The outrageous door

You can't see what's on the other side. That's the whole point.

Hello fellow traveller,

Six years ago I couldn't swim.

I decided I wanted to swim from island to island in Greece. When I told people, most of them looked at me the way you'd look at someone who'd announced they were going to walk to the moon. Fair enough. I was 53 and I couldn't do a length. In fact not a stroke. I'd just sink.

I called it an audacious goal at the time. Then I changed it to outrageous, and based on what I've seen in myself and with clients I've toyed with ludicrous. I've since realised I was toying with the wrong word.

It wasn't a goal. A goal is a destination. You can see it from where you're standing, you plot a line towards it, you get there or you don't. What I'd actually done was open a door. And the thing about a door is you can't see what's on the other side of it until you walk through.

Here's what was on the other side of learning to swim.

Sleeping on top of mountains. Wild expeditions in the Lakes and Scottish Highlands, pack-rafting 21km down the River Wey with two friends, getting the train there and back from London, swimming in the river along the way. Hammocks in trees in Ibiza with clients. Frozen lakes. And two weeks ago, five days at a wellness festival that I'd put among the most beautiful experiences of my life, singing and chanting with hundreds of strangers under an eclipse.

None of that was the plan. There was no plan. I wanted to swim in the sea. Everything else came through the door that opened when I stepped through the first one.

The goal is just the handle

We're taught to set goals we can see. Specific, measurable, realistic. And there's a place for that. But the most alive I've ever felt has never come from hitting a target I could picture in advance. It's come from stepping through a door and discovering a room I didn't know existed.

The outrageous part isn't the size of the goal. It's the willingness to open a door when you have no idea what's behind it, and being present enough to recognise what's offered up on the other side.

Because here's what I've learned. Once you've stepped through, it stops being about the goal at all. The goal was never the point. It was just the handle. What matters after that is staying present enough to notice the opportunities as they appear, and to keep moving, keep growing, keep saying yes to the next thing that intuitively feels right even if it makes you initially uncomfortable. That's just growing pains.

And when you're connected to that space, the one made of growth and joy and connection, you have no reason to stop. Why would you? It's cumulative. Each door opens onto the next. You're not chasing anything. You're just following what lights you up, and it keeps giving you more.

I'm on a new door right now. I've started working with a voice coach, learning to sing, to tone, to let my breath carry sound. One session in and I sang in public for the first time in my life, with my twin brother, on our 60th birthday. Two sessions in and I was singing my heart out at the festival, something I never would have dreamt of doing. It turns out that voice activation is about allowing your breath to carry and express your emotions rather than forcing a performance. I have no idea where this one leads. That's exactly why I opened it.

You don't need to see the whole room. You just need to turn one handle.

What most of us do instead

We negotiate. We take the outrageous thing and we shrink it down to something sensible, something we're fairly sure we can manage, something that won't embarrass us if it doesn't work out. We trade the door for a target. And targets, however well we hit them, rarely surprise us. That's the problem. Nothing on the other side of a target you could already see is going to change your life.

The doors change your life. Precisely because you can't see through them.

So here's the question I've been sitting with, and I'll leave it with you.

What's the door you keep walking past because you can't see what's on the other side?

Best,
Hugh

You've lived many versions of yourself in this lifetime. And there are many more still to come.

If something in this stirred a door you've been meaning to open, that's often where the good work starts. It's the kind of thing we'd explore together in a conversation. Let’s chat.

P.S. When I said I'd swim between islands in Greece, one of the people who heard me say it eventually became a client, then a friend, and two weeks ago flew over from Ibiza to stand next to me at that festival. I didn't swim to meet him. I just opened the door.