We look at life through the space we locate ourselves in.
When you go home for the holidays, you have a space inside which you interact with your mother. You have a space inside which you interact with your father, another space with your siblings.
Some people live their whole life out of one favorite space.
When you know what space you think you are in, and the other person makes no sense, that is because they relate to you inside a different space.
For example, Nancy lives inside Mother-child space. She is either the mother, or she is the child. When she is the child, I am either the mother (she loves that) or Not mother… she hates that. When she is the mother and I refuse to be the child, she throws a tantrum.
This is invisible for her. It’s the water she swims in.
When a coaching relationship doesn’t work, i.e. it is unpleasant, it is forced, it is ineffective, it is always because the two people are in a different space…
My intention is to operate, interact with a student inside the space of partnership. I have my job cut out for me… and I fail more often than not to move them to the space of partnership.
In the Landmark Education Partnership Course participants got a glimpse of partnership after a whole year of learning to recognize, learning to distinguish all the 16 different spaces that don’t allow for partnership.
Inside the space for Mother-Child partnership isn’t recognized. The mother and the child are NEVER in a partnership: their self interest is sharply different. In fact: partnership there is rejected. It is resented. Same in Father-child… or playmate-sibling, which is yet another space…
Becoming curious (and observant, aware) about the self-interest and the many forms of it is incredibly useful and makes seeing why these relationships lack harmony or growth potential.
You can practice recognizing the self interest (without making it right or making it wrong) any and every place in your life, even in books, or TV shows. Everywhere.
Self interest conflicts with another’s self-interest… because self-interest lives as an either I win or you win phenomenon. Validating self-interest, the other’s self interest, is one way you can take the sting out of relationships and bring them closer to partnership and workability. 1
I am not licensed to teach the Partnership Course, or any Landmark Education Course, so this is pretty much as much as I can “quote” from the course, without violating my non-compete agreement with the company.
But if you are astute enough what I have written so far is going to make you look. See what space you do your life, do your relationships from.
When things don’t work… you can safely assume that you are in the wrong quadrant, you are in the wrong room, you are in the wrong space.
Identifying where you are at, and where the other is takes practice, but is easy.
Then make the conversation move to another space takes a lot more. A whole lot more. It takes the art of communication.
I’ve recruited seven different people for the experimental communication training. The goal is to make life work, no matter how different they are. No matter what space they hang out most. No matter what they want to accomplish.
Moving people, moving the conversation to another space where there can be alignment, real communication, love, harmony, and ultimately partnership is what I intend to teach.
You, who are not in the course, you can do your work to identify what space you have your conversations in.
The Partnership Course, a fully Tree of Life phenomenon, gets to a deep knowledge through using collages, the non-verbal tactile, kinesthetic representation of a field. 2
Ingenious.
Of course, most of the people in the course first had the thought and then made a collage to illustrate it. Meaning: they stayed on the Tree of Knowledge.
Getting of that tree is not easy… no matter what tool you use.
Most artists create “art” on the Tree of Knowledge too… even though art is not a Tree of Knowledge, word thing.
In this article I have given you a whiff of how to alter your life, on the Tree of Life. The trimtab method, where gentle and small changes turn around your oceanliner… and your life towards workability and towards growth and fulfillment.
As long as you live inside one of those quadrants, uneven quadrants, ordinary communication, workability and fulfillment will be there only for moments, and only as an accident.
When you become intimately familiar with how you and others live their lives inside those tightly defined spaces, you’ll have a choice to stay there, live a limited and predictable life, or to take charge, and direct all your communications to the open water, what we’ll call, maybe, partnership… maybe alignment with all of it…
Haven’t decided yet.
PS: I just realized why people like animals, pets more than people: animals, your choice of animals, allow you to dominate to your hearts content… people don’t…
- More on validation: https://yourvibration.com/33924
- There are four “ordinary” fields of relating, values and communication: 1. mother-child 2. father-child 3. playmate-sibling, 4. admirer-admired. (Here are a few collages of someone I don’t know on Flickr. Hover over the images to see which quadrant, which space, which field it shows. )
The fifth field, the field of partnership, cannot be jumped into. It can only be accessed when all the values of the four quadrants, the four ordinary fields, are transcended… i.e. seen but not operational. 1~2 out of a hundred is willing to do the work… We shall see how many in a tiny course I am leading. I am shooting for 50% or more
