I have borrowed the title from David Hockney’s new exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, fantastic stuff! But the phrase has a lot to do with coaching as well and helping our clients find new ways of looking to generate options. It’s probably one of the best features of a great coach: inspiring new possibilities, discovering new ideas, and opening doors that seemed not to exist and yet appear so obvious once explored. Finding new ways of looking creates more useful choices. It transforms the world around us from two poles into a rich spectrum of colour and options. Only a fool sees the world in black and white a wise friend once told me. One should at least appreciate the various spectra of grey connecting them, he continued.

He was right. And yet so many people I come across do choose to see the world through a very narrow pinhole. It can be tempting to persist in viewing things one way. It offers the payoff of massive though often delusional certainty and a quick result.

In coaching we aim higher. We want a fast solution that is also a truly satisfying solution. One that we don’t settle for or feel forced to make on limited evidence. Instead, we explore other ways of looking so that we can see possibilities that fill us with excitement, slight trepidation and exhilaration at the shear possibility of them being true or realised.

Are you looking at your world with sufficient imagination and creativity? Or are you perhaps denying yourself the possibility of great things happening in your life in favour of ease. It’s like the famous joke – when a man prayed to God to win the lottery, God finally replied “Son, do me a favour and buy a ticket!”.

I hope you are inspired to dream big and leap into the things that, while uncertain, glitter with possibility. Buy your tickets. Buy many. We are rewarded in our dreams when we dare to live them.