An eccentric rhyme here and there may be pardoned in an amateur, but a whole book of them becomes monotonous and maddening.

This review of Emily Dickinson's poems was printed in the magazine The Nation in 1890.

A similar review in The Boston Transcript said this:

There are gems of thoughts, but the expression is not infrequently unintelligible

Dickinson only published a handful of poems during her lifetime.  To say they were flops would be putting it lightly.  These quotes are just scratching the surface.

But fast forward 135 years and today Emily Dickinson is seen as one of the greatest American poets of all time.

Poems which used to be panned for being peculiar, dippy and half-baked are now celebrated for their flair and genius.  And Dickinson’s off the wall, murky & erratic writing style is now seen as an early inspiration for modernist poetry.

Clearly the shift in opinion didn’t come from anything about the poems changing.  The poems Dickinson wrote 135 years ago are the same poems we’re reading today.

Instead, the shift came from the way the poems are seen.

Put simply, the world is projecting merit onto the poems rather than the poems projecting their merit into the world. 

Now here’s my claim:

What’s true for Dickinson’s poems is also true for your job, your finances, the people in your life, your daily routine and 1,001 other things which society has taught us are projecting their own qualities into the world and yet who’s qualities are actually created by how we view them.

Thing is, I wouldn’t be surprised if 135 years from now, Emily’s poems go out of fashion.  Perhaps even back to being seen as a load of twaddle.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few days, your dull or overwhelming job (for instance) might look completely different to you too – without anything changing about your job.

What might change, though, is the way you see your job.

Which prompts the question:

How can we change the way we see things?

Perhaps the obvious answer is by gathering knowledge and reading a few books, watching a couple of YouTube videos or milking the Google cow until it’s dry.

But this might not be the best strategy.

I’m not saying knowledge isn’t useful.  But knowledge by itself is not enough.

Dickinson hinted at this very idea when she wrote about "the facts but not the phosphorescence” in one of her letters.

It’s a very Dickinsonian way of saying that true understanding doesn’t come from facts, figures and words on a page.  And it doesn’t come from acquiring knowledge.

Instead, it comes from somewhere deeper.

It comes from insight.

This, in a nutshell, is what coaching is all about.

Coaching is a catalytic spark which ignites a clearer, more expansive & more liberating way of seeing the world.

If there are parts of life you’d like to see more clearly:

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com

That’s all for today.

 - Tom