What else could be true? The Question That Opens Your Focus and Your Energy

Watch a child trying to build a tower. It topples. The child builds again. It topples again. And the child doesn't weep over its failure or doubt its identity as a master builder. It simply turns over the next block — maybe there's a treasure underneath.

This stance has a name: openness. The child enters the situation without already knowing how it will turn out. It hasn't yet learned that certain things "don't work." And that's exactly why it's astonishingly resilient. It only ever sees the next step — never the whole verdict on itself.

We don't lose this stance through a single event. We slowly train ourselves out of it.

How we train ourselves out of the open

With every experience, every disappointment, every time something went wrong, a belief forms. That won't work anyway. Conversations like that always end the same. I already know how this turns out. Caution becomes bias. And bias feels like experience, like maturity, like realism.

But it carries a price hardly anyone accounts for. Whoever judges before acting usually judges downward. The next meeting with that employee? Pointless anyway. The difficult decision? Going to be unpleasant no matter what. The moment that verdict lands, we're in an avoidance loop. We still do the thing — but against an inner resistance we created ourselves.

And that's not just a question of mood. It's a question of energy.

Bias costs, openness saves

Approaching something from a biased, negative state costs a disproportionate amount of strength. You're working against the headwind of your own expectation. You're hitting the gas with the brake on.

And it doesn't just cost more energy — it also takes something from you: your creativity. When the nervous system runs in a quiet stress pattern because a belief is sounding the alarm, your focus narrows. Biologically, that makes sense: under threat you're not supposed to get playful — you're supposed to act or flee. But the next meeting is not a threat. And in that narrowed state, the very door through which solutions come closes shut.

Openness, then, is not a nice character trait. It's energetically efficient. An open state costs less, lasts longer, and admits solutions a narrowed one can't even see.

Why you can't "decide" to be open

Here lies the point where most advice fails. It says: just be more open, think more positively, go in without prejudice. As if it were a matter of willpower.

It isn't. As long as your body is in fight-flight-freeze mode, you can't think your way into openness. The inner Judge — the voice that has already reached a verdict — is louder than any good intention. You can't get at it through the head as long as the nervous system isn't regulated.

That's why the work doesn't start with rethinking, but with regulating. Before you work on a stressful problem, before you make a difficult decision, before you escalate something: come back into a calm bodily state first. A few conscious breaths, a sense of where the tension sits, a moment in which the system grasps that there's no real danger. Only then is the ground ready. Only then can you even ask the question that opens everything.

The question that widens your focus

The question is plain, almost inconspicuous — and that's exactly what makes it strong: What else could be true?

It does something specific. It takes away the inner Judge's monopoly. It doesn't claim the verdict is wrong — it just makes room beside it. Maybe the meeting does lead somewhere. Maybe the employee's resistance isn't resistance at all, but a question they don't dare to ask. Maybe the uncomfortable decision is the beginning of something you can't see yet.

A second question often goes even deeper: What don't I know? It reminds you that your verdict always rests on incomplete data — and that the unknown holds not only risk, but also the treasure under the next stone.

Neither question is a trick for talking yourself into a prettier story. They are tools for switching from a narrowed focus into an open one. And out of that open focus, quite often, comes exactly the creative idea you searched for in vain while shut down — sometimes even the whole solution.

Back to the child's stance

The child with the tower doesn't have better technique than you. It just has fewer verdicts in the way. It recovers faster because its system hasn't yet learned to read harmless things as threats.

We can't get this stance back by becoming naive. But we can find it again — via the route that is grown-up: first calm the body, then invite the inner Judge to sit beside you instead of obeying it, then ask what else could be true. Three steps that together restore what we were given as children: an open gaze at the next stone.

In the end, resilience is often no more than that. Not the strength to run harder against the wall. But the openness to ask whether there might be a door you overlooked in the verdict.

In the [free workshop](/en/workshop) you practice exactly this sequence — regulate first, then open your focus — not as an idea, but as an experience in your own body. 90 minutes that widen your gaze.