Primed to Unlock
Priming ourselves: The Practice of Showing Up in Ways That Invite New Insight.
It’s October 1st, which means I ran another live session of The Possibility (now called Your Month By Design) today.
If you’re interested in pausing to connect with what you most want your next month to be about—to live by design, not by default—you can register for the next event on November 2nd. It’ll be the fourth time I’ve offered this event, and some participants will be returning for their fourth experience with this part of the Primacy Cycle system.
At the end of today’s session, one returning participant shared something about her mindset beforehand:
“I wonder what I’m going to unlock today?”
That, it turns out, is a priming question.
Priming to unlock
This participant had discovered something powerful:
“There’s usually a point during these where something just… unlocks.
And it’s not always tied to a specific exercise—it’s like my thinking shifts, and something I’ve been stuck on suddenly makes sense.
It’s nice knowing that when I’m stuck, showing up here helps me move again—even if I can’t explain how.”
A few weeks ago, I had a similar realization during an xChange community event.
“Every time I connect with this community, something unlocks for me. I never know ahead of time what it will be.”
Until I said it out loud, I hadn’t realized how consistently this was true. But there it was—in the half-filled notebook beside me, full of quiet unlocks I hadn’t connected to the context they came from.
Others in the breakout group said the same: each time they entered that space, something new surfaced.
So the question isn’t: Where do the insights come from?
The question is:
Are they always there—and we’re just not in a state to notice them?
Finding the state
Whether we realize it or not, we’re constantly priming ourselves—into and out of states—all day long.
- “I have to meet with this person.” → Triggers a state.
- “I love/hate/enjoy/am stuck on this task.” → Triggers a state.
- Bedtime routines with kids? That’s a whole sequence of primed states. (Or maybe that’s just me.)
- Knowing you’ll unlock something useful—even without knowing how? That’s also a state.
- Intending to serve no matter where the conversation goes? Another state.
These internal states, often more than external conditions, shape what we experience.
Which leads me to this:
Maybe the insights are already available.
Maybe what shifts isn’t the world—it’s what we’re able to receive from it.
In systems language, our state determines the feedback we notice when we interact with the system.
The feedback always arrives
Every input into a system generates a response.
That’s what feedback is.
The energy you bring? It comes back—sometimes as openness, sometimes as escalation.
Sometimes there’s a time lag, and we miss the connection.
Other times, our current state filters what we notice—and we miss the feedback entirely.
But the loop always closes.
Feedback always arrives.
The real question is:
Are we in a state to notice—and respond to—what the system is telling us?
Today, I was.
And something meaningful unlocked—again.
– Gerrett
This was originally published on Substack in my Human Systems Playground. But I’ve decided to bring all my writing home here.
