We are all familiar with the saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.” Sometimes it’s very easy to overlook the gems hidden inside the challenges we face. In other words, dismissing things that seem unwanted can mean we miss those gems.

An experience with my email provider this morning brought this home to me, and while this may seem a bit off-topic for us, please bear with me for just a few minutes.

Lately I have found my email to be unusually unreliable. I send messages that don’t arrive. Messages sent to me are lost on a regular basis. For me, this is especially troublesome, as I do much of my communication with clients via email. It has caused a number of unnecessary issues.

After spending an hour with a technical support person for my email provider, I discovered that they had re-set my SPAM filter settings, without my knowledge, and I subsequently located many of the missing emails.

These types of things happen, especially in an automated world. After much explaining, experimenting and resetting of email preferences, the issue was FINALLY resolved.

What this led me to, though, is perhaps pertinent to all of us in pursuit of our own ambitions.

This email issue originated when someone(s) said, “Please protect me . . . from unwanted messages in my inbox.” This seems a reasonable request. Or is it?

This simple request spawned an entire industry devoted to creating filters and algorhythms designed to discard the “unwanted” and make sure that I only get messages I want (my gems).

Sounds good, until you get to the next question: how does any computer program know what I want or don’t want? For that matter, how does anyone else on the planet know what I want? They don’t. And thus, the real issue behind my frustration emerged.

When we give someone else permission to protect us from something unwanted, we also give them the power to decide not only how they will protect us, but also what constitutes ‘unwanted.’

In essence, we are giving someone else the power to decide what’s “good for us” - and we trust that they know what our “gems” are.  The reality is, though, that no one else can ever know what you want or don’t want. At best, they are guessing at what most people consider unwanted.

We have given up our freedom to choose, because we no longer “know” or have access to ALL of our choices.
(Just as an aside, like everything we decide to “fight against,” the object of our resistance only gets stronger, more determined, and more prevalent.)

So here’s where this roundabout train of thought gets really relevant.

We each have created our own “spam filters” in our un-conscious mind, and turned over to them the power to discard “messages” that look like spam without our noticing them. We have, over the course of many years, grouped and categorized large blocks of things, and ideas, that we just dismiss without looking at them.

Everyday, we are presented with opportunities to see things that we have never seen before or that are commonplace to us - in new ways.  And, because we have finely tuned our internal spam mechanism to “hide” things from us that do not support our chosen direction and priorities, there are a number of things that are filtered and stored in our brains without us ever consciously noticing them!  And every single one of those things might contain the gem we are looking for, hoping for and asking for.

Perhaps it’s time to take a new look at some of the things we file away without examination. Set an intention that you will notice things that will give you insight and new perspectives that will serve you in making the most of the issues you are facing today. Trust that what you need is right in front of you and that you will notice when it shows up.

Then, when you notice something, take a good look to see if there is a “baby” in there that is worth nurturing into a full blown gem of a GREAT IDEA!

Just Imagine That!