“Zooming in” and “Zooming out”

In counseling and coaching work, one of the patterns we see is that there are folks who are too focused on the “outer world” i.e. how society works and what society/others value, but are too detached from their, “inner world” i.e. their inner principles and what matters to them, leading to outer success/popularity, but are surprisingly unhappy or uneasy within themselves.

And then there is the opposite extreme.

Folks who are too focussed on their “inner world” but are a bit too detached from the “outer world”, leading to inner content but can be very maladaptive to their environment. They may be too “zoomed out” from their surroundings leading to inattentiveness and others to be really unhappy with them.

Both extremes can lead to mood disorders especially if the inner values/rules are quite mismatched with the outer values/rules. We can see this in neurodivergence for example.

The first step is to hold space and emotionally accept the context in order to preserve self esteem and/or not get too frustrated.

The second step is to be mindful enough to find the Venn diagram between these two domains i.e outer values with inner values, and the outer rules with the inner rules.

From a counseling point of view, this will require mindfulness, good emotional literacy, and the ability to “zoom out” of things that are outside our control/don’t matter, and “zoom into” the things that are in our control/does matter dependent on context.

Not easy!

I wonder if you can relate or see this same pattern in the people you look after.