Doing It Right

Recently I was playing with my four-year-old niece. She was trying to unscrew the top from a plastic container.  She twisted the top for a few seconds, then turned to me and asked “Am I doing it right?”

Am I doing it right?

It’s easy to spend a lifetime concerned with variations on this question.

• Am I doing this right?
• Is this the right answer?
• What if I do it wrong?
• What will others think of this?

The questions are understandable.  Unfortunately, they frame the world into right and wrong, good and bad.  And life is much more complex than that.  For most endeavors there are many paths to success.  Thinking in terms of right and wrong tends to limit our creativity and steer us toward the most popular paths.

Instead of ‘am I doing this right?’, how about one of these?

• Is this working?
• Is this producing the outcome I want?
• Is this taking me closer to my goal, or farther away?
• What might work even better?

And if someone asks you the question "am I doing this right?", perhaps a useful response is "Hmm...I'm not sure.  What do you think?  Is it working?"