Cats are notoriously individualistic, and abhor being herded, or even told what to do.
Your (and) my aspects are like cats: enjoying and protecting their freedoms you have given them all these years, that you thought they were the boss. Your boss.
I am talking here of the aspects of your mind, your emotions, your thoughts, and your urges.
All of these aspects have been telling you what to do, how you are, who you are, what’s right and what’s wrong… ultimately the you, the human, is ordered around by the machine, by the vehicle.
Much like, if you can imagine, you go out to your car, put in the key, turn it, and the car says: today we are going shopping… work is bad, you are a slave, f… the boss… we are going shopping.
Life wouldn’t quite work, would it? But this is how it has been, except it’s the internal machine that is doing it. It’s your legs, it’s your hands that obey, but the order comes from the mind or from some emotion: both a random firing of nerve endings.
Now, enter coaching.
You, with all these cats inside operating your life, enter into a coaching agreement with me.
For a while you are meek, or obedient, you feel me out, you feel how much I allow, what you can get away with.
And then, with full force, you let one of those cats loose…
Inquiring minds questions, make me do all the thinking… Of you resist and fight me every step of the way… Or you sulk, quit, call me names… Or break out into one of your tirades, that I have heard 30 times already, and it didn’t have any relevance even the first time.
These are all cat moves, and unfortunately my tamed cats may respond.
My number one cat move is throwing you out… or give you an ultimatum… or threaten you with being thrown out.
Bad combination, because, often, the cats win.
One of my clients has come up with a healthy income idea. I could see that it could finally put him on the map… after all he is talented and deserves it.
At the moment he makes that product one at a time. I ask: ‘how much do you get for them?’ ‘$200-$400 a piece,’ he says. ‘But it only cost me a few dollars…’ he adds really quickly.
The plan is to mass produce them, and sell the heck out of them.
But that would put him in hundreds of homes… people who don’t care about him, don’t even want to know about him, they just want the finished product: an amazing conversation starter, a limited print original…
No, his ego cat wiggles, and fights, and claws to break free: he is afraid. His self image of scheister, cheater, manipulator will be without work… NO WAY!
The fact that he’ll have money to pay the rent, pay child support, take vacations, don’t matter at this moment, and definitely don’t matter to the cat. Staying the same does… Making money by being a liar, cheater, etc.
Wow! My cat threatens him to cut him loose… Now it’s a cat fight… ugly.
Will I be able to tame his cat, to herd his cats to a place where he can be rich and famous? That is what he has earned… except that his cats don’t want that.
The problem is this: until he (you?) start to successfully control your cats, know them and have strategies to harness them (what, harness a cat? Yeah!) even the best coach, the best program will lose out, because who is missing is you!
Unfortunately no one can do it for you.
Many call it self-discipline, but it is not the self that needs the discipline, it is the cats. Cat-training, cat discipline.
I don’t teach cat-discipline. I leave it to Andy Shaw…
But until you go through that, at least the first 100 pages of his book, Creating a Bug Free Mind, I will not be able to take you to a place you want to go, because your cats don’t want to go.
I can coach you out of trouble, but success will elude you, regardless.
Is there any help I can provide you to be more effective and efficient in learning to control your cats? Yeah, the audios are great for that. Which one? The one you listen to… because believe it or not, only about 10% of the buyers of the Avatar State Audios actually use it.
There is even one (at least) who bought the high quality mp3 player, and still doesn’t play the audio… WTF? Which cat made the decision for them?
All the Playground calls are digging deep for the hidden. That is the essence of the Playground, the digging.
I think I am a gold digger by profession: I dig for the gold.
Thanks Sophie,
That is what I am looking forward to—“how much more is hidden”. 🙂 Is the mentioned Playground tape available?
Thanks Helena,
I didn’t intend ever to say that taming the cats is enough. If you look at today’s article it is totally clear that taming is useful, but there is a lot more going on. And had you heard today’s Playground you’d be amazed how much more is hidden even beyond that I have seen in that article. Wow. Deep.
Wow, great article! The cat analogy made this really easy for me to understand.
Also, I totally agree that Andy Shaw’s Creating a Bug Free Mind is a very good place to start learning how to go about taming the ‘cats’. However, I still feel your products (tapes, articles, coaching) are necessary to reach beyond just tame cats. Tame cats are nice, but are not enough, too limited. There is so much more.