I had a coaching call today with my friend, let’s call him Max.
He is an entrepreneur and we’ve been friends for some years now.
I coach him, and he coaches me, and the goal is that we get equal amount of value: each get what they need.
Max’s problem has been similar to a lot of my students’: he has had a hard time choosing a direction to take his business. So we spend a lot of time brainstorming about possible directions, and then he doesn’t choose. We do it again, and he doesn’t choose… again.
Years ago, when I still lived in New Jersey, so more than 14 years ago, I did a lot of work in Axiology, the science of measuring values.
For most of us, values are very subjective… but for this guy, Robert Hartman, it occurred that values could be measured.
His idea was that the Universe, Source, God, what have you, has an order, let’s call it the Original Design, that had a set order that was consistent with the Universe and harmony, and growth, and peace.
Anyway, I don’t want to make this complicated, and it isn’t, not really, the amount of importance we place on certain value makes us harmonious or disharmonious with the Original Design.
If you place too much value on one thing, you must place too little value on something else. You may even place value on things that destroy, take away from others, and then you are even more disharmonious with the Original Design.
The vehicle, the testing instrument is very simple: put a list of items in the order of importance, relevance to you. Marriage, happiness, good taste, simple things like these.
Sounds really innocent, right? But although it’s innocent and simple, and maybe looks childish, the results you get show you, clearly, your score of harmony with the Universe.
Now, why would your harmony with the Universe matter? Because that score also shows your coherence.
Your coherence is a more relevant measure than your IQ, your “intelligence quotient”
It shows where you are delusional, where you are out of line, where you make mistakes and why.
Max is a very intelligent man. Highly intelligent. He went and got his Axiology test done yesterday and posted it for me, after all I am a certified axiology consultant… at least I was 14 years ago.
His coherence scores were consistently high, except… drum roll, his relationship with himself… he has an unstable sense of his abilities: one moment he thinks himself a genius, the next a moron…
We could say that he swings back and forth between overconfident and unconfident.
This gives him a life in hell. Now, mind you, his soul correction “Share your light” has something to do with this… I have three “share your light” people close to me, and they all share this exact same behavior, this alternating overconfident/underconfident behavior.
Overly independent, yet overly fearful.
I have a call scheduled with Max, and I am sitting here, with my wires crossed, stupid, and feel horrible. The anxiety is permanent, and reaches into my brain, making me incoherent.
They are Max’s feelings, he is still on another call, dreading my evaluation of him.
OK, I am continuing now, after the call with Max. In the call I told him that his value profile says that he is a lot smarter than me. There was no reaction to that… he probably knew it.
Then I told him that his area of development is being able to have a stable horizon, so he can stop feeling like he is on a boat on the ocean in the middle of a storm.
And then he will have to create a distance between his Self and his self… aka the mind chattering 24 hours a day, seven days a week, telling him that he is smart and then that he is stupid, and what he should do, what he should have done, blah blah blah.
It just so happens that this is the area that I am going to concentrate my energies for the foreseeable future. Not because it is the easiest thing to teach. Not because it is the most profitable. But because MY horizon is to develop the next generation of human beings, and no human being can be without superior control over their attention, without that distance between the two selves, without a steady horizon.
Oh, one more thing: I was pondering why it doesn’t bother me that he didn’t question that he was smarter than me… meaning that I have less brain capacity than he has.
Then it dawned on me: It is not what you have, but what you do with what you have, that matters most that will ultimately produce your results.
The world is full of talented, creative, smart derelicts… underachievers, never do wells…
Because it is not what you have, really, but what you manage to do with it.
And the difference is coherence, a steady horizon, and a distance between the Self and the mind.
It all boils down to that.
