The Power Of The Pivot

Pivoting can be used in two ways: pivoting away or pivoting towards . . . and one of these two ways serves you much better. Find out more in this mini podcast.

 Grasshopper Notes are the writings from America's Best Known Hypnotherapist John Morgan. His podcasts contain his most responded to essays and blog posts from the past two decades. 

Find the written versions of these podcasts on John's podcasting site: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1628038

"The Grasshopper" is the part of you that whispers pearls of wisdom that  seem to pop into your mind from out of the blue. John's essays and blog posts are his interpretations of these "Nips of Nectar." Others have labeled his writings as timeless wisdom. 

Most of the John's writings revolve around self improvement and self help. They address topics like:

• Mindfulness
• Peace of mind
• Creativity
• How to stay in the present moment
• Spirituality
• Behavior improvement

And stories that transform you to a wider sense of awareness that presents more options. And isn't that what we all want, more options? 

John uploads these podcasts on a regular basis. So check back often to hear these podcasts heard around the world. Who wants to be the next person to change? 

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Transcript

The Power Of The Pivot

I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this, but I’ve watched way more national news in recent years than I ever did before.

And with that came a steady diet of candidates, spokespersons, cable hosts, and pundits—lots of people talking, lots of words being used. But the thing that really jumped out at me was something known as the pivot.

You know the move.

A candidate gets a question they don’t want to answer. They start down what sounds like the right path—just enough to give you hope—and then, smoothly, almost gracefully, they pivot. Suddenly we’re off on a side road, nowhere near the original question . . . or desired answer.

Here’s the problem with that strategy: the question doesn’t go anywhere. It just hangs there. Floating. Waiting to be asked again.

The people who do this the most end up earning a kind of nickname—the king or queen of conversational dodgeball. And no, that’s not a title anyone’s chasing.

But pivoting itself isn’t the problem. In fact, pivoting can be incredibly powerful—if you pivot toward something instead of away from it.

When a question is dogging you, the instinct is to dodge. To sidestep. To hope it loses interest and wanders off. But as we’ve all seen, it doesn’t. It just sticks around and shows up later, usually at a worse time.

Pivoting toward the issue means dealing with it head-on. It means finally answering the question instead of outrunning it.

That kind of pivot usually reveals a realization—that you’re putting off the inevitable. And once that hits, you see that every dodge just sends you deeper down your own personal Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole.

It actually reminds me of my martial arts training.

One of the hardest things to learn in certain disciplines is stepping into an attack. Everything in you wants to step back. But when you step in—skillfully—you take the force out of the attack and redirect it. You use its energy instead of fighting it.

That’s what pivoting toward does.

It clears mental clutter you may have been carrying for years. When you turn toward the problem, you create space for resolution—real resolution—instead of another exhausting, results-free retreat.

Dodging is like treading water. Or swimming upstream. Tons of effort, zero progress.

That same energy, used differently, can carry you forward—downstream—toward an actual solution.

So what question are you dodging?

Sometimes just noticing what you’re avoiding is enough to start the pivot.

Here's an undeniable fact: Most problems don’t solve themselves, even though we like to believe they will if we ignore them one more time. That’s the Pollyanna plan—and it rarely works.

Imitating an ostrich gets you a birds-eye view of your hiding place. Pivoting towards an answer gets your head removed from some other dark hole.

All the best,

John