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A powerful perspective shift.
On Monday, we talked about how to shift from judgment to curiosity as a strategy for building your internal coach. Today, we’ll continue by focusing on another skill—creating psychological distance.
Creating psychological distance is a brilliant complement to your curiosity practice—it’s like adding a zoom-out lens to your leadership toolkit. When you’re deeply embedded in a problem, your perspective naturally narrows to immediate concerns and familiar solutions. But when you step back and imagine coaching a colleague through the exact same challenge, you access a completely different quality of thinking.
This shift to a coaching perspective works because it removes the emotional charge and self-judgment that often cloud our problem-solving. When it’s your problem, you’re dealing with your ego, your fears, and your history with similar situations. But when you’re mentally coaching someone else, you naturally become more objective, creative, and strategic. You ask better questions, see more options, and offer more balanced perspectives.
The coaching perspective also taps into wisdom you already possess but might not access when you’re stressed. Think about it—you probably give excellent advice to colleagues facing challenges. This practice helps you to give that same quality of guidance to yourself.
A simple way to implement this: When facing a challenge, literally ask yourself, “If [name a colleague you respect] came to me with this exact situation, what would I tell them?” Then listen to your own advice. You can use Sophia to further help you to think through the advice you’d offer a colleague.
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