What is the difference between a field and a context?

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Oh… and why should you care? lol

First off: what’s a context?

The best way I can explain a context is that it’s a backdrop. Like the background in front of whatever is happening happening. You are unaware of it, and therefore your actions are not consistent with what people expect. You are offensive. Or you are disagreeable. Or you are out of line.

With context, you have a default context, and then there are invented contexts… You bring that into the interaction. Interacting with yourself, with things, with other people. Your context, the context you bring with you will define your attitude, your behavior, the success of your interactions, the success of your endeavors.

Most people bring their need to be acknowledged, to be admired, to be able to hide that they need help, love, companionship, whatever, because they bruise easily.

Over the ages the sense of entitlement of people has been growing. And some of the things people feel entitled to are

1. that their opinion is the truth, whether it is about themselves or about others, the world, etc.
2. that they need to be fanned because they deserve it, whether they did anything deserving at all or even ever.

It is not easy to see, or even distinguish, accept, tell the truth about the context you bring to life.

Context as a background is great, but there is an advanced way to look at interactions, and that is considering backdrop, context as a room that restricts what can happen inside them.

We call these rooms that have walls, door, etc. fields. But it would be maybe a better name: stages.

You see stage designers design the scenery, three dimensional, to match what can and does happen in the script in that scene.

Here are Chekhov’s stage rules:

• One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.
• Remove everything that has no relevance to the story.
• If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired

So it’s a system. A stage makes what happens on it predictable…

There are, in this system I learned, five possible fields, five possible stage designs.

Fields or stages are different from context in that they have only certain roles participants can assume and play. And the outcome is totally predictable… nothing unexpected can happen…

If you are surprised by what happened, that only means that you were clueless…

The five stages are:

• Father/Child
• Mother/Child
• Playmate/Sibling
• Admirer/Admired
• Partnership

For now let’s look at some aspects of those stages:

Aspect #1: Are they even or uneven?

• Father/Child has father on a pedestal, and the child is below.
• So is Mother/Child
• Playmate/sibling has a constant struggle for dominance… either of the participants can be higher by duking it, fighting it out at any time
• Admirer/admired is the stage where most people spend their most of their lives… it’s where the domination the participants exchange admiration or slights.

Admirer/admired, the field and the roles

Admirer/admired is the only field where you can feel slighted, offended, even frustrated. Or angry.

It is the field of entitlement. That is the source of the offense, the frustration, the anger, the impatience

To the degree that you live your life in that field to the same degree your life is wretched.

I also spend 10% of my life in that field, but you, likely, upwards of 90%, maybe as much as 100%. Unfortunately that 10% cost me disproportionately too much… I’ll explain later.

Living in that field is not part of your DNA, even if entitlement, the two child genes are… But…

…it is not the genes that keep you there, it is the EGO.

Ego is the aspect of you that insists on that you are right, that it is right. That insists that you do not change… because why change something that is working. Working for the ego, not you.

But ego doesn’t know what works. it just wants to keep you the same. It just wants to be right.

To the degree that ego dominates you

To the degree that ego dominates you, to the same degree you’ll be offended by everything I teach, and you’ll be unwilling to even see it, so you can decide if you’d want it or not.

The battle is between your soul/spirit and the ego. Between the good life and the ego. Between who you could be, and the ego. Ultimately between heaven on earth and the ego.

Life when there is a battle inside is no fun. And you know if you have that… Just look. Feel into your chest.

Because what you really want is not possible in the field where you live your life.

You see the Admirer/Admired field can only allow for a very limited number of scenarios.

• You can be the admirer or you can be the not-admirer: ‘I don’t admire you!’ The exclamation mark is important there, it is like a shout. You’ll put the other person down…
• And you’ll be the admired/not-admired, interacting with life, tasks, people as if they were either admiring you, or offending you.

This, even if a task, life, or another person consider themselves and their actions in another field, you’ll consider them and their actions as the ‘not-admirer’ and anything they do or say will offend you, frustrate you, anger you…

For example I teach, coach, consult exclusively in the father/child field.

Inside that field I point out where you are off, I point out what you misunderstand, I point out all kinds of things about you and about what you do.

If you come to my classes, my calls, my programs expecting that I am in the admirer/admired field, or that I am in mother/child, or playmate/sibling,  you’ll hate the interactions, and you’ll never learn anything, because everything I say will occur to you, seem to you, feel to you as offending.

The only place where you can learn from me is if and when you willingly accept that in teaching, coaching, guiding you, my role is father, and your role is child.

Any and all other fields are disruptive to learning.

I had once an assigned coach in a program. She was clearly in the admirer/admired field, and she was a fangirl, a cheerleader, and in that program I accomplished exactly zero, due to the kind of coaching that field allowed. No correction, no feedback, just adulation. Ugh.

So for me to be able to give you what you pay for, you need to get out of the admirer/admired field… and INVENT FOR YOURSELF to be in need of learning, in need of being taught. That is what is the ground rule of the father/child field.

You need to invent that you need learning, coaching, growing more than you need to be admired.

As promised, here is how being in that field hinders me and my life:

1. I move, unconsciously into the admired/admirer field when people consider that the appropriate field to interact with me is the admirer/admired field.

When people send me email, post comments, or attempt to admire me openly on calls. I don’t want to be in that field! I don’t want to admire them, and I don’t want to be admired.

These are the people, no matter how much money they pay me, these are the people who never learn. Especially the ones who consider themselves above me… superior to me. Where my job in the field is to admire them.

2. The other times I find myself in the admirer/admired field is when I pay someone to coach me, but they don’t consider me a person, don’t consider that I have already accomplished something, or that I am smart… or whatever stupid things my ego wants. The ego says: ‘but you don’t know me!‘

Those relationships always end up a disaster. I kick them out or the coaches kick me out… Predictable… And yet I haven’t learned from the myriads of instances.

My whole life is about causing something…

To be able to cause, you need to be in a field where you can. In a field that is designed for that. In father/child. Or maybe partnership… But partnership, the field is only for human beings, the next evolutionary stage of humanity. Homo sapiens can’t even fathom it.

So when you find yourself in a field that is counter to what you want, you need to learn to move the interaction entirely into a field that is conducive to what you want… or the result will be disastrous, or at the minimum unpleasant.

• You want intimacy, romance? Stay in the admirer/admired but be the admirer.
• You want fun? Move to playmate/sibling, but be willing to be playful.
• Want nurturing? Mother/child.
• Want to learn or teach or cause or lead? Father/Child.

In the Fields Course that I am designing, in the course that is in the experimental stage…

…the three important phases will be

• 1. identifying the field you think you are in.
• 2. identifying the field the other thing or person thinks you are in
• 3. move the whole interaction to a field where there is harmony.

At this point I have two sessions scheduled, and we are still just learning about the fields, what they allow, what they don’t. The homework wanders into phase two… but…

We won’t move past phase one, until participants are ready. Until the knowledge becomes instinctual. Head-knowledge is useless here…

If I have ever thought a course could really change lives, this is it.

Because the course is an experimental course where I am learning and teaching at the same time, I have no idea how long it should be.

So at this point only two sessions are in it.

To take the knowledge to instinctual, we’ll need to have a lot of time to practice… Most people have no distinctions, no instinctual knowledge, no skills, and refuse to feel into things. They can’t tell their ass from a hole in the ground, or don’t even feel their feelings.

One of my students is almost perpetually offended. By life. By her results. And by me. By what is happening. By other people.

She is only aware that she is offended about 1% of the time. Until she can feel what she feels, she won’t be able to do much with this methodology, even though she needs it desperately.

I learned enough about this 20 years ago, that one would think I am somewhat competent in it. I am not.

Competence would mean mastering all three phases… and I am nowhere near that.

Your life is as disastrous as much as your mismatched fields dominate in your life.

Mine is 20% disastrous… But the two participants who were on the call with me on Thursday had 91% and 99% respectively…

You see, knowing why life, conversations, relationships, projects, don’t work is the essence of diagnosis. Accurate diagnosis is 70% of success in any endeavor.

As long as you only look at the foreground and neither the context, nor the field in which the foreground happens, you have no chance, zero chance to make the situation work better.

And that is why your life, or most if it, is disastrous. And it will remain that way, not because there is anything wrong with you or with them or with it. But because you lack distinctions, you lack different ways to look at life and allow what you see to guide you.

Join me in the new ventureThe first session of the course  was recorded and you can get it to help you make a decision if you want the course or not.

If you now are not able to hear anything outside of praise or being put down, you won’t even be able to imagine, that one day you’d be able to hear me call you stupid and you won’t even bat an eye. Because in Father/Child there is no way to be offended… and if and when you can be in that field with me, the only field where learning happens, you won’t experience the disaster like you do now.

And because you cannot even imagine hearing things differently, you are, probably, not teachable because of that.

PS: this whole issue, both context and fields are part of a larger area of life: communication.