What if missed opportunities are in fact opportunities we are still missing and still available to us, just in different forms?

No doubt you can recall something that feels like a missed opportunity. Whether for you personally, for a friend or even a team you are part of or support. 

We may even talk of wasted opportunities. As a (what feels like long suffering) fan of the England men’s rugby team, this Six Nations was framed as an opportunity. On a winning run of 11 games there was valid talk of them winning the Six Nations or at least being in with a chance of winning it come the final weekend. Instead they only won one game, their first, they lost to Italy, for the first time in their history, and lost four out of five games, also for the first time in their history. 

It could certainly be put as a missed, if not wasted, opportunity. However, what if this missed opportunity is also another opportunity, different but still an opportunity.

In reality the England team still have the opportunity to realise their clear potential, the opportunity to do so in this Six Nations may have gone, but the opportunity remains for future tournaments. 

Of course there is the question for many fans of how many opportunities do they need, which really is laced with the frustration that this feels like another in a string of missed opportunities.

The point is — and to avoid this becoming a piece of personal cathartic writing on the recent disappointment of being an England men’s rugby supporter — what may be the opportunities arising from missed opportunities?

I have spoken to many people who can point to moments in their life, with the benefit of hindsight, and say that is a missed opportunity. Whether it be career decisions, life decisions, where to live, not saying ‘yes’ to something that felt a bit too uncomfortable, not saying ‘no’ to the thing they really didn’t want to do but felt they had to, what if they are only missed opportunities if we fail to act on the feeling it was a missed opportunity now? 

What if in seeing it as a missed opportunity we are missing the opportunity still available to us in a different form? 

Each time I say ‘no’ to a restful Sunday morning because I need to do the things to prepare me for the week I continue to miss the opportunity to learn to rest better. Again each evening I choose to do a few bits of work rather than rest again. While a rather simple example the opportunity still remains to learn to and to rest better.

The challenge is our practices, our ways of being, our habits, everything we do that we have learnt, consciously or unconsciously, may mean that we keep missing the same opportunity in different forms. 

So what if that missed opportunity is really still the opportunity? 

For example, I know I have missed the opportunity to pursue my teenage ambition to be a professional rugby player, however just because one form of fulfilling my personal dreams has passed it does not mean there are not other opportunities to do so.

Which also suggests it can be valuable to notice the opportunities we miss and what commonalities they have, because they may be the patterns we need to spot and  avoid to open ourselves up to the opportunities we keep on missing. 

Going back to my rugby aspirations I notice now that the missed opportunity was in part down to not taking that aspiration seriously enough. If I had been really clear on what I wanted and how much I had wanted it my approach and my level of commitment would likely have been higher, I would have sought more opportunities to achieve the same ambition rather than seeing the trial I didn’t succeed at as the missed opportunity. 

And it is a pattern I noticed more recently, when taking the step to be a full-time coach. I was taking my coaching seriously but I wasn’t taking my desire to have a successful coaching business seriously, and so I was missing opportunities to do so, in this case filling my diary with things that prevented or stopped me from taking it seriously. 

What if it isn’t missed but missing, the opportunity we feel we missed has an equivalent now, an equivalent we are missing until we choose to recognise and take it.

In turn this has become an (ongoing and work in progress) opportunity to take me and my aspirations more seriously and as a result create new and different opportunities that better fit what I want. In some ways the same opportunity — to pursue what I really want to its fullest in different forms (rugby and now coaching) — continuing to be missed by the pattern of not taking my aspirations and me seriously enough. 

What are the opportunities that you feel you missed and wish you had taken?

What would taking that opportunity have given you?

What is the opportunity for that now? What may it look like?

What would you need to do to ensure you don’t continue to miss that opportunity?

What would the world be if we found and took the opportunities in the present we feel we missed in the past?