...

What are you focused on?
What would happen if you let go?

These questions were posed to me by my optometrist, not my coach.

Quick backstory:  Over the past year, I've been on a journey to understand the source of and solution to my vertigo. In a twist that I'll have to describe in a book someday, I was able to track it back to two traumatic brain injuries that I had as a teenager which impacted my optical nerves and visual and spatial processing.  (Yes, for real. I promise, I'll write more about it someday.)

Essentially, when the brain injuries happened, my 17-year-old brain said, "Ok cool, I'll just find a different way to see since this path is not available." And now, my 47-year-old brain is saying, "I'm tired of working so hard to see, can we go back to the way it's supposed to be, go back to being easy?"

When you are in danger, part of the fight/flight/freeze reaction is to tunnel your vision in to focus on the thing right in front of you.  You lose some of your peripheral vision so you can have all of your resources dedicated to what's right in front of you. THAT is what my brain chose to do to enable my vision when the normal path was damaged!  So, I've essentially been operating in a version of fight/flight/freeze for the last 30 years. That's fun.

If that's not a metaphor for life, I don't know what is.

Each week, I go to the eye doctor for vision therapy to retrain my brain how to see the way it was originally designed to do.  The lessons I've learned through this process are significant, here are a few that might help you too:

You can't see the big picture when you're stressed. (Literally and figuratively!) What are you so focused on right now that you can't think about anything else? Maybe it's a change of leadership or ownership at your job, maybe it's a teenager you're worried about, maybe it's the promotion you didn't get or a less than ideal performance review... what are you tunneled in on?

When you're focused on that thing, you can't see what's available to support you.  You're in the details, not the big picture.  Doing my eye exercises, if I get too focused on the detail, I miss what's available to help me.  Last week, I was doing a puzzle and could not find a piece I needed, because I was so focused on what I thought was the right solution that I couldn't see that the actual solution (piece) was sitting right in front of me.

The solution might be right in front of you too.

You have to consciously let go. You learn to adapt, to survive, to navigate. You get it done. Because you have to. Because you can. You have to choose to let go of what is not letting you see the big picture of your life.

When I'm doing my eye therapy, she says this to me over and over...

Let go. Breathe. 

When I let go and intentionally look for the bigger picture, consciously choosing not to focus in, it feels like I'm out of control. (And I really like being in control.)

So I have to make a choice, over and over again, to let go. To trust that if I just unclench a bit, I'll be ok.  Sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not.  And that feels like life too.

You can find another way. You (and your brain) are more resilient than you can even imagine.  Right now, that problem might look too big, too complex, or too damn hard...and, you can find a way forward.  It might not be the way you were taught or think you're "supposed to", but you can find another way to achieve your goals, to heal yourself, to move forward one more step.

Trust yourself to know the next right thing.

The path to discovering the impact of a teenage brain injury on a midlife brain has been winding and challenging.  The recovery has been too.  All along, I've been listening to myself, trusting the nudges, taking one. more. step. to discover what has been blocking or limiting me.

I wonder more and more about the things that previous versions of me learned. This journey has been a journey back to a 17-year-old version of Steph, who wasn't quite so serious but just as passionate, who wasn't quite so fond of control but just as intense, who wasn't quite so focused on the "right way" but just as curious about "my way". 

Who knows might happen when you let go of what you're focused on? I can't answer that for you, but I do know that...

You've got this. So do I.