I believe in all that has never been spoken.

I want to free what awaits within me

so that what no one has dared to wish for

may for once spring clear without my contriving.

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,

but this is what I need to say.

May what I do flow from me like a river,

no forcing and no holding back,

the way it is with children.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

I came across that poem in a course on designing better learning environments. It’s not just a piece of sentimentalism. It reminded me to be me - to embrace the way I think and speak and create and dream. It reminded me of that great Olympic runner (celebrated in Chariots of Fire) Eric Liddell saying “When I run, I feel God’s pleasure”. It reminded me that each of us has a distinctive genius that doesn’t always get an “airing”, but which needs focus and release…

Find your Voice.

So dependency theory has underlined some of the ways we become hooked either ON something/someone or BY something/someone. He/she/it has power and control over some portion of our being or resources.

What do you do when you want it to stop?

SOLUTION #1: Cost Reduction

This is where the party on whom the power is being used adjusts to make that use bearable. This is not really a solution at all but it can appear to be for the person being controlled .

Remember Jenny in the post Sources of “Power” to Control Others? One of the ways in which Jenny can escape the conflict she feels is to redefine the situation so that she won’t feel bad. She can change her moral views. She can convince herself that since they will inevitably marry anyway, it’s OK.

In the same post, we met Jeff who has already applied this solution to his own detriment. 

This happens in businesses where the supplier is told “there are other suppliers cheaper than you – if you don’t give us a lower price we’ll walk.” The supplier lowers their price but to maintain their comfort level [that is their profit margin] they literally reduce costs by using inferior parts and making staff work harder for less .

The bottom line is that all of these “solutions” – after a time delay – will cause further harm .

SOLUTION #2: Simplifying life.

I run a 2-hour workshop around this theme. In this context it simply means our Party B (the one being controlled) reduces his/her need for what A provides .  

When the Arab nations put the screws on the West in one oil crisis, the U.S. rationed gasoline and lowered speed limits, reducing the need for oil.

Jenny could lose interest in dating, undertake counseling to lower her anxiety about missing out on the right man, could undertake a yearlong spiritual journey to find peace and purpose before finding a man on a par with her.

Jeff could find a job with the same pay but less responsibility/hours in order to restrategise/revise his career plan. There are plenty of companies that will pay him that lower rate for doing less and this becomes his chance to find a new way to do the work he loves (and get paid what he deserves!) long-term.  Or Jeff could simply accept a longer commute to work in his chosen field  in a company on the other side of town.

Simplify life around your core values and be content with less. The more desperately you need something (and the more you desparately need), the more vulnerable you are to being controlled. Just like a drug high, the more used to a certain lifestyle you get, the more you start doing things just to maintain it.

SOLUTION #3: Find alternative sources for the same “services”.

Jenny joins a tennis club or returns to study where she meets new guys.

Jeff researches a greater spread of opportunities for people with his expertise. Alternatively, since Jeff has been depending on his employer for a certain level of income, he could develop his own skills to increase their need for him.

The supplier we spoke of earlier makes a trip to South Korea to source more clients. 

Where Person A has been the conduit for anything from information and expertise to potential control over Person B’s reputation and even to grace, Person B can begin to find ways to get to the source. For instance, she/he can build relationships directly with the people to whom his/her reputation is important . 

SOLUTION #4: Raising  Person A’s need for what B provides.

This is why unions were so powerful in the 20th Century.

What if Jeff could find a way to solve the problems his company has been repeatedly paying several contractors to solve?

What if the supplier could develop a unique product line not available anywhere else? 

What if the one being gossiped about inserted her/himself into more of the relationships that person A has, thereby reducing Person A’s monopoly on their reputation?

This includes reducing the alternatives that Person A has. Jenny makes friends with the other girls Vince dates. They start refusing to go out with him out of consideration for her.  Jeff takes on another qualification.

WRAP-UP:

Hope there’s been something helpful here. I think this is the basis for a great conversation. I’d love to make this post a hub for questions, ideas and comments …

So picking up from where we left off, I have an intense hatred of people using positions of authority to wield power over others.

“Aren’t authority and power the same thing?”

So glad you asked that question. For our purposes, authority means “A position of leadership that comes from either natural or organisational relationship” (e.g. parent, mentor, manager, Colonel or teacher). “Power” in dependency theory refers to “the ability to make Person B do things they wouldn’t otherwise want to do for the benefit of Person A”.

You can hold authority  without wielding this kind of power, since the demands you make on others may be for their own good, for the good of others or as a part of your own necessary boundary-setting. Unfortunately, many kinds of relationships in our world entail control and manipulation that makes life intensely unhappy or uncomfortable for the Person B’s  on the receiving end. 

I’ll give you some examples of this next time. Right now, too much typing is giving me shoulder cramps! Time to balance my activities and get away from the keyboard.

Ciao!

If you found the Time Thieves and Out of Your Head and Into Your Hands posts even mildly interesting, it’ll worth a visit to anarchists. The flash movie takes a few minutes to watch; it’s been there since April and was still running at the time of me posting this. Some basic concepts but looked at slighthly differently and amusingly….

Enough of reading me raving about it, go watch it and make up your own mind.

In my work over the past decade, I’ve been constantly reminded how difficult it is for caring, passionate, motivated individuals to set limits with the demands of others…

And yet this inability to say “NO” or “WAIT” undermines their effectiveness and their health.

For this reason, I am announcing the offer of a special coaching package focussed on setting limits and learning appropriate times and ways to say NO.

The package consists of six 45 minute coaching appointments over two months, via telephone. I offer this service at $360 for the full course.

For a no-obligation chat about how this package might work for you, please phone me on + 61 03 8743 3950 or email me at peter@greatcircle.com.au . This reduced fee service is available to people enquiring before the end of September 2006.

When you think of a great character actor, who comes to mind? For me it’s Johnny Depp.

Just think about the differences in his roles as Jack Sparrow, Edward Scissorhands, Mort Rainey  (Secret Window), Spencer Armacost (The Astronaut’s Wife) … and of course - Willy Wonka! Now, compare him with someone like Bruce Willis.

Willis almost exclusively plays the “burnout cop/criminal/taxi-driver/soldier on the verge of losing everything who finds his inner nobility and saves the day.” That’s basically his role in every movie he’s starred in.

Human beings are more like Depp than Willis in that we often change roles depending on the situation we’re in and the needs we have at the time. What roles do you play? And which serve you well? Which don’t? It’s helpful to become both aware of them and intentional about which are most responsible and helpful for certain contexts.

Personally, I know that when I play the “He-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed” role with my older son, he automatically puts on his “Lawyer” (“let-me-show-you-the-error-in-your-reasoning-and-or-syntax”) role! There follows an escalating argument in which no one wins.

However when I change roles in my head to “Mentor” or “Coach”, the lad can’t play the Lawyer role – it doesn’t make sense. The two “scripts” don’t match. So he inevitably reverts to a more open-minded and co-operative role.

Which role do you play in job interviews? “Charity case” or “Worthy Prospect”?

Which role do you play in family dynamics? “Victim”, “Cheer Squad”, “Rescue Ranger”, “Self-Defined Adult”, “Spoiled Child”?

Which role do you play professionally? …..

You get the drift.

Try some different roles in problemic situations and see how it changes the “script”, the dynamic, the response of others, your own feelings and perspective.

 Oh, and you might like to try this link for fun to find out which Depp role most suits you: depp-quiz.

Apparently, i most resemble Willy Wonka!!??!  Hmmm…..

When supervising others (be they paid staff or the unpaid volunteers who help in the school office), there comes a time for confronting and challenging their behaviour. I found a terrific article online which gets inside the situation and gives some nice short sharp “how-to’s”, such as specific behaviours (and missing behaviours) to focus on.

It starts: “Project managers are caught in a seeming paradox: They need to create and maintain good working relationships so that they can get work done through others. At the same time, they need to constantly perform course corrections on others’ performance. In other words, they need to criticize…”

Want more? Go to criticism .

In fighting fire with fire, be careful you don’t become an arsonist.

Your head feels like a small town in America’s Tornado Belt. Twisters keep coming and going. Thoughts whirls at hundreds of miles an hour, damaging some of the structures that kept reality nice and tidy for you. You are at that place again where it has become impossible to control the energy of the demands, the expectations, the dreams and the disappointments.

You are both exhausted and jazzed up – head spinning from the voices competing for your attention, the clamour of the To Do lists, the deadlines rushing at you, the priorities fighting their way to the forefront of your attention.

Sound familiar? Life can get like this pretty easily these days.

One of the best things you can do for your self is to get some of the chaos out of your head and into your hands. In other words, remove it from the realm of THINKING - where it just adds to the morass - and bring it out into the world of DOING, where it can be worked on, changed - maybe even completed or deleted.

Ever looked at a thoroughly messy house and not known where to start? But you told yourself to pick a corner and start cleaning. Pretty soon you could see floor again, dust was giving way to reveal that lovely sheen the furniture used to have and it was possible to move from room to room without tripping over stuff. You found that (strangely) you could breathe easier and more deeply, your stress levels were decreasing, and so on.

Your mind can be like that. Just picking a corner to start in can be a simple step toward taking some of the spin off the tornado. Choose a priority to focus on for a time, a non-essential demand to discard, a day to flee from the chaos in order to get some perspective on it, unfinished business to gain completion on.

Eight months of my life were spent living with the extreme restrictions of an acute and chronic back problem. There wasn't much I could do: couldn't sit in a coffee shop, couldn't sit at my own table for more than 2 minutes, couldn't play active games with the kids, couldn't stand for too long in one position, couldn't lie down in one position for long either. Early on, when people asked me what I'd been doing, I often found myself answering the question by saying "Just killing time until my back gets better". Eventually I realised the problem was not my back, but my choices…

You know that term - "Killin' time"? How often do you use it? You got to the coffee shop early, you have time to kill. You're waiting for a significant event to occur, so you kill time until then. Everyone's too busy to see you, so you kill time until they're not. It's raining today so you'll just have to kill time until it stops.

Wait a second! Let's think about this – time is the ultimate non-renewable resource! Life consists of many things but it is measured in time! If life = time, then killling time = killing life!

When this occured to me, that's when I began to use my time to start laying the foundation for Great Circle, as well as deepening some significant relationships and my own personal foundations.

Riddle me this: What difference would it make to your life, if you thought of killing time as killing life??