Your path is a series of opportunities to help you accomplish your goal

One of my friends is a ropes course designer.

Andy combines his passion for outdoor adventure and degree in landscape architecture to help students and corporate teams navigate their way through breathtaking and challenging adventures.

One piece of advice he always gives groups during orientation is, don’t view this course as a series of obstacles standing in your way, view it as a series of opportunities to help you accomplish your goal.

Man, isn’t that wonderful advice for life in general?

As we progress through the jungle of existence, each of us should do the same. We should expand our field of vision to selfishly take advantage of our circumstances whenever possible. Not expecting things to be any easier than they already are, but holding intentions that support our overall experience of prosperity and abundance and positivity.

We try to optimize our inner experience, aka, the only element we have control over. And should some external outcome follow suit, awesome. Or if it doesn’t, that’s okay too.

This tool is called the opportunity agenda, which is the inherent enterprise to notice and manufacture creative opportunities, apply force and propel them into interesting directions.

Do you know anybody like that? Someone who always seems to sniff out the good luck in their circumstances?

Everyone knows at least one person like this.

But their fortune is not magic, it’s a skill you can learn. It’s a muscle you can strengthen. Anyone can develop a more generative posture based on possibility.

A helpful first step is to practice noticing spikes in opportunity. Literally keep a list on your phone, which you’re already looking at seventy time a day anyway. Take time to write down all of the quiet signs and chance opportunities during the day that prove to you the universe is on your side and trying to bless you.

Think of it as a gratitude list, but for things that haven’t happened yet. See what happens.

Now, you can call it confirmation bias, call it seeing what you want to see. But hell, if tricking yourself into opportunities is wrong, then I don’t want to be right. Look a little deeper to find the gift in your experiences. You will realize there’s always something with a ribbon wrapped around it.

Sure, it sounds saccharine and mushy and unverified by science. But what’s the alternative? Doesn’t it sound less stressful and more fulfilling than viewing everything as a course of obstacles standing in your way?

That seems exhausting.

People who use their opportunity agenda as a legitimate tool for materially improving their lives are almost certainly more prolific than the rest, and also less tired. They create more because they see more, they see more because they notice more, and they notice more because they trust more.

Plus they have a lot more fun swinging from tree to tree.

What if you viewed your path as a series of opportunities to help you accomplish your goal?