Three days later, at 4:40 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, the Coach's phone rang. He was walking into the house, back from a quick trip to the store. The FaceTime call was from the Client. Quickly, the Coach entered the house and set the grocery bag on the kitchen counter while his thumb responded to the call. “Hey there!” he said, looking at the screen, “I didn't expect to hear from you so soon. How was your weekend?”

On the screen, the Client was grinning from ear to ear. “I did it. I really did it!”

The Coach asked if he had quit his job.

“No, not yet. Nothing like that! I have had the most amazing weekend – you're not going to believe it.” The Client was sitting at his kitchen table. The background of white walls behind him was a simple frame for the FaceTime conversation.

The Client relayed a story of how he recognized that the layers of thinking around this last-minute request were suffocating him. If infinite creativity were always available, he reasoned, why wasn't he able to tap into it? If he were wired and built to adapt and really operated inside of a universe that had his back, why couldn't he see it?

“Well, new ideas are always available, except for my thinking,” he said. “My concentration on the utter hassle of this redundant assignment was just filling me up with so much … anger! So much indignation! And when I found myself getting frustrated … ” his voice trailed off.

“What did you do?” the Coach interjected. He was putting some blueberries into the refrigerator while he held the phone in his left hand at arm's length.

The Client was on a roll. “I found myself. I found that I was more than my thinking, my feelings of being wronged, or inconvenienced, or hassled or whatever. We were going to the wedding – my wife agreed to drive, which was a huge help, and we were talking about my frustration in the car. My girls were in the back seat, and as I was going on and on about how I had already done this work before, my ten-year-old says, ‘Dad, they ask us to do the same problems over and over in math class. Why can't you just do the problem again?’”

“What did you make of that?” the Coach inquired.

“Well, I was creating this massive story of injustice and repetition and just all kinds of head trash and my kid just simplified the whole thing for me. I decided to drop my story.”

“How did you do that, exactly?” The Coach was really curious.

“I didn't do anything! It's what I stopped doing that made everything easier,” the Client explained. “Sometimes kids can see things in a way that is so much purer than the way we process stuff. They come from a much more natural state. Really just … honest, you know what I mean? And from this natural state, she was saying, just do the deal, Dad – do what your boss is asking you to do. I didn't try to control the story, or rewrite it, or manage my emotions around it. I was still pissed off that I was being robbed of my Sunday, but I saw that impulse for what it was: just a thought.”

The Client was on the move, headed through his own house, past pictures of his family. He was in his own living room now, and the Coach saw beautiful abstract artwork that bordered floating shelves behind the Client's head. He wondered if one or both of the Client's daughters would make an appearance.

“It's amazing what you can accomplish when you just drop the color commentary. Like dropping commas. Putting in more periods. Stuff gets simpler. The elaboration stops and the management of moods just seems to slip away! I mean, I wasn't in some Zen-like state of constant euphoria. But recognizing that I was having some thinking about the work allowed me to also recognize that those thoughts were just part of my experience. When I got okay with how I was feeling, when my experience of frustration wasn't something I needed to manage, fix, or control, I was able to do something really cool.”

“And what was that?” the Coach said.

“Take action! Lots and lots of action. I changed my … okay, I don't know how I did this, but I changed my relationship with my work. I don't even know if it was me that did it. It just kinda happened! My identity went from ‘angry frustrated guy in a dead-end job burning through the weekend’ to something different.” He paused to gather his next thought. “I was focused on the task at hand – almost like the work was coming through me. When I moved from taking things personally to just taking things as they came, one idea after the other … well, my work accelerated in a way that was absolutely crazy.”

“It's funny,” the Coach said, “Speeding up happens fast, when you start in neutral.” The Coach decided to walk out of the house and enter the back patio. A light rain was falling, but he was covered and dry. He sat down at one of the chairs where he had met with the client just a few days before. He perched the phone up against a flowerpot on a nearby table.

The Client jumped in, “I found some new ideas for investment,” he explained, offering details on how the company might acquire new capabilities, even when revenues were down. He did a detailed cash-flow analysis of one of the company's smaller competitors, showing how the acquisition would pay for itself. The net effect was a cash-flow purchase that allowed them to buy a missing technology, with a payback period of less than 21 months. He didn't know if the CEO would go for it, but also –he didn't care. He was, he said, detached from the outcome.

His life wasn't defined by the terms inside the report, the history of the company, or the projections of his team. His identity was separate from his work, he said, and he truly saw it. He saw that possibilities existed.

When he stopped thinking about how he was living, he really started to live.

To do.

To thrive.

He was looking toward the infinite, toward creativity, instead of trying to solve and correct himself, his career, his boss, or really, anything. His identity wasn't even a consideration; he was just a man in motion, moving through reports and riding the waves to see what showed up next.

When he stopped trying to correct anything, he said, he accessed everything. It was like playing piano, but the song only contained 10 notes – the 10 piano keys he could touch. Imagine thinking that you could only play the 10 keys underneath your fingers, as if your hands were fixed and your wrists were frozen and you couldn't even spread out your fingers or move your hands to access different keys! The Client laughed at the thought. Inside the laughter, he saw it: he could always access every key on the piano. Even though he only had 10 fingers, he could move around and touch any and every key – and there were 88 possibilities there. He liked that point of view. He zoomed out to see it.

He stopped trying to manage the future. As a result, he found himself in the present. Putting together information and projections and connections in ways that he hadn't experienced before, he felt flexibility inside of what originally seemed like the most backward, rigid, and redundant assignment he had ever encountered in his nearly 10 years with the firm.

He said he didn't care if things didn't turn out the way he planned or projected. His projections were impersonal, but supportive, like the universe around him. His report allowed for uncertainty, and so did he – without any discomfort whatsoever. The work he completed today wasn't an exercise in trying to fix the unfixable or change the minds of anyone who might read his report.

“Do the doable,” the Client said, “and I did.”

He realized that insights had come to him. He didn't have to manufacture them. Like clouds in the sky, those insights showed up, more easily than ever before. Like waves in the sea, the ideas came to him.

The Client noted that the request was still not a source of delight for him. But, while the request remained the same, he had changed his relationship with the ask. With the deadline. With the requirements.

His relationship to his work had changed. Transformed. Even though his job was still the same, the way he related to it made everything different. The Coach congratulated him on his exceptional progress and encouraged him to go further. “Say more,” he prodded.

He was A-OK with his reaction to his circumstance – with his humanity – mentioning how anybody would be angry if they had to deal with this kind of stupidity. Nobody likes to burn up a Sunday! But instead of fury, he was laughing. Laughing! Nothing had really changed, but he was different.

“What if it's not on me to solve a problem or think my way into some kind of solution,” he asked the Coach rhetorically. What if when he had an angry reaction or he felt frustrated or whatever, he didn't have to resolve that thought, or modify it in any way? “The idea that the universe might help me out really resonated,” he said. “And the wave came to me.”

The Client zoomed out. He let himself just be. Be angry. Be irritated. Be productive. Whatever. It was all okay with him. When he wasn't on his mind, he was doing what needed to be done. Instead of becoming a constant gardener for a made-up stream of consciousness, he tapped into a place of connection. And when he did, a new identity bloomed.

Suddenly, an adorable dark-haired girl of about six or seven years old came into frame, wrapping her arms around the Client's neck and pushing her face into his. Her hair was rumpled and straight and she had white barrettes on either side of her forehead so that she could see and be seen. She was wearing an evening gown, dressed as a character from Frozen. She mumbled something inaudible into his ear and the Client laughed.

He pulled back to look at her. He realized he was the guy who got a ton of stuff done on a Sunday afternoon, without giving up anything. Because, right here and right now, he had everything. He rubbed noses with his daughter and told her that he was on a call. So the little girl turned her face to the Coach and said hello. Then she darted out of frame before he could reply.

The Coach was smiling deeply at the little exchange inside the FaceTime call. He offered words of encouragement, to reinforce what the Client was already seeing. “What else can you invite, from the infinite, into your life?” he wondered.

“What, indeed,” the Client said, considering the possibilities. “I've already sent the report to the CEO,” he said, “and I just had to share the news with you. Now I'm going to take my family out to dinner, to celebrate!”

The Coach was pleased to see the Client's progress and told him so. Inspired by their work together, the Client felt certain that he could move forward with his resignation sometime in the next month or two. They agreed to speak later in the week, and the Coach congratulated him once again on his progress around the report.

Currently, that report was being used to sharpen an axe. Soon that axe would strike a fatal blow to the Client's career.

In 16 hours, he would be fired from his job.