3 Coaches, Avoiding Confrontation, What’s Your Filter?
I now have three coaches. Three different people, three different styles, three different worldviews. the only thing that is common among them is that they represent a worldview that is the polar opposite to mine.
Why would I hire coaches so different from myself?
Because I hope that their different vantage points will make my own filters visible to me. I don’t expect them to catch my filters… but I promise I will catch them. As soon as I see them.
Now, if you are paying attention, you should be asking, what is a filter… coffee filter, U.V. filter… what the heck are you talking about Sophie?
If you didn’t ask this question, I assert that you sleepwalk through life and ‘for you everything is the same as everything else… except that not always.’
Offended? Good.
I have been beating this water and the fish example to death… but it’s a good one. Unless the fish jumps out of the water, and has a chance to look down long enough to observe and see that he is not in water, and what is underneath him is water… this fish of ours will never realize that he has been living in water.
That is a filter. You can’t see what is everywhere, you can’t see what is ‘normal’ for you.
Everything that you can’t notice, that no one can convince you that you are swimming in… is a filter. Invisible, to you, normal, to you, binding for you…
So here is the first filter I discovered
One of the filters that define my life is my relationship to controversy and confrontation.
I’ve been living, for the most part of my life, as if I can’t defend myself, as if I can’t defend my ideas, as if I can’t defend my stuff. That my only chance for being myself, being able to live true to my ideals and principles is to live alone, and surround myself with people who agree with me, preferably admire me.
If my filter says that I can’t do that, I can be sure to lose. It’s a sure bet.
My landlord will overcharge me. Will threaten me. Will let me live without a working stove for years. Without a working furnace for weeks in the dead of winter. For years with peeling walls, floors and ceilings.
The idea of standing up for myself came from others, but ‘they don’t know me, they don’t know that I can’t…’
The past month I finally stood up to my landlord (a little bit!) and he has done about 5% of what he was supposed to do… and today I experience the fear again. I have to work to change this filter, to stand up for myself, probably till I die.
All my life I watched people getting what they wanted…
…but they ‘probably’ had some magical quality about them, something I didn’t… lol.
Hell yeah. They didn’t have my filter… They had filters different from mine.
One way this filter of mine manifests is how I shy away from arguments. How I never participated on teams or team sports. How I never got a promotion or a raise when I still had jobs, regardless of the quality of my work.
When challenged I go meek, I go shy, I go stupid. Just thinking about this I have dread rising up my chest and breathing is suddenly difficult.
Alternatively I yell… incoherently, ineffectively, making a total ass of myself.
There are all kinds of filters one can have.
All three of my coaches think that saying that something is hard or difficult, or wrong is a really bad move.
They say that now you are stuck with that and what are you going to do about it? They can’t see it as a filter: but I can: I don’t have that. Saying that something is hard makes me roll up my sleeves and go for it. Unless, of course, it includes arguing with someone… Then I’ll pay possum. lol.
Another type of filter makes you impulsive and jump before you even look
I have a friend who has that in spades.
He bought into an investment scheme some time ago. We discussed it several times. He gave me ‘all’ the numbers, and they looked good.
Then I started to suspect that something wasn’t right. He is starting to have blood pressure issues: and he never had any reason to see a doctor his entire life, not before this investment.
This morning I asked if we could discuss the thing again, and if I could see all the numbers…
I have some understanding of business, I have an almost complete mba… just one credit short.
Found out that his numbers don’t work. His best course of action would be to drop the whole thing. All future earnings, everything. He delegated everything so his monthly management fee is so high, that there is no way he can make money. Literally, no matter what the return on investment will be, he won’t make money.
This was the first time I heard about that management fee… he conveniently hid it from me and himself, until he lost enough money that he now will need to declare bankruptcy.
His filter filters out all the bad stuff…
Filters out all the bad stuff that doesn’t agree with his rosy outlook. Bad stuff like monthly exorbitant fee, and only allows through only the information that shows that people are good, the investment is good, and he will make money. A deadly filter, maybe even worse than mine… lol.
So, if you’ve read this far, you are probably asking what you can do with your self-defeating filters… and if you aren’t asking that: you should.
The answer is going to surprise you: you can’t do away with your filter.
Filters can’t be killed, they can only be managed.
Some of us are ready to manage it ourselves, others, like my friend, will probably need me to keep it in front of him for a while, until he learns to ask the question himself: is this a filter? Am I looking through my rose-colored glasses?
Is it stopping me from seeing the whole picture? Stopping me from taking care of myself? Stopping me from living my life to the fullest?
Of course, connecting to Source, getting activators, and learning about your filters, about the machine that runs your life will make this more reliable, a lot more effective, than leaving it to chance or to another person.
My programs are about connecting and learning… developing new brain pathways, developing new capacities, developing a strong guidance system. It all starts with learning to connect to Source… it’s simple. It’s easy. It’s fast…. as long as your filters are the same as mine.
You have some choices about how to do the work of identifying your filters.
- You could hire me as a ‘coach’ to have one-on-one calls. I don’t have any availability right now.
- I have quite a few programs that you could do… all recorded…
- And I am in the process of leading the crowning achievement of the past 12 years… a course where in six hours I cover everything you need to know.
The link below is to that course.
Identify your filters so you can manage them
I think we can attack that sucker together, would you like that? Peacefully standing up for ourselves: what a wonderful dream.
Sophie: Congrats for standing up, even if just a little bit. I have a similar filter; I avoid confrontation too. I was once told that I do so because I experienced much conflict on the battlefield in a past life lol.
But is “standing up” for oneself necessarily confrontational? No, but it usually feels that way to me.