When Graeme my old editor saw this struggling diagram for the first time, he said “I know what that feels like. We’re like a boat dead in the water and big waves are washing us around and around and we have no control over it. And this part (he pointed to the arrows headed straight towards the goal) that’s when we’re driving the bloody boat.”
It’s listening to our inner guidance system, which includes the way that we experience our connection to others, that “drives the bloody boat.”
Whether it’s OUR anguish and despair and hopelessness or THEIR anguish, despair and hopelessness, it’s when we’re stuck in those feelings, that’s when we’re going round and round in circles not changing the thing that WE care about and it feels seriously crappy. Do you get how big that is?
That stuckness is the reason that we think some things are beyond our capacity to influence – when in fact, our ability to “drive the bloody boat” is as big as the combination of our Care Factor, our connection to others and our willingness to listen to and act on our Inner Guidance system.
I don’t care how big this thing is that you feel anguished or despairing about. Our ability to influence what we care so much about, has almost no limits. When we understand OUR part in it, when we understand what WE’RE meant to know or do about someone else’s anguish and despair and hopelessness – pffft – that’s the sound of all that overwhelm disappearing.
And then we’re playing the part that we’re meant to play in creating this change that we care so much about.
If you’re wondering if that could even remotely, possibly be true, bring your anguish and despair and curiosity into a live event and experience it for yourself. I look forward to sharing a smile of wonder together.
Even without a specific photo, I’ll take this opportunity to give the editor of my first three books a bit of well-deserved appreciation. Graeme Trotman is a very talented kinesiologist and an engineering whizz kid with a mind like a steel trap and a very humorous approach to editing – I still have his carefully printed award for Gigantus Paragraphis. He’s from Pakenham in Victoria.