Letter #2: Stories No Longer Serving You?
This is ‘letter’ two of ten. It started last week (if you missed it, check it out here) and will continue for, you guessed it, then next 8 Tuesdays.
As a series, charting a journey of change waking you, your company, up from work you don’t enjoy for people you don’t like or respect….
Because, let’s face it…
For many, Interest is waning, slip sliding along a great plateau. A road ahead somewhat uninspiring. Maybe a growing unwellness, you grayer, paler and less well. Or worse, seriously ill.
Companies too ignoring a coming obsolescence, a growing insignificance, holding on ever tighter to work which no longer serves them, or maybe much else besides.
This holding on is a signal, an invitation to change. It's a signal that the tectonic plates on which you sit are shifting, changing.
A signal maybe that the game you've been playing is run, which reminds me….
Are You Playing Cat and Mouse?
It was an early May morning. I’d been to the gym.
I arrived back home and outside my house was a cat. In front of the cat, in a near death / very tired state, a mouse.
I sat and watched.
The cat had the mouse in its paw. Or nearby. The cat would paw it, then release, the mouse then scurrying away, in turn prompting the cat to paw it again. And so on. Paw. Release. Paw. Release. A grim dance without ending, the cat stuck in a role not of its making (not to mention the mouse), unable to complete the game it was inadvertently playing. Cats hunt and kill mice. It’s what they do.
Except this cat didn't.
More on cat later.
"YOU'RE SUCH AN IDIOT".
Jim Loehr is a sports psychologist.
He's worked with the world's best tennis players, golfers, swimmers, dancers and jugglers (well, three are true. I'll leave you to judge). Those tennis players endlessly bouncing balls before they serve? Not a nervous tick but a precise number of bounces for very particular reasons. This some of the fruit of his work, regulating the system that is you. If you're interested - This a good reference.
I'm interested in his work on the voice in your head.
We all have a voice. It's talking to you now. You're likely oblivious to it, as we all are. Yet it's an always on, deeply pervasive conductor of your affairs, dictating to a very significant degree what you do, why and how.
An interesting insight of Jim’s: that voice in your head likely assumes the tone and tenor of the dominant authority figure from your growing up. That'll likely be your mum or dad scolding or cajoling you always and often. For a lifetime.
This useful to reverse too, if you have children : how you speak to them, particularly in stressful situations (which include everyday ‘stress’ like not brushing their teeth or eating their veggies or losing their school jumper 83 times a term - oh, just ours?), is how they'll talk to themselves. Yours becomes their voice.
You might be a lucky one. Maybe your parents or other key figures understood the impact of their ways and spoke to you with the clarity and consistency of a coach, teasing out your best self and nudging you beyond your shortcomings. Or, more likely, you like me (and me in turn) find a shouty, occasionally shitty response to falling short or down.
This speaks volumes, determining what you do or don't do now, what risks you take or decisions you make. This voice silently (although not in your head) conducting the choir of your life.
Interestingly, this whole voice in your head phenomenon was well understood long before contemporary psychologists storied it up for us. It goes by the name of Mara. Check out the Buddha’s telling of it, 2,500 years ago (and how to make it go away...!)
Worry not though, silently conducting it might be, ultimately it's not in charge. And seeing the structures which shape you goes a long way to weakening them. This we’re writing to next week…
For now…
The Drivers You Don’t See
Jung was a pioneering soul.
He a doctor looking deep, taken with myth and mysticism and our conscious and unconscious drives and drivers. He was a contemporary of Freud, although they fell out, their work and perspectives diverging.
Jung observed that the first decades of adult life are a practise, a playing out of roles and expectations gifted us by family, school, society at large. Us being a good cat, we might say. I call this our Act I: us playing out other people’s expectations of a good life.
We're well drilled, after all.
From our earliest moves we get good and clear directives about what is right and wrong. These instructions are broadly helpful, obvs, societal guard rails that they are. But there are limitations too, grooves in our mind about what I can and can't do, should or shouldn't, instructions fusing with Mara, that voice in your head.
Jung was interested in the deep lying structures, the archetypal stories, we don't see. Our spirit and nature, ideas bigger than you looking to find expression through you. Look back, and you'll find clues hiding in your childhood, dropped threads. Threads often schooled out of you, replaced with ‘norms’ of success and appropriate contribution.
For Jung, the malaise of mid life is a call to arms, to action, a signal that deeper roots are calling time, demanding to be seen. This an Act I to Act II tension.
This a malaise we might feel personally, professionally OR commercially and organisationally; a time when the old ideas lose their hold and the new seeks to be born.
Companies and organisations, like people, have a mid life too, when the ideas which once defined them no longer serve, and a new story seeks to be born.
What Of The Cat?
Which brings me back to the cat.
That cat pawing the mouse, playing out a game bigger than it, was me. Or that’s how it felt that early May morning.
I was the cat.
By many relative measures, I had successfully figured out how to play the game of entrepreneurial company life - we the cat, caught the mice. I'd navigated to the top of the company tree and, for a while at least, we'd navigated the company near the top of its (little) tree.
Yet I was bored. That phase of work unambiguously on the wane, losing its hold. A coming obsolescence. I no longer had energy or desire to kill the mouse.
And yet…
Letting go of all this feels risky - it’s unsurprising, rejecting as I was, on some level, ideas of work and achievement laid down deep, feeling like I’m going against the stories and structures which shaped and made me.
The stories we tell ourselves.
The voices in our head.
All this, the water in which we swim, the structures which contain and constrain.
These tell us how to be a good cat, what is expected of us, the mice we’re schooled to kill.
Until the wheel turns and the Act I of work or company life has run its course - and the roots of Act II demand to be seen. This is what Jung speaks to, as risky and scary as this might feel (check out this book if you're interested... or listen free over at Spotify premium...).
This the myriad people stuck in work they don’t like for people they don’t respect, or their companies struggling and straining, holding onto ideas which no longer serve them or much else besides.
The route through is not holding on tighter.
It’s to let the old die so the new might be born. This where those new (old) roots might be found, that we spoke to last time.
And this is what we’ll talk to next time, specifically how to loosen the grip of the stories and voices which no longer serve you.
All in service of you being less cat, when cat’s time is up.
Meeow.
A Note Before You Go...
if you like this, or know a struggling cat, human or organisational, feel free to share. Or better, have them...
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