What a single dot and our life have in common

If you have a piece of paper grab it, and place a single small dot anywhere on the paper, and look at the page. What do you notice?

I asked some members of my team to share their thoughts. The answers ranged from black dot, dot on a piece of paper, ink spot and oil spill. How does that compare to what you noticed?

This isn’t a puzzle, or a cryptic riddle. It’s a quick reflective exercise to understand how and what people focus on.

Many people become fixated on the dot. Even though it is only about 1% of the page, they interrogate it's colour, size, position on the page, what it looks like, represents, and reminds them of. For some people, this bears striking similarity to everyday things that occur in their lives. Time spent examining the small stuff in minute detail until tunnel vision takes over and everything they live, breath and talk about becomes relative to the dot.

When this happens, we can become preoccupied and lose sight of what is important to us.

But what if we also considered the blank space, that abundance of white that we can see on the page??

If we shift our focus from the dot to the rest of the page, suddenly an expanse of white space is created. What does this space mean to you?

Some may consider this space to be representative of opportunity, others creativity, change or capacity for growth. The ability to let go and stop focusing on the dot, and instead start to imagine the bigger picture is a simple way to give yourself permission to consider other alternatives.

Are you ready to let go and start considering how you might use the rest of your page?