my mantra for life, fitness and work

I have a mantra that’s become my go-to phrase whenever I’m confronted with a problem these days.

The problem could be anything. An issue in my personal life. In my training. In my career planning. In conversations with clients. Regardless of context, it’s applicable to all of them.

Here’s the mantra:

Zoom Out.

That’s it.

Have you ever been playing around on Google Earth or Maps, looking at your city or a travel destination, and decide you want to zoom out to see the bigger picture?

You click the minus button, and all of a sudden you’re in a virtual jet taking off from the earth’s surface, into the stratosphere.

It’s pretty cool if you ask me (at least the kid in me still thinks so). Going from such a granular, detailed view of a few streets, to suddenly seeing your entire state, the entire country, then the whole globe slowly spinning in front of you in a matter of seconds.

It’s a significant perspective shift, and almost without fail, every time I do one of these “Zoom Outs” on a map, I’ll see something I didn’t realize before, or learn something new. “Dang—New Hampshire is that far north of NYC? I always pictured them being closer” (that’s the ignorant West Coaster in me). Or “Wow I didn’t realize we were so close to __ place.”

Whatever the realization might be, the act of zooming out automatically brings new things into focus. It creates a broader understanding of surrounding geography, context and relationships.

The same applies to most problems we encounter. I’ll give you some examples.

The other day I was feeling stagnant. Stuck in a rut and struggling with thoughts about where I’m at and where I’m going to end up in the next few years.

I felt the feels, but then instead of wallowing in them, I zoomed out.

I looked back at the same day from a year ago, and from 3 years ago, and realized how far I’d come. I remembered that I’d had days of feeling stagnant in those years, but I moved through them and kept making progress. I saw my successes and the actions I’d taken a year ago to get to where I am now, and those thoughts galvanized me into reflection on my current inputs and actions. Long story short, I wound up pulling myself out of the pit of stagnancy mindset, and created some tangible action items to keep moving forward.

The perspective shift from zooming out was the antidote.

Here’s another example. I was talking with a client about an increase in knee pain she’d had after going to a group fitness class. She was fixated on the pain and couldn’t understand why she was experiencing it when she had done the classes months ago without pain, and had been feeling good in the week leading up to the class.

I encouraged her to zoom out, and together we did an audit of the stress factors and context surrounding her class experience. We discovered that there were a number of relevant factors that probably contributed to her experiencing pain: poor sleep quality, nutrition, as well as a significant mismatch between her current volume of weekly training and the amount of knee-intensive exercise volume she’d done during the group class. We created a plan to work on the non-exercise factors, and then outlined a progression to bridge the gap between current training and the amount of capacity required to successfully complete a class.

Once again, zooming out provided key details that offered both data and a solution.

“Zoom out” isn’t a quick fix by any stretch. And it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. It’s just a helpful mantra that prompts a change of perspective, which can often be just what’s needed if we tend to get overly wrapped up in the details and emotions of what’s in front of us.

The next time you run into a problem and you can’t seem to find a solution, try zooming out in some capacity. You might be surprised by what you find.