A Client’s Perspective
A client once told me that he deeply regretted how he spent his college years. He had studied diligently and received an excellent education. He had focused so much on academics, however, that he missed what he called “the real college experience,” the socializing and camaraderie. When we spoke, he had people in his life describing their college years as the best years of their lives, the years of new independence without the crushing responsibility of adulthood, years where they grew into the people he knew. My client felt that he had wasted the opportunity to grow into a full person that, as he saw it, only college provides.
Fear of Missing Out
The Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is a popular term. For some, FOMO is the fear of missing out on the fun of a gathering with friends: “I should go to that party, even though I’m tired, because I’ll regret it if I don’t.” FOMO can be bigger, fearing missed opportunities for advancement at work: “I need to carve out time for these meetings, because I might miss advancement opportunities when things start moving.” FOMO is “I missed an opportunity.”
Beyond an opportunity
Coaching often reveals something behind FOMO, something deeper and more distressing. Where FOMO might be “I missed an opportunity,” the deeper fear is, “I missed the opportunity. I missed that one opportunity that would have set my life right.” This deeper fear shows up frequently in the work of coaching. “If I had gone to college, if I had studied this instead of that, if I had asked her out… and because I didn’t, there is no recovery – I missed the chance at happiness.” A striking number of us carry the belief that there is one right way to go and one right time to take it, and if we miss it, we have missed out on life.
Coaching beyond FOMO
Coaching turns away from the idea that the past locks the present and future into something immutable. We can learn from the past, and often benefit greatly by reflecting on what we have done and what we wish we had done differently. Beyond learning from it, the past doesn’t have to constrain what’s possible now. The idea of, “If I could go back, I would do it differently,” is not an idea that makes sense in coaching. Instead, we take the past moments and choices that we call “mistakes” and recognize them as nothing more or less than opportunities: rather than going back to fix, we begin now, in the present, to change. I received my coach training through iPEC, and they have a list of 33 Foundation Principles. One principle that consistently challenged us as students – and gets mentioned most often – fundamentally reframes our relationship with past choices. The Principle: “It’s impossible to make a mistake.” You might reply, as many of us did as students, “Ridiculous! I’ve made lots of mistakes!” And that’s true, but only if we leave them alone as mistakes. There is no such thing as a waste of time, a misstep, or a mistake so long as we take the lessons of those events and then lay them to rest. As an aside, it is not necessary to learn from our mistakes in the moment. If you are still burdened by a mistake from 20 years ago, you can use that today. So long as we treat our mistakes as painful memories, rather than drawing out the good and then moving on, they are mistakes. In coaching, we turn mistakes into opportunities.
So many of us carry this fear behind FOMO, the fear, not of a lost opportunity, but of the lost opportunity. The diligent worker who believes that a missed promotion five years ago closed the door on rising to a leadership position. The entrepreneur who believes the one chance to sustain a business was in an old market. There is no such thing as missing the opportunity, because we are not bound to single moments that we either take and thrive or miss and fail. Regardless of how many “mistakes” you hold in your memory, coaching is about now, and now is that opportunity.
If this resonates (whether you agree or not), I would love to hear your thoughts. What ‘missed opportunity’ are you still carrying? What would change if you saw it as preparation instead of failure?
