Welcome back to Practicing Human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Muscarra, and today's podcast is going to be an encouragement to think bigger

and to use seemingly disruptive experiences as a way to alchemize positive change and transformation.

More to come on all of that in a moment but first let's settle in with the sound of the bells.

So as I've been mentioning, these recent episodes are tailored more toward what's happening at the time of recording, which is COVID-19.

It feels almost impossible to talk about anything other than this because it is so in our lives right now.

If you are listening at a different time, you can filter whatever I'm saying through the lens of just anything that might be difficult that you might experience.

And with all of that said, this particular episode, if you're experiencing something very difficult right now, recent lost pain, processing some really significant disruption in your life that requires just space for grieving, this might not be the episode for you.

I think there's a fine line between making space for our experience to process and to integrate and starting to look at the opportunity that can come out of this experience and what the positive might be, that sort of mental reframing.

So use your best judgment as to where you might be at in this process because this is going to be more about the positive orientation and what opportunity there might be.

One thing I'm observing for many people, including myself, is that with these big disruptions in the way we're all living right now, shelter in place, not being able to interact with our work in the same way, going through parenting in a completely different way, relating in a completely different way in partnership, being single in a completely different way.

All of this is requiring substituting our normal way of doing something with new strategies, new maps and new ways of thinking.

And what I'm observing in others and also deeply in myself is this sense that this substitute won't be as good as the normal thing, the usual thing.

And at best, it might be as good. We might find a substitute that allows us to function in a way that we did before to do our work, maybe in a similar way, accomplish tasks in a similar way, make the same amount of money we were doing before, figure out how to parent in a way that feels familiar and is hopefully as successful as before.

It all seems to be about either an acceptance that we're not going to be functioning at the level we were before, or the best we could is to find substitutes that allow us to function at that level.

And the reason this podcast episode is titled Think Bigger is because I do want to encourage you, and this is what I've been doing for myself, to ask what if, instead of just getting back to what it was like before, this experience could help me create something even better.

So I'll give you an example. For me, I'm having to start to reimagine what my different offerings can look like from my usual keynotes to organization school systems to my public events and retreats.

And although nothing has been changed yet, I am thinking about the future, and if that does need to change what that will look like.

And the early thinking of it will be like, all right, well, maybe this will move this to be an online event, and we won't get as many people.

It'll be a smaller thing, and maybe I'll make a fraction of the amount that I might have made for this in-person event.

And so the kind of thinking was already coming from a place of a loss. The event isn't going to be as good. No way we could get more people to come to something like this.

It's definitely going to be a financial loss, it's going to hurt the business, and maybe we could get to a fraction of that.

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