Stay & Thrive, or Leave & Thrive?

I collect powerful questions. Here’s one of my favorites:

“Do you want to stay and thrive, or leave and thrive?”

Thriving is not in question. Rather, in which context will you choose to thrive?

Naturally, if we’re feeling powerless, this question is highly irritating.

So we have to craft the path towards knowing which door to walk through.

Notice, if we stay and thrive, there is still a change, still a threshold. The door opens to a new perspective and way of being.

To move toward that threshold, first unpack the circumstances barring the way to thriving with things exactly as they are.

Backtrack & Unpack

In a systemic coaching context, we explore strengths, skills, and agency. We discuss costs, benefits, dynamics, and patterns. We name fears, limiting beliefs, and loyalties.

Once we look at the field in totality, we know more about our place within it.

Then we can receive and make real use of a potent question like, “given everything you’ve considered, will you stay and thrive, or leave and thrive?”

Beyond the door of “Stay & Thrive”

There are all kinds of times that people stay in situations that are structurally or functionally crummy. We can put up with a lot if we need to. We might be holding personal circumstances from inadequate housing to deeply unsatisfying relationships.

Many people struggle to cope with workplaces that are chaotic or even exploitative. Others talk with me about their desire to live in a country with humane infrastructure and policies. Finances, illnesses, and/or other complex commitments are some of the top reasons people stay when they’d truly rather not. Sometimes they’ve simply outgrown the circumstances.

When we consider the same situation from the perspective of CHOOSING to stay and thrive, we activate agency. Agency ignites a very different part of our intelligence. And we look in different directions, that lead to different outcomes.

For example, wrapping up a year-long systemic executive coaching engagement, a client reflected, “Now I accept that my workplace is a chaotic mess, but I no longer let that define my value or my worth.”

At a different scale, and yet holding the same principles, when we choose to stay in this nation, not by default but by active choice, we have a new set of questions to consider. I’m both curious and active in the inquiry: as old systems crumble, what shall we co-create anew?

When we choose to stay and thrive, we better integrate “what is,” be it the chaos of a relationship or a news cycle. We can and must choose where to put our time, attention, strength, and direct action.

Beyond the door of “Leave & Thrive”

Other times we know we must exit the whole deal.

Leaving a broken home, deeply unsatisfying relationship, or chaotic workplace is a step into the unknown. That’s often both liberating and scary.

Once considered through the lenses of conscious choice, agency, and the magnetic attraction of truly thriving, the risk involved with such a leap has a very different intensity.Preparing to turn towards that potential we find new and different potent questions.

Who would you be without this limiting situation?

What happens in your body when you sense into that?

What kind of thoughts and actions activate resonance with that?

And onward we go.

Powerful questions are a golden cord through and out of any maze. I love the process of tracking and tracing the answers.

Wherever they lead, there we are. May we thrive.

fire and grace,

Amelia