Here is a great article by Rob McNamara of Ten Directions on how we box ourselves in and how to get out.
Tag Archives: Discernment
Crawling Out of Your Own Shadow
The hardest thing for us to work with are potentials we lose to our own blind spots. As this series started with Seriously Folks, to be serious you have to filter things out. Just as a mirror helps us see ourself, it is the outside world that provides us with the feedback to see our shadows.
If you do not know why you are stuck, the world is constantly giving you feedback. Are you listening?
It is impossible to be shadow free due to the nature of attention and concepts in the human mind. It is currently a popular new-age thing to dig around in shadows. The majority is alot like helping you discover you bleed if you cut yourself. Working on someone elses shadows is only randomly helpful to you.
Since you will always have shadows, work on discovering those that are keeping you from where you want to go. To get a handle on this without working with someone, which requires much trust, try the following exercise.
Take a day and go about your normal business and be mindful of the things that annoy you. Just jot them down don’t try to analyse them. Do this commuting, at work, walking down the street and at home, if you forget, just start again. Things or interactions that annoy or make you uncomfortable are like fingers pointing at the shadows. Over time you will see trends and pick up clues.
If you want to really go right for it, consider the person that annoys you the most and ask yourself what it is you are afraid of that they represent. Just as an example:
In last weeks post Discernment, I laid out the Victim, Perpetrator, Rescuer triangle. I personally have a thing about being seen as a victim or a loser and those that take up that role really bug me. I did not know this for most of my corporate life and therefore took on the role of Perpetrator, the get it done at all costs guy, causing much unneccesary chaos by purging project teams of this traight.
May your life go well
Discernment
Discernment is the proper balance of Wisdom and Compassion. When expressed perfectly the wise thing to do is also the compassionate thing to do.
Wisdom in my mind is the combination of knowledge and perspective expressed. The older I gets the more I figure out that the best expression is often no-action. As they say ‘you cannot push the river’.
Compassion on the other hand is hard to put into words as it is grace that you are actually trying to define. Outside of actually witnessing it in action you can sometimes recognize it in poetry. It is easiest to speak to what it is not. The Victim – Perpetrator – Rescuer triangle comes up as a good reference to speak to.
Identifying with any of these is not compassion, it is known as idiot compassion.
Being the victim as to not cause problems is not compassionate. Allowing the Perpetrator to continue they’re abuse is an error that will harm others and cheats the perpetrator from growing.
Being the Perpetrator is fairly obvious. There is a thin line between holding someone accountable and victimizing them. The rule of thumb I learned in the workplace was that to be accountable they had to have responsibility and authority, which holds true in the world as well.
Being the Rescuer is where idiot’s compassion plays out most often. The Rescuer is most often righteousness in disguise. People do need a hand up, but as they say, teach them to fish. If rescuing is not in the moment, such as grabbing a runaway baby buggy, then it is very difficult to maintain.
The truth is that you are always victim, perpetrator, rescuer and taking action; that is being human. Being aware of this instead of operating blindly out of habit makes all the difference.
So with all of this in mind I ask myself what am I doing here. Yes I am trying to rescue a certain group in my community and here on LinkedIn. Yes to the majority here, as LinkedIn claims, I am a perpetrator of thinking outside of comfort zones. Technically I am a victim of censorship; however I fully expected LinkedIn and those that feed from the corporate structure to not like what I had to say.
I have no interest in wasting energy battling LinkedIn, there are other venues, so I will de-escalate my posts here and focus elsewhere. It is also clear from private messages that having you help me propagate this on LI is a lot to ask of you. I will post from time to time as things come up and to remind those new arrivals out of corporate life that there are alternatives.
If you wish to see more it will all be on www.fiveranks.org and soon likely be posted on FB to a page titled Corporate Rehab. Or follow me @PrajnaAbility on twitter for tweets of new postings.
May your life go well