A home within a home.
If you’ve been here for a while, or at least in the last 3 months, you’ll know I moved into a new office in April. It’s in a fabulously old building with great history (one of those “if these walls could talk” vibes).
But as much as the walls were talking, they were pretty bland.
In my home office, just months before moving into the official office, I had hung some gorgeous wallpaper.
It was an oil painting of an Australian landscape. And not postcard Australia, like Uluru or the reef.
This is of the countryside where I grew up. The limestone plains around Canberra.
A certain sparseness, a blueness, a brownness. A landscape I love deeply and miss daily.
The moment I saw it, I knew. I hired a talented human with an impressively large gluing machine, and a day later, there it was.
(If you joined me on any of The Year of the Coaching Habit sessions earlier this year, you would have seen it.)
But then … I moved.
And here I sit in a new office with fifteen-foot ceilings, original wood, and extraordinary light. I’ve been working here for three months, and I love it.
Except …
Every day I’d look up at that standard-issue white wall and think about the wallpaper I’d left behind at home.
I was so close to that experiment fully working. But I knew this was a solvable problem.
So as I write this, I’ve just said goodbye to the talented human with his fancy machine who just hung the same wallpaper in my new studio.
I now work with one foot in Toronto, my home, and one foot in Australia, my home.
There’s a lesson here, I promise
There’s a question in The Coaching Habit that is delightfully powerful, but a sneaky one to ask — of yourself most of all.
What do you want?
Not what would be nice or what seems reasonable. What do you actually want?
It’s the Foundation to a good coaching habit, and yet it took me years to answer honestly about something as small as a wall.
But once I’d realized I wanted to be near the Australian landscape, the next question got easy.
What needs to be true to get it? In my case, the answer was a man named Chris and his gluing machine.
You don’t get everything you want. You likely learned that a long time ago.
But you can’t get much of anything until you’ve named it.
Naming the want is what turns a vague ache into a foundation you can act from.
