Either everybody counts or nobody counts… this is the principle that makes Michael Connelly’s books so dear to me. Obviously, to me, that labels me as a commie, a Democrat, a lefty… but I really don’t care… It’s your issue, not mine. My job is to be true to my principles.
I like crime novels. Most of them are clean and most of them go into the details that allow me to be forced to ride on the surface, to turn the page too eagerly, but stay on the page I am on: savoring it. Rare to find books like that.
No FOMO, I am where I am supposed to be. No desire to be anywhere else, doing anything other than what I am doing.
Priceless.
With that said: it is as hard to be in no FOMO as it is to relate to all people the same way. All clients, all students, all neighbors, everyone…
Be curt with the resisting, belligerent, non-receptive people… and hang out leisurely with the ones the respond well.
NEXT! Screams the mind… Maybe not with words, but with wanting to get to the person or persons who would be like butter under my butter knife, putty in my hands, take my teaching and make my life like a wedding march… victorious… lol.
As a coach the dream is to work with that kind of people.
I have never truly experienced it, but I have a hunch: it is like masturbation. Of course you know what your own rhythm is… and you give it to yourself. I don’t masturbate… by principle.
The result for me: I am alone.
I allow that “ideal” to be there, I allow my thought to wander there, but I don’t do much of anything to actually get there, to find the clients that would make my life like a wedding march… I can see how ridiculous I am… but let me explore this deeper… I think there is gold in them hills.
I study marketing, learning about writing in a way that will get you that “whale” type of person…
…and then I ponder : do I really want to give only to some and not to all who finds themselves resonate with the future, with the possibility of becoming a human being?
Choice A: I get the whales. Choice B: I get everybody who is interested but not committed… Two drawers… ugh
It’s a dance. Really. Imagine you are a woman… You go to a dance. Anyone can come and ask you for a dance. And you can say yes, or you can say no… And you judge from a predefined, prejudiced place, and your life remains the same… Because you look at what’s visible, and judge.
Or you judge from looking at yourself, and you are needy… Just as bad.
So my life is a lot like a dance with many and very diverse dance partners, and my job is to dance, to cause “dance”, for myself and the other.
So I have been looking what is MY principle about that… dancing.
I just finished Michael Connelly’s newest crime novel, Night Fire. I have read all his books, 30 or so, by the way. I can’t stomach his Bosch TV show, I think the actor is miscast… ugh.
In this latest novel he discovers that the detective who he learned the principle “everybody counts or nobody counts”, this old detective acted against his own principle… Disturbing…
Living like by a principle, working by a principle is so rare, that you stand out like a sore thumb: the majority, the 99% picks and chooses who and what counts… who and what don’t.
Many of my clients are on the suffering end, the victim end of this picking and choosing… they are suffering as if it meant something about them… really.
But even if you are not some minority by birth, by sexual orientation, by skin color, by religion, you can experience yourself on the business end of that particular gun: slighted, blamed, disapproved of, judged, killed.
My job is to not judge. Confession time: the only way to not judge is to notice that you are judging, and not judge yourself for it. Nor believe what your judgment says. Consider it noise…
It is impossible to not judge…
I see the face of someone with, by now, a familiar contempt: one side of the mouth goes higher than the other… The eyes that don’t smile, even though the wrinkles are there… the sparkly child-eyes of the 60 year old: a practiced move to project innocence. Practiced and now unnoticed.
Ugh. The judgment is right there… I allow it and don’t try to change it.
The more things change the more they remain the same… Whatever you allow to be (i.e. don’t try to change) allow YOU to be.
Which is what is underneath the principle: either everybody counts or nobody counts.
- I encounter people with energies that I can barely tolerate… My job is to allow myself to feel the energy and do for them what they paid for… To make them count…
- I do tasks in my business that I don’t like… my job is to allow the “not like it!” feeling to be there and do it anyway.
- I don’t like Mother Theresa, but the words attributed to her resonate with me and fit here:
The Paradoxical Commandments by Dr Kent Keith
People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.
If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.
The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.
People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.
People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.
Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.
The beingness this poem, the paradoxical commandments suggest, are sure to create a life you love, and you love yourself in it.
But what do you need to have these not as commandments, but as principles for life… that come from within. Commandmends are rules… because…
you get dutiful, meek, and miserable by rules… while principles light you up.
In the What’s missing workshops we investigate who you have been being, what rules and commandments you’ve been living by, who are you being that your life doesn’t work or doesn’t work as well as you would like it to.
And then we look “what is missing?” What we are looking for is almost always in the language, in the vein of the Paradoxical Commandments… because the Paradoxical Commandmenst talk about being, not doing…
And what is missing in your life so it isn’t working, so you are not happy, fulfilled, excited, joyful, or healthy, is some beingness…
Depending on your vibration, depending on your ability to be inspired, depending on your cone of vision, on your willingness to look outside the box (find option C), you can find something that is missing… that beingness that if it were there, your whole life would start to blossom.
And often I have to look for your missing, because you can’t.
But no matter whether it is you or me… you need to be able to learn and hold the vision of that being… and attempt to be that way, learn to be that way, until it becomes who you are.
You may need a spiritual capacity or two to support you in that… no capacities? No new future… only rules, pretenses, and more unhappiness. This is really option A and option B…
Explore your options on this webinar
