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I watched Bob The Butler again yesterday.
I want all my clients to watch it to see some of themselves.
I love, have always loved that movie. There is something magical about it, regardless of its fantasy ending. But what?
After all Bob is a slob, a never do well, an uncoordinated big slab of a guy. He gets his vocational and relationship guidance from a hamster. Not who you want your students to be… would you?
And yet.
So what is it about Bob that endears me, gets me firmly in his corner, rooting for him? What gets the kid want him to be in their lives?
I have been a human (albeit ‘just a woman human’) for seventy six years, and it just happened that I have words for that ‘thing’ that I admire, that people crave, that Bob has.
Bob has his heart in the right place.
When he screws up, royally, or just. It is never about him. He allows a fuckup be just a fuckup, pays the price and moves on. And still care about the people who now, maybe, hate him. He is not about lofty ideals, principles. He just wants to work, and have a place under the sun. Get to where he needs to get to, do what he needs to do, because that is what life is.
He has zero distinctions. He is utterly clueless, incompetent and he knows it. And he has no concept of better. Doing something better, doing anything better.
In this regard he is like every single one of my students and clients. In this regard.
But in other regards, heart in the right place, doing things to do them, no… In those regards my students and clients are not like Bob at all.
There, everything is about them, talking about them, and nothing is just what it is: done, not done, good, not so good, short, long, incomplete… No. because it all becomes about them.
In spite of Bob failing at every new job… he is at the end of job listings starting with the letter b… Butler is the last. The next letter is c.
And every former employer loves seeing him. For decades I coached people in Landmark for nothing. I don’t think any of them cheers when they see me.
My heart wasn’t at the right place coaching them.
So what or where is this right place?
Most of us have seen this ‘psychological tool’ everyone teaches and yet everyone misses where it matters.
Rubin’s Vase is two facing silhouettes and the space between them.
The space, when it’s the context, is like the silhouette of a vase.
You can look at life and everything in it through Rubin’s Vase, and decide where you’ll be. Whether you’ll be a face of the space.
- When you are a face… your heart is always about you… so it is not at the right place.
- When you are the space… your heart can’t be about you… you only exist as the space for life to play out.
I lived about 70 of my 76 years as the face… Miserable, miserable, miserable.
When I am the space there is joy. The joy for its own sake. Love for its own sake. Life for its own sake.
There is no ‘I’ in teaching… no ‘I’ and no ‘You’. Just teaching that either worked or it didn’t.
Our Bob the Butler lives in the space…
Your first job would be to move YOURSELF from face to space… back and force, so you can tell where you are at. It is a skill some have more than others. When in bed, on my side, I can’t feel which side of mine I am lying… so my skill in body position is not well honed. I have a real shortage of clues about left, right, up and down. I think it’s the dyslexia.
But maybe because I can’t be unconsciously competent at that, I have to look for clues.
And that takes us to the clues… To the fact that a full eight billion of you have never, or scarcely ever have looked for clues in anything… Clues in reality I mean.***
But maybe it is never too late to start. For you.
If I were you, I would start with the clues I have been missing ever since you were born. What your space cadet persona has completely missed.
Or start with seeing that you’ve always been the faces… never the space…
In some personal coaching, maybe on a workshop type call, I’ll go back with you down memory lane to see what you missed… so you can start learning of its existence.
I mean that ‘learning of its existence’. It doesn’t exist for you right now. It’s missing. And it’s missing that it is missing.
Jodie, my student, is practicing seeing it for the first time… Her missing distinction is ‘faster’. Running faster.
A major step towards being able to do any of this is the Drink your Food process. In that you forego your automatic way of eating, your chew-chew-swallow way, to chew-chew 50 times and then consciously swallow.
This forces you to become present and conscious and aware. Takes you right out of your space cadet state… and into reality.
Without this step the whole shebang won’t work.
And it that space I can only do one thing: talk at you. And you can only do one thing: be the ‘offended’ face.
Ugh.
***Dyslexics do a whole lot better in life than normies. I assert the reason for that is that they need to look for clues in reality to ‘know’ much of anything… And that single fact makes a dyslexic twice as likely to become a high achiever.
