When I went to capture this glorious sunrise, I bemoaned the light poles and parking lines taking away from the beauty of the scene.

When those elements are removed in the second photo, is the sunrise any less beautiful?

What I registered after having that internal grumble was that my focus was creating what I saw.

When I just looked at the beautiful colours spreading across the morning sky, which had been dark just moments earlier, I saw beauty and felt blessed.

When I went to capture that and share it, I thought about what makes the perfect photo and how disappointing this image was. I stopped appreciating the beauty of the scene when I compared it to other photos of sunrises.

I don’t regret doing that, as it gave me an opportunity to catch myself and to notice where I was focusing my attention. I had gone from an appreciation of beauty and a desire to share that, to a comparison and judgement which made this somehow deficient.

The scene hadn’t changed, just my perception. And thus my appreciation of the gift I was receiving changed.

When we set an intention to create something in our lives, we often want to control what it will look like and how it will eventuate.

We can come to believe that, for example, cities are ugly/the countryside is beautiful and we can only enjoy beauty there. Neither is true, and when we shift our focus to what we really want and take steps towards that, it can come to us in unexpected ways.

I don’t know how many people drove past that sunrise in peak hour without noticing those glorious colours. Or how many saw it but didn’t fully appreciate the gifts nature was sending them.

I know there will have been people like me who were preparing for a busy day and contemplating tasks to be completed who just stopped for a moment to receive the gift in that morning sky.

The same is true in every aspect of our lives. If you want your partner to care for you more, you may have expectations about how that will look, and miss what actually comes to you. Maybe you’d like breakfast in bed but you had the oil and water in your car topped up.

You might want more support from your boss, workers or colleagues and imagine it coming in a certain way. Instead of input and feedback, you may be receiving a vote of confidence through a hands-off approach that demonstrates that your skills and knowledge are respected and assumed.

There is an old parable about a man who arrives at a new town and asks the man at the gate what the people are like there. The man asks him what the people were like at the last town. Whether the traveller says – “They were generous and supportive” or “They were mean and critical”, the man on the gate replies “You’ll find the people here the same”.

By your focus you create more of what you have been achieving in your life to date, or more of what you would love.

Changing your focus changes what you receive.

And it’s still possible to get breakfast in bed – if you focus on that outcome without judgment or control about how it will happen, it can come to you.

Touch base if you’d like to know more about that…….