I got so much joy out of this article – an interview with the Mayor of Johannesburg, Amos Masondo, about Johannesburg’s readiness for the World Cup Soccer in June 2010.
Give it a quick read and notice what thoughts and feelings come to mind for you first…
I’m sure you’ve had one of these sorts of dreams (actually nightmares) before… a really vivid dream that’s really scary, and you wake up and take a few moments to realize that it was just a nightmare. And then you sigh in relief that it wasn’t real. But the vivid-ness of the dream stays with you throughout the day, with flashbacks of feelings and images from the dream popping into your mind throughout the day.
And it’s gonna be you.
That’s the truth of it. And yet we fight ourselves all the time. We force ourselves to be in relationships and work roles that constrain our Essential Selves, we make ourselves do stuff we loathe doing because a part of ourselves is concerned with what everyone else thinks about us, we deny ourselves pleasure and punish ourselves with guilt, and we berate ourselves with our unkind self-talk. All of this makes for internal conflict, a war inside, and the longer the war goes on, the more confused we feel about who we really are and what we really want in life.
Your divided Self
Martha Beck has written about a really useful model of the self as two parts – an Essential Self and a Social Self. Your Essential Self is the part of you that’s spontaneous and creative and playful, the part that knows what’s most important to you. Your Social Self is the part of you that developed since the day you were born, taking in the rules of the tribe and working hard to make sure that you’re safe by making your follow the rules of the tribe and avoid any threats. Your Social Self wants you to be safe, and your Essential Self wants you to be happy. When you feel conflicted, it’s because your Social Self is pulling you away from the direction your Essential Self is wanting you to take, and there’s a little war going on between the part that wants you to be happy and the part that wants you to be safe.
I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people lately around the topic of uncovering/ discovering/ deciding your “thing.” It’s partly about deciding what you love doing and partly about discovering what the world needs, and then it’s a lot about how you create a platform and share with people about your thing, so it overlaps with ideas around niching and branding and leadership. It’s central to any self-created venture.
I’m normally a fairly articulate person and for the last 10 years or so I’ve been in quite left-brain-directed jobs where analysis and giving words to ideas and concepts has been central to what I do. But I’ve been battling with verbally articulating what Agile Living is all about for what feels like ages… I guess it’s going on a year now. It’s been the most frustrating thing. I’ve been feeling like a pregnant woman that just can’t give birth and can’t sit down comfortably and get on with life either!
If you’re busy trying to birth an idea and struggling with articulating it clearly enough so that it can come alive in the world and be easily grasped by other people, then here’s some of what I’ve learned from my own process:
Forgive me if explaining my box and ladder metaphor feels like I’m explaining a joke…
Metaphors have great value in that they allow us to make our own meaning, and they often provide visuals that carry much more meaning and convey it much more quickly than what we can squeeze into a more left-brained, tangible explanation of an idea. Feel free to keep whatever interpretation and rich connections you had made of my box and ladder story as Kyle did. What follows is my unpacking of what boxes and ladders mean to me and what boxes and ladders actually look like in our lives, so that you can find your hard corners and stiffnesses that are keeping you stuck.
Cath is loving, healing and serving herself and others by walking, making art, raising funds for the Kidney Foundation, supporting people who are grieving to live wholeheartedly after loss, training grief coaches, tending to her small urban garden, writing, blogging occasionally here at AgileLiving.net and having real and compassionate conversations with new and old friends. Cath is an experienced Social Worker, Neuro-linguistic Psychology Master Practitioner and Martha Beck Life Coach.
