Everybody in your life is making you smaller.

And that’s ok.

There’s just - too much. Of everything. Life is a lot.

Making you smaller is a survival mechanism.

I’m about to take our taxes to the accountant.

Our lady is just our tax lady. She’s a character, too, which is why we go back to her every year (there’s an entertainment factor involved in the loyalty calculation here), but for the 364 days we won’t talk to her, she exists in a tiny little “accountant” pigeonhole.

When I reduce her to that, I make her smaller.

In my life, in my world, and - hey, I’m sure she does it to me too.

She has to.

Partly because she’s got plenty of other clients besides my wife and I, but also because what purpose would “bigger” represent in this case?

So we make people smaller.

We all do.

Not out of malice, but out of the transactional necessities of all sorts of aspects of adulthood.

Angie Colee and I got into this on Just Press Record and it’s really lingering in my mind.

How the relationship between the size of our relationships, and the people in our lives at various distances and for assorted purposes is a metaphor worth playing with.

Getting to be smaller is pretty great sometimes.

I kind of love with my financial planner hat being a small part of people’s lives.

There’s still very much a relationship-driven aspect to it, but I like that I don’t need to be everybody’s friend (even if that line is selectively crossed).

Or take the podcast thing, too. When somebody is a fan and only knows me from that work, I’m small.

And small is beautiful, baby!

We’re all always being made smaller by the people who need a specific version of us.

Sometimes there’s no room for nuance.

When Angie explains her consulting process, and how she’s asking why, and who, and really digging in for the nuance, she’s talking about understanding a bigger version of a person.

That’s a relationship profession at its finest right there.

Because what she’s doing is exploring just how massive a person is, how far-reaching their passions might lie, and then assessing, with her marketer hat on, how that could be reduced to deliver value for people on the other side.

It’s an awareness of how small others will make you, that she steps back to see the big version of first, to steer that reduction.

It’s a pretty brilliant framing.

And beyond doing it at work, I think there’s the personal level too.

Just like she does when she’s helping a client, this is what our best friends and spouses can offer.

They see the bigness and richness and weirdness of our whole selves.

And then they reduce it too.

Take it from the wonderful, loving spouse who is about to become the guy who vacuums before friends come over.

Trust me when I say the smallness of me filling that role is worth its weight in gold, too.

People need us to be small.

We need others to be small.

When it’s necessary, don’t forget to expand the view, too.

Thanks Angie for the reminder.