I own a really cute pair of shoes that I wish fit me, but they don’t.  They never have.  I bought them knowing they were tight and thinking I could have them stretched to fit.  Never mind that my baby toes were squeezed or that three toes were sticking out a little too far through the small open toe area.  You have to understand, the shoes were so stylish, the two-toned colors matched several of my outfits, the price was reasonable, and I needed shoes to go with my outfit.

My desire to have what I wanted right then overshadowed my best decision barometer and put me in a followup series of bad decisions.  The first was when I bought them.  Then I went to the shoe store and paid to have the shoes stretched and rubber taps put on the bottom.  I rushed the cobbler, as we were leaving for the weekend event the next day.  I wore my pretty shoes around the house while I got ready for us to leave, telling myself they’d stretch some more.  I brought along another plain pair of shoes just in case, though I was sure I wouldn’t need them.

An hour into the event had me hobbling a good distance to my hotel room in bare feet to change out these painful shoes for the comfy ones I’d brought along.  I applied bandaids to give extra cushioning to my reddened baby toes.  What a welcome relief, as I placed my wounded feet into shoes less squishy and then returned to the event having much less attention on my feet.  

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Sometimes prospective clients investigate coaching with me because they are simply looking for open windows.  That is, they aren’t sure about the change or changes they want to make and they take steps towards an open window to see if there is anything there that will help make them clearer.  They are in the discovery phase and they want to run their ideas by someone who can understand where they are and hear themselves talk about it. 

It’s a healthy approach to consider your options with an expert who knows how to listen and feedback what they hear from you, so you can hear it with a fresh ear.  However, you may be someone who does too much window shopping, dragging out decisions or never even going in the store, letting time pass and waiting till frustration or forced circumstances cause you to act.

Someone once said to me when I was being indecisive about signing up for a program I wanted to do, ”you can certainly wait, but what will happen is more time will pass and the cost of this program will go up.”  That didn’t seem horrible, but it also put the delaying my goals in perspective for me.  I’d already been waiting to get started and make some changes.  I didn’t want to keep waiting – and I didn’t want to have to pay more.

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