20 years ago I had my first entrepreneur value profile done.
It was some 30 pages long… too much English. But somewhere it said something like: You don’t work well THROUGH others…
Bummer…
A year or two worth of training later I got my certification to become a value profile consultant. Then I learned to see all that the 30 page said in English (meaning lots of words) at a glance on a grid.
My starting point measurements report is a lot like that grid. It is more meant for the coach/consultant to know how to guide you, than for you to enjoy reading to indulge your delusional self. Your delusional self loves the many words… I have watched people get all excited about the book “The Life You Were Meant to Live”… because they picked out the words they liked… No growth.
The more someone is determined to remain the same, the more they like that book…
Sigh.
So today, 20 years later, I looked at coaching, both as a client and as a provider.
I saw that I still don’t work well through another. This is why I like the kind of coaching I do: you do the work, and I nudge you. And, of course, I don’t have employees, not even a virtual assistant.
Now, this would be either useful or not… but suddenly I hired a business coach.
One of the curses of being a true empath is that I feel what’s going on for the other… and my coach and myself are at odds.
He likes to tell people what to do, and get it done that way.
Parent to Child, if I am looking through the “ego states” in Transactional Analysis.
I alternate between independent/creative Child and Adult… and I am in no way an obedient Child who would work well with a Parent.
So I am rubbing him the wrong way.
If you are a parent: you know what I am talking about. If you are a child, or have been one, you may know what I am talking about. You don’t want to be told what to do. You don’t want to do what the other wants you to do. Even if it would work.
No, you want to be you… your way… and still be OK… don’t you? I want to be able to make my own mistakes and learn from them. Or learn principles, and be guided by them. But not by a person… who ALWAYS has a personal agenda.
So the question is: can this coaching work? And if not: is there anyone out there, who is not a “Parent” type of coach?
The ultimate question is this, I think: should you be different than you are? or said in another way: do you need to be FIXED?
I hear people smarter than myself suggesting that partnerships, marriages work best if you “marry” the person who has what you lack.
But what if the other person (or you) hang out in Parent (or Child) ego-state a lot that is all about forcing the other, instead of completing them?
I hear the biggest tragedy of marriage is that
“Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed.”
This is what happened in my older brother’s marriage. Interestingly, I think I managed to alter the balance of power recently, when I adjusted their perfectly matched Predatory Genes: He had 1, she had ten… so she was the boss, and he was suffering. After the adjustment they both have 3… and judging from what I feel, her need to order him around, and his need to be a person in slavery are altered, and love has returned to the relationship. There is still magic in life… lol.
Back to “either everybody counts or nobody counts”…
I have found out that if I don’t insist that my judgment is accurate, and justified, I can just have the judgment as my opinion… and not act on it.
The results have been revolutionary: I can now, at least occasionally, work THROUGH another… meaning: cause accomplishment over there… Which is, I think, a coach’s job. Causing accomplishment over there, over where the client is.
I now have this new ability to fully see what someone is doing without judgment. Opinion, yes, but not judgment.
I clearly see what someone is doing… And because my favorite fiction genre is cop procedural… I see a lot of incompetence, disloyalty, fraud, lying, taking sides, and, of course, violence.
So I have been sitting with this since yesterday. How do you be, when you are looking at evil?
It’s the judge’s or the jury’s job to judge the crime. It is lawyers’ job to create and enforce laws that are just.
And it is my job to not be the judge, or the jury, or even the lawyer… It is my job to have a great life… even though there is a lot of evil in the world.
But even though I manage not to judge, it doesn’t mean that from time to time I don’t cry… no sob.
My favorite detective is Henry Bosch. Why? Because he lives by an invented context: ‘Either everybody counts or nobody counts.’
It’s looking at life, at crime, at justice, at police work from the intrinsic level of value. Makes me, reliably, cry.
Maybe it’s the Jew in me… maybe this is why I voted “Human Rights Movement”… because that is who I am.
That is the wind I walk into.
When you live by “Either everybody counts or nobody counts” you know who you are. And you see what people are doing, but don’t judge. There is no room for personal judgment if “Either everybody counts or nobody counts”
Judgment says: I count more than you.
I don’t count more than you… that is quite a sobering thing to say… try it on. Knocks you out of your self-righteous mindset, doesn’t it?
In the What’s Missing workshop we’ll see what and who you judge, what and who you are trying to change… so that you are not happy…
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