It seems everywhere I turn now I see the word pivot. It's like the “Red Car Syndrome.” You notice one on the highway and the next thing you know you see them everywhere. I’ve noticed “pivot,” and with good reason. The global pandemic has caused so much upheaval and disorientation that people feel, and often fear, the necessity to address the moment in their business or career plans, to pivot from what feels like a raging sea towards the certainty of calmer waters.
Pivoting seems to be going on everywhere in everything. It’s the expression of the need to meet the moment, to change, move, shift, to experience something different, safer, known, familiar, to get a solution, get a handle on it all, or simply do something to survive.
Here’s Miriam Webster’s first definition: a shaft or pin on which something turns.
In turning the word over, one thing that's occurred to me is that one needs to know where they're pivoting from. Too often people don't have a grounded sense of where their “from” is. So they wildly flail around thinking that they need to do something, and they don't know what, because their minds are so stressed and distracted that they are the least able to know anything.
So what is it that you need to know?
You need to know where your experience is coming from. From inside where the pivot emanates, from the core, nowhere else.
Once you understand something about that you can have easy access to clarity of mind to know how to proceed, and the direction to pivot to best serve you. Otherwise, you could be pivoting into a headwind, thrashing around, dangling from the yardarm.
But if you know the design of your craft, how the pin works from the core, your pivot can be a seamless motion to tack in a favorable direction, or it might simply be having the sure knowledge to wait till the wind picks up.
So get curious about where you’re pivoting from. In a more settled state of mind clarity will appear, the horizon will come into focus and your destination and next move will become crystal clear.
Artwork: Brown Sail, Wing on Wing, Nassau by Georgia O'Keeffe