🚪Red Door, Yellow Door: What's Yours?
Our monthly(ish) community prompt
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“You shall not fold your wings that you may pass through doors, nor bend your heads that they strike not against a ceiling, nor fear to breathe lest walls should crack and fall down.
. . . For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.”
—Kahlil Gibran, “On Houses,” from The Prophet
Rolling in Doh wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for two essential events in the summer of 2023: losing my Favorite Corporate Client (as longtime readers know all too well by now), and having brunch a few days later with my friend Brooke, author of the book and blog May Cause Side Effects with Brooke Siem.1
Brooke embodied a creative courage I had lost along the way of building my business, writing boldly about her story of antidepressant withdrawal after fifteen years of hazy memories and harrowing side effects while on them. We hadn’t caught up in years, but I always appreciated the depth and breadth of her pursuits: writing, cooking, lifting, speaking, business-building, traveling, and art-making.
Brooke was already on Substack. When I mentioned I was tiptoeing around starting one, she offered enthusiastic encouragement. She pulled out her phone, and together we brainstormed breadwinner puns for the title. Once she suggested spelling “Dough” as “Doh,” I knew the idea was too fun not to pursue.
She gave me the gift of naming what I was experiencing, cracking a new door open even as I was still seeing cartoon stars, face stinging, while standing shocked in the old slammed door’s threshold. Brooke was my courage surrogate that day, my “trail angel,” as Dr. Lisa Miller, author of The Awakened Brain, put it in a recent episode of Elise Loehnen’s podcast.
In the episode, Lisa walks Elise through a reflection exercise called “Red Door, Yellow Door.” With the gift of hindsight, recall a moment that hinged on an unanswered prayer, one later revealed to be a life-changing blessing-in-disguise (emphasis mine):
“I invite you to locate a moment when you wanted something so badly. A plus B plus C, you did your homework, you researched it, tactically strategized that red door was yours. It could have been that job, that school for you or your kid, an internship, for them to say yes.
You go for your red door, A plus B plus C. But it’s stuck; you can’t believe it’s stuck because you’ve done everything right, A plus B plus C. You might be angry, shocked, even depressed. You did not get what you wanted. So you have no choice. You pivot. You pivot 60, 140 degrees, and over there is a wide-open yellow door, a splendid yellow door.
You might have said yellow doors don’t exist. What’s a yellow door? On the other side of the yellow door is a job where you see a skill, a capacity you didn’t even know you had; someone who adores you and makes you feel worthy and alive; a community where you finally feel that you belong.
That yellow door that has so much to do with who you are and where you are today, that splendid yellow door with a new landscape, that was not what you had wanted. It was better and better for you. And as you sit back now, [you can see a] stuck red door [versus the] hairpin turn [leading to a] wide open yellow door.”
Was there anyone at that hairpin turn—a counselor, a grandparent, a friend—who told you a story for the first time, who gave you information? Someone you met for two minutes at a coffee shop? A trail angel pointing you to the wide-open yellow door?”
Building on our earlier monthly(ish) Community Doh discussion threads, I’d love to hear from you in the comments:
💬 What is one of your biggest yellow-door life moments?
What was the red door you thought you wanted?
How did the yellow door end up expanding you even more?
Was there a trail angel who showed up at the perfect time?
Do you think it gets any easier to choose the yellow door, or does it always require a cold-shower-like shock to the system? (Or to stick with the door metaphor, a proverbial slam in the face?)2
❤️
🤩 I had the privilege of watching one of Brooke’s earliest talks sharing her story in person for The Legacy Show in New York City:
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My red door was entry to a School Psychology program in Syracuse. I was an alternate, and the spot didn’t open up. That left me with two options: another graduate program at Georgia where my partner didn’t have entry, or the Behavioral Science program at Auburn University. I hardly knew what Behavior Analysis was all about, but my trail angel was a professor who convinced me to give it a go, I could always leave after my Masters degree. He ended up becoming my advisor, and I found organizational psychology here - a field I didn’t even know existed.
I think about that sliding door, me languishing in the school environment with so little prospects for growth, wow. What a yellow door that was!!!
The red door I thought I wanted was a PhD in biophysics. Viet Nam required a pivot and the university was not welcoming a return. So I ended up in air pollution control, environmental compliance and industrial hygiene. I got to use science and technology to help people and bonus, I got to see firsthand how many things were made, from steel to glass to oil to semiconductors and nanomaterials. The yellow door turned out to be as brilliant as the sun.