The Name of Your Game: Four Game Plans for Success at Home & at Work

Life starts with us in the center of things.

It is as if we are born into the center of a room with four walls. There is a window on each wall looking out to the world.

Because of our life experiences, and what has worked for us, we look at the world through one or two windows of our choice. We may learn to look through the window in front of us and to the right of us. Someone else may look at the world from the windows to our left and behind us.

When we try to describe the world to each other, it appears as if we are talking about two different worlds. It’s really the same world out there, but we’re only describing our familiar perspective, our preferred orientation that has been reinforced through trial and error, success, and failure.

Difficulty between us can start when we try to work or live together if our views of the world come from opposite windows. Trouble happens when my way of looking at the world is from the window in front of me, and your way of looking at the world is from the window behind me. I may have occasionally looked out that window, but it’s been infrequent, and I don’t remember how things are from there. I choose to remember my comforting viewpoint, my own convenient perspective.

But that is not enough. We need total perspective. No person’s judgment is any better than the completeness and accuracy of their information. And if we get information from only one or two windows, we are missing important knowledge. Then we do not have everything available to bring to a problem or a decision affecting our lives and each other.

We need people who are different from us. They have different perspectives and different strengths. We need them by having them physically present, or by learning to ask the unique questions they would ask if they were with us, the questions that come from their orientation to life.

What this book does is broaden our awareness of the total world outside our room, the total perspective, and the total power available to us through different game plans. We can go beyond our present state of working and loving from the limited information we get from our select view of the world.