Of all the skills I’ve developed over the years, “going to the balcony” ranks in the top ten skills responsible for creating the happiness I live on a day to day basis today.

I’ve been “going to the balcony” far longer than I’ve had a name for it. I was first introduced to the phrase when I read William Ury’s “Getting Past No: Negotiating With Difficult People.” It occurred to me that going to the balcony was useful across many areas of life, not just in negotiating. You may have other names for it, but what I’m talking about here is the ability to step outside yourself, gain a bird’s eye view of your life, the people in it including you, the events, the relationships, the drama…all that your life is today.
That view, without the emotional connection to what is going on, is what allows you to get clear about what is working in your life and what is not. We all know how easy it is to see things in someone else’s life that need to change, how glaringly apparent those things are, yet how we can be so blind to those same things in our own lives. Learning how to go to the balcony is as close as we can get to the kind of objectivity we have about others’ lives in our own lives.

In other words, going to the balcony allows you to see the forest that is your life, in spite of your trees.