You’re in a box

So am I. So are most of the people either of us knows.

The box is the narrative people have on us. The narrative is the easy story that allows people to place us in a tidy category. “She’s a great technician but not good with people.” “He’s a lot of fun, but not a serious thinkeMuch as we may dislike being put in a box, we do the same to others. Even people we care about. In a world of challenged attention spans, easy generalizations tend to trump nuanced understanding of most anything, including people.

The bigger problem is that the narrative likely has just enough truth to silence dispute. We may offer half-hearted clarifications, but mostly we simmer at how little we are understood.

Professional advisors, especially insurance advisors, tend to get put in the box of whatever products and services they are trying to sell and treated accordingly.

The irony, however, is that few people possess an intuitive understanding of what specific advisors actually do. It is the advisors themselves that establish the narrative.

What if we replaced the tired admonition to “think outside the box” with “climb out of the box?”

What could we achieve by breaking out of the limiting narrative and say; “To hell with anyone who doesn’t agree”?