You Are Not the Boss of Me!

You Are Not the Boss of Me!

Power is such a funny thing. We all have it, we each use it in our own way. Some of us own our power, keep ourselves separate from others’ shenanigans, and go on about our business. Some of us pretend to give our power away, and feeling like we have to do someone else’s bidding. Some of us pretend that we can take others’ power and get them to bend to our will.

Thing is, and I know this is kind of creepy, but you don’t have access to my power, only I do. I have to go through a bunch of mislearnings to learn to act as your proxy inside my head so you can seem to be the boss of me.

Sometimes I will act as your proxy to push me around from fear of you, or from fear learned a long time ago from one or more of my adults. Sometimes shame may be the impetus, or feeling like we have no resources. This feeling often comes with an icky, shrinky feeling, like we are less than.

Why am I strong? What makes me capable? How am I competent? Why do I trust?

Sometimes I will act like I have power over you. I will try to intimidate, or scare you, or manipulate you in some other way into doing what I want you to do. When you do, I may often feel better than.

Sometimes I am in a situation, like work, where someone is the boss of me, or I am the boss of someone. If I have less than or better than stuff going on, this can make for interesting dynamics we call power struggles, which tend to be high on drama and low on productive activities.

And then there is teamwork.

How am I a good team player? What makes me work toward our goals? Why do I enjoy cooperation?

When I a good team player, I know what our goals are. I know what my job is, and I know how we are working together. When we are a team, we work for our mutual support and that feels great. We get a sense of community. We get a sense of connectedness. We share a sense of purpose, and those things all contribute to a sense of personal well being.

When I am clear about my goals for us, and make sure that we understand each other, working together is much easier. When I am clear about what my expectations of your performance, and my performance are, we can take measure of where we are. Because we are communicating respectfully, we can ask for help or guidance if we need it, and can trust the answers we get.

That is the ideal. Doesn’t always work that way, but I can do my part to help bring it about. I can be clear in my communication. I can ask for help if I need it. I can be straight about my performance and accomplishment. And often, the others will follow suit. They will see that it is way easier. I like that.

How have I changed from pushing myself around to being a good team player?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 05282014

Perfect, Schmerfect

Perfect, Schmerfect

Good enough. Words I have come to love. In the yorely days, good enough never was. Being a perfectionist sucks. Well, at least it sucked for me.

There is a huge difference between doing my best and doing it perfectly. When I strive to do my best, I feel satisfied and content with my efforts, and I am relaxed. When I try to do it perfectly, I am frustrated and tense, and may find myself reworking and reworking and never actually getting my project done.

I also found, for me, mind you, that the older I got, the more my perfectionistic tendencies got in my way. In fact, sometimes I would actually be stymied into inaction. Yikes. It turned out a lot of my old procrastination was based on an unconscious fear that I couldn’t or wouldn’t, do X perfectly, so I couldn’t even get started, and would withdraw into time-wasting behaviors. Oy, did I hate that. Especially since I was just baffled as to what was going on.

How do I know good enough is good enough?  

Of course, one of the things I did think was that somehow my divine perfection was tied into my being able to do stuff perfectly. It meant that because I made mistakes, I was inherently flawed. If I were inherently flawed, with no hope of change, what was the point of even trying? Depressing.

How do I see my divine perfection? What makes me good enough?

It seemed to me that I was surrounded by people who were better than I, people who never made mistakes, who recognized my flawed nature, and looked down on me for it.

Oy. What makes me compassionate?

As I let go of my perfectionism, I started to see how much those people who had been looking down on me were suffering, trying to hide their mistakes by drawing attention to me, or anywhere except on them.

As I let go of my perfectionism, I started to see how much leeway we have in how we accomplish stuff. I used to think there was one right way to do things, and either I knew it, and was somehow better than some people for it, or I didn’t, and was therefore, less than.

Oy. Why am I flexible?

The perfectionist thing is all about negative emotional judgments, judgments that hurt both the people we make them about, and hurt us because we stay stuck in the I’m better/less than X.

Exercising our judgment is a good thing. We can make decisions about behavior and consequences, but when it starts slipping into our thoughts about people, we need to take a step back. Often, when we want to make negative emotional judgments about people, we’ve got some topic up that is bringing up feelings of not good enough for us. When we can identify those topics, and address and integrate them, we will go back to feeling fine.

How do I know I am okay? Why do I feel safe? How do I trust the Universe?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 01112014