It's starting to become a bit of a pattern that I've noticed where I don't know whether something is true until I've said it.
Often, it catches me off-guard. For instance, someone might casually ask a question, and I find myself articulating an idea that had never occurred to me until that very moment. Occasionally, I can somewhat instigate this, usually by bringing stray thoughts to my coach, therapist, or unsuspecting friends.
I have become used to saying, "Hey I have something on my mind. I'm just going to say a few things, then we'll see what connects."
It usually works because things do connect. Alphabets drift together like leaves falling from trees. When they land, they become certainties.
Every time this happens, I am both frustrated and surprised. How is it possible that I can know these things to be true, yet these truths remain hidden from me? I wonder: is my subconscious waging some kind of clandestine war? What else is operating in the shadows?
I am reminded of an incident many years ago. I am face to face with my fellow founder, and he is telling me that I am the problem. There is no one else I know who is capable of delivering such facts with this potent mix of urgency, compassion, and helplessness. So he has my full attention.
To be precise, he is saying, "You are the bottleneck." What he doesn't need to say is, "Please go figure out how to fix this."
He doesn't need to say this because I know he is right. In fact, I had known this for some time, and had thus far been incredibly successful at evading this truth.
When I was finally able to confront this, I began to take, over the course of the following 2 years, the slow, meticulous action of learning how to turn a group of people into an organisation.
What I gained from this experience wasn't so much the knowledge and practice of how to delegate, how to hire your next level of managers, or how to create systems that operate without you. All of this matters, but I was caught most off-guard by the realisation that while I believed I was working that way because of my team, I was really doing it for myself
At the time, I would say yes to everything. I was available to review work at literally any hour, and always insisted on helping where I could.
It was for them, I would tell myself. They need my help.
Really, I was doing it for myself. I was doing it because I liked being good at something, and more importantly I liked feeling useful and needed. Once I was able to see this, I understood that I was not responsible for what other people do; they are.
After this, it became so easy to let go. But it took me years of working this way and being blind to my own motivations to even begin confronting this reality.
The term 'hidden agenda' often implies an agenda that is hidden from others. However, it is also often the case that it is hidden first and foremost from ourselves. I do not believe, for example, that most people who do bad things are inherently evil. It is just that they have found a way to tell themselves a story where, in their world, their behaviour is perfectly reasonable.
These days, I think of this as the shadow at work. And I think I am getting better at seeing how it shows up in my life.
It is more obvious in my experiences of emotions like envy or resentment. Maybe I see someone who has attained a level of success that I do not think they deserve. Perhaps I even have good reasons for this—for example, I have it on good authority that they are just good at selling, even though the quality of their delivery is often poor.
But I find myself thinking, I wish I too had that level of success. Or, I don't think they deserve it.
I now recognise these triggers as opportunities to ask myself questions like, "What is my envy/resentment telling me about my own unfulfilled aspirations? What can I do to make progress towards these things?"
And I know to reorient my effort and attention to my own life, which, unfortunately, is the life I am saddled with.
Then there the moments when my shadow shows up in ways that are mundane, yet no less insidious.
Not too long ago, I was chatting with a friend, and they said to me, "It's like everyone is becoming a coach these days." As someone who has built so much of my identity on being different and doing things my way, my immediate reaction was that I should just stop doing coaching work, and do something else instead.
It was so automatic it took me several minutes to even realise it was happening. Then I remembered that I have clients, I have a business, and this pre-occupation with being unlike anybody else is just a story I'm telling myself.
What has really helped is to hit the emergency stop button that I imagine is buried somewhere in my brain.
Some people have described this as learning to pause, but to me the act of pausing is too gentle and too forgiving. When I first started doing this, what worked for me was not a soft, metaphorical nudge reminding me to chill the fuck out. What I needed was more like a short-circuit—just HOLD THE REACTION, DON'T DO ANYTHING, GIVE IT A FEW MINUTES.
And in that space, I can start breathing and working through the story.
This is not unlike moving through the stages of competence.
Q1: Automatically reacting to things, and believing the problem is always external: events, other people, bad luck.
Q2: Learning to manage my automatic reactions, but still believing the problem is external.
Q3: Beginning to have some awareness that the problem is internal: in my own perceptions, biases, and defence mechanisms.
Q4: In control of my automatic reactions because I am aware of my triggers and how to defuse them.
And as I'm working my way towards becoming consciously competent in managing very specific things, what I'm also learning is that this brings with it its own shadow—which for me is the belief that it is enough to be competent in this, and I no longer need to work on other areas of my life.
Which, of course, is yet another story I'm telling myself.