“If you’re in the desert, it doesn’t matter how much you want sushi — you need to look somewhere else. What I’m really good at is ordering,” my savvy real estate agent Sherine Beltran said. She grew up global hopping for her parents’ work, and all the variations of culture and location seem to have imbued her with the ability to find an opening in solid rock. She’s the kind of person who always finds an answer in impossible situations. The off-hand comment piqued my interest as I pondered the meaning. I realized it meant much more than a decent dinner.
We get locked into ideas about the way we want life to look and how we want our solutions to arrive. We want our employees to excel in their job description and be the person we thought they could be in the interview. We want our spouse to become a version of themselves that a fairy godmother couldn’t deliver with the most powerful magic spellbook. We want fairness to be delivered through instant karma that doesn’t involve us altering course or taking accountability for our contributions to the problems. We want change on our terms and solutions to fit into our current perceptions of what good means. We want really good, fresh, amazing sushi delivered in the landlocked desert instead of drinking the prickly pear lemonade and noshing on decadent stuffed dates.
Release the “should”
The first step in making a good order is to release the idea that what is available should be different. If you find yourself complaining that any situation or person “shouldn’t” be that way, then you are blocked. You cannot find solutions in the “land of should”. You’ll need to transport yourself back to reality. While there can be a lot of fear that accepting reality and how things are currently is a form of giving up and allowing the malaise of life to descend into unadjudicated complacency, it actually accomplishes the opposite. Acceptance of what is presently happening is the path to change. I call it reality-based decision-making. You’re not making decisions based on wishful thinking. You accept what is present, and that is where the magic begins.
Ask a new question
My daughter loves to use AI to take a picture of what is in the refrigerator and tell us what we could make. It comes up with some audacious dish ideas most of the time, but every once in a while, we get a hit that results in a delicious dinner. Instead of staring into the fridge and wishing I’d picked up a few other items at the store, we’re asking the question, “What could we make with what is here?” We have to embrace the irony that wishing for “what was” leaves us stuck, while accepting “what is” allows us to see brilliant new ideas and solutions. Rethinking how to use what is available is where our answer resides and where we can even find new material with which to work. The question becomes, “What is the optimal thing to order here?” Through acceptance of what is available now, fresh creative solutions arise. The resistance of what should be dissolves into what can be. What can be isn’t a sellout —it is a transformative way to arrange the pieces.
Being “good at ordering” means letting go of the way you wished it could be or the way you wanted it to be and allowing yourself to see and take the best of what is available. When you filter for the answer, not only will you find a path forward, but you’ll get something far better.
