Tipping the Scale

Relationships rarely end because of one argument. Yet that's usually the argument people remember.

People talk about the final conversation. The disagreement that pushed things over the edge. The comment that shouldn't have been made and the assumptions which were misplaced. The moment one person finally decides they had had enough. That, that is the last straw.

But relationships don't usually end because of a single conversation.

The final argument wasn't the cause. It was the moment the direction became impossible to ignore.

Long before that conversation, there had been smaller moments. Moments that may have seemed insignificant and easy to bypass. Until eventually they accumulated and were pointing only in one direction.

The day they eventually tipped the scale. The argument wasn't the reason. But it's the moment people usually notice - the dramatic event instead of all the moments leading up to it.

An orca breaching the water

The more I think about it, the more I realise we often misunderstand progress in exactly the same way. We look for the breakthrough. The turning point. That one big dramatic event that tells us what

we need to know. The day everything changes and the pain finally disappears.

The day we trust our body again and we finally feel confident.

When we finally know for certain that we're moving in the right direction.

Then we use that moment as proof that change has happened.

But what if change was already on the way? By all those moments gone before. What if those are the true measures of change?

A few days ago I was speaking to a client.

His carer asked him how he was getting on.

"Aye," he said, "it's no working."

A strange answer given that he was standing there putting on his own trousers for the first time in months. He wasn't being dishonest. ( Though that's not what the carer exclaimed in disbelief!)

He still had limitations and frustrations. There were still things he couldn't do.

But while he was still focusing on what remained, he had overlooked something important.

The scale had already started moving. Yet he was measuring the distance between where he was and the destination, not where he had been. Those measures and the way we look at them can tell very different stories.This is something I see quite often. The seemingly insignifcant moments don't get a real mention. There is no certainty in the uncertain. So we remain cautious instead.

Someone sleeps through the night for the first time in months or walks further than they expected.

Someone returns to an activity they had quietly given up on or stops organising every decision around discomfort, uncertainty or fear.

Yet when asked how things are going, the answer is often the same.

"It's still not right." And that may be so. But that is a final measure, it misses the progress in between.

The more interesting question is whether the balance of evidence is changing.

Most people measure progress by looking for certainty.

We want the scale to tip yesterday preferably and immediately on intervention of any kind, which is natural in the type of world we live in today. Everything is driven towards a lifestyle, career and environment that looks like the destination.

We want the dramatic moment that proves everything is different. Overnight success, something that either works or doesn't. Where there is no room for in between.

There however, is where all the magic happens and when we discount them, we miss them completely. We miss the accumulation that made the tipping point possible. All the moments gone before. One extra walk. A better night's sleep. One less hesitation. A moment that you didn't think about it or check it. They accumulate, one small piece of evidence at a time.

None of them look significant on their own. Until one day they do and suddenly people call it a breakthrough. Not because that's when the change happened but because that's when they finally noticed it.

I think this is why so many people become discouraged.

They measure themselves against where they want to be rather than where they have been.

They focus on what they still can't do rather than what they have quietly reclaimed.

They wait for the scale to tip while overlooking the fact that it is already moving.

So perhaps the question isn't:

"Is it fixed yet?"

Because direction tells us more than we think

. It tells us which way we're moving.

So perhaps a better question is:

"Which way am I leaning?"

"Tipping the Scale"- Podcast Episode 6 of Shift the Field available now Spotify and Apple. 🎙️✨