What Does It Mean To Stand On The Threshold?
- [in singular] a point of entry or beginning: she was on the threshold of a dazzling career.
Things changed while we were all in lockdown. Many congregations and organizations have found that emerging from the pandemic means they are emerging into sustained changes and continued demands for further change. This is not easy for those who imagined “going back” to “normal.”
We have learned that the congregations and organizations that thrived during COVID were the ones that were, among other things, innovative and nimble. They both saw and exercised out-of-the-box thinking and made choices based on those visions. This approach to change remains crucial for viability and growth in this post-pandemic (endemic) world.
When I train professional coaches, I find myself engaged in delivering the same messages repeatedly, because they are not always innate to our cultural conditioning: “Coach to the possibility (not to the problem);” “Coach the who (and the what will take care of itself)”
Whether organization or individual, we, as global inhabitants, are faced with “threshold” choices every day, especially as we learn to embrace the demands for change this “new world” living calls us to recognize. What does it look like to intentionally seek the unexpected, the out-of-the-box, the innovative, the formerly unthinkable? What must we let go of in order to see the choices we have?
In our work it is common to be called in to work with an entity that is telling itself it has more limitations than it does, far fewer options for next steps or mission, and/or limited options for future expressions of new developments, vitality, or viability. In these circumstances, our first goal is to help the other(s) to look up and forward, instead of down, inward, and back; to assess what is possible – to take a threshold approach. A question we ask is, “What have you told yourself is not possible?” or “What idea or concept have you repeatedly dismissed?”
To be aware of possibility in the moment leads to innovative thought, to varieties of actions and outcomes that have often been dismissed as fanciful. Having a thought partner who will join you on the threshold, helps you see new things, or familiar scenarios in new ways, and chart a new way of thinking and being in the world, growing into a future that would not have existed without stretching and without letting go.
Let us stand on the threshold together and see where you can go!
“Many times today I will cross over a threshold.
I hope I will catch a few of those times.
I need to remember that my life is, in fact,
a continuous series of thresholds:
from one moment to the next,
from one thought to the next,
from one action to the next.”
–Gunilla Norris, First Stanza of Crossing the Threshold, Being Home, pg.14
