The Desert of Arizona
An Hour Before Sunset 60 Degrees
Today we have a rare evening edition of the Client Letter…
These few moments between day and dusk remind me of the shaman I studied with for years and how she would talk a lot about liminal spaces.
Liminal spaces are “neither here nor there.” They are by definition “in between.” They are at the threshold.
In the shamanic world, these liminal spaces are the boundaries between the seen and the unseen. These are places with great mystery and power.
But we have liminal spaces in the business world too. And bizarrely enough, there’s a lot of potential in these as well.
One example of this is when an “outsider” enters into an industry without all of the preconceptions about how things are SUPPOSED to go. When people like this show up, you tend to see what we call innovation.
In reality, it’s simply taking ideas from one place and applying them to another.
But it’s a liminal space. The magic is created on that line between the outsider’s view of things and the “insider’s view of things.” On that boundary you can do some pretty cool things.
This is why “getting away” from your business is so powerful. Because to leave your business, even for the day or the weekend, you cross over this liminal space – the threshold between you being IN your business and then outside of it.
Then, when you come back from your time away, you cross over that same threshold again.
This is when you can SEE things that were invisible to you before.
Start looking for these places, great ideas come when you are in them.