What are the invisibles?
A student of mine emailed me a few seconds ago.
She says: I grieve the loss of the camaraderie. And the affectionate joking that was so much fun. Is it dead, or does it have a chance of returning some day?
My answer to that was short, cryptic: “look at yourself first… always”
I am certain that she received it as an insult. But what was my answer? It was coaching.
When the saying says: There are three mysteries of life: Air to a bird; water to a fish; and man to himself.
When Dostoevsky 1 says: Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.
These quotes deal with the invisibles of life. The fish doesn’t know it is swimming in water. The bird doesn’t know about any freakin’ air, and man doesn’t know anything about his nature.
But while it’s ok for the fish, and it’s ok for the bird, man needs to know about his nature if he wants to become more of a man, have more power to achieve, relate, and be well.
Your attitude
One of the invisibles is your attitude. You are never clear about your attitude. Everyone else around knows exactly what is your attitude, but you are in the dark about it. Why? Because you are unconscious about your attitude.
Your filter aka Already Always Listening
Another one of the invisibles is your filter. A filter is a mental device that allows only things to pass through to your conscious mind that fit the filter. A filter is a binary structure: it has two states: on or off. 2
Some well-known filters are: I understand/I don’t understand. I agree/I don’t agree. It is true/It is not true. I like it/I don’t like it. Your filter is unconscious and therefore it is invisible.
Some other filters are: I am being attacked/I am ok, I am being pushed/I am ok, I am comfortable/I am not comfortable.
No matter what is your filter, no matter what is your attitude, they act as an alteration, as a skewing device of reality.
Unless you learn to put attention on your attitude, distinguish your filter, your life is going to go in a predictable way, more of the same, more of the same.
There is a third invisible that I am going to share with you here… I have shared it many times before, and we had a lot of people go through the free webinars last year about your default name. I think I have a free replay somewhere, I’ll dig it up for you, if you want it. It was part of the course: The Soaring Method. Magical.
Your default state, your default name
This third invisible (third in a list of many!) could be said as your default state you end up with, no matter what.
Mine is devastated… that is my default result state. Yours could be unloved, unappreciated, unwanted, stupid, slow, not the one, etc. Not pretty.
This is invisible, although if you think about it, you always end up feeling like that. The book “What do you say after you say Hello” called it your “home address”.
What is even more invisible is that you actually work, feverishly, to bring it about. You and I.
And unless you get hip to it, you’ll end up feeling that way really frequently.
As you can see, that was a loaded email I sent to my student. Does she know what to do with it? No.
Will she be able to know after reading this article? I surely hope so.
- don’t know who he is? google it…
- Know what filter you are wearing. If you think you are a spaghetti filter but really you are a flat pasta filter… you are delusional and you have no power
