Chase The Bird
Last Wednesday Cooper and I were at the park together. He was enjoying all of the swings, slides, and other kids, just having a blast. Cooper absolutely loves birds and one was sitting on the ground about 50 feet from us. He saw it, exclaimed, "BIRDY!" and took off after it.
Obviously, as he got close, the bird flew away from him. Cooper was undeterred and continued to chase it. As I was watching him run after the bird, I almost said, "Cooper, you can't catch a bird, they fly away too fast." Based on my own attempts to catch birds over 30 years ago and the strategy Cooper was utilizing to catch said bird, it would've been reasonable advice, but it wouldn't have been useful or even true.
First and foremost, Cooper was laughing and getting a lot of much needed energy out running around. By telling him he can't catch the bird, I take away some of the joy and thrill of trying. Secondly, there are many ways to catch a bird. I don't know that running full speed while yelling "BIRDY!" is the best one, but there are ways to indeed catch that bird.
Cooper probably chased that bird for 2 minutes before eventually moving on to something else. Then another bird flew by and he immediately took off after that one too. He didn't seem to care at all that he hadn't caught the first bird. He was simply enjoying the chase.
All of us probably had a time where we chased a bird. I know I did. Somewhere along the way, someone, most likely lovingly, told us that we were never going to catch the bird, so we stopped and eventually we stopped chasing birds altogether.
This happens in a lot of areas of life. We put a cap on what is possible and our potential because somewhere along the way "the truth" of life was told to us and we followed it as if it were the only way, without challenge. We accept outcomes to stories that haven't even been written yet, and we use absolute language instead of sitting in possibility and asking, "How could I?"
How could I:
Start a business?
Get into the best shape of my life?
Grow my business while working less?
Travel the world for a year?
Make the PGA Senior Tour?
One that I've been working through recently is running. For as long as I can remember, I've said that I can't run on back-to-back days. Not that I don't run on back-to-back days. that I can't. Then I was talking with someone recently and they shared their running schedule, which included running on consecutive days. My immediate thought was, "Well, maybe I need to challenge my own thinking because they are both older and faster than I am.”
So I did. I ran Sunday and then I ran Monday, no issues. Nothing magical happened. I didn't suddenly become a better runner. I simply questioned something I had accepted as true for years and found out it wasn't.
People do this all the time. They're too old to start a business, too out of shape to run a race, too busy to control their schedule, too stuck in their career to make a change, or too far behind to start. Many of these statements aren't facts. They're conclusions we've repeated so many times that they begin to feel true.
That's what struck me while watching Cooper. He hadn't yet decided what was impossible, he wasn't worried about whether birds could be caught. He saw one and started running and when it flew away, he found another one.
As adults, we spend a lot of time deciding what can't be done before we've given ourselves a chance to find out. Maybe the bird gets away, maybe it doesn't but before you decide the answer is no, make sure you've actually tested the possibility.
What bird have you stopped chasing?
What "I can't" have you accepted as fact that really should be a “how could I…”?
Go chase the bird.