I will come back to the definition of a belief 😉
First though, a bit about me and my journey, in 2008 I started writing a book called “How to be me”, not finished. Eh, I’m not really a completer finisher.. What follows is built from my introduction in that document.
Warning about 1600 words long 🙂
Hello and welcome.
I’m watching a bird, a red kite, float effortlessly (it has a five to six feet wing span), above my garden in the Chiltern Hills, England and wondering, what is life like for him or her? I notice other birds flying past, which seem to be asking, “how come I have to flap like mad to stay in the air and you seem to be in such wonderful control?” The kite, just floating along, an occasional swoop to pick up carrion, or find out it wasn’t actually food, then gracefully back using the air to maximum advantage. It seems to me life as a red kite in the bird world is almost ideal, almost as if he were designed perfectly for his life.
I thought then about myself and how my life compares to the kite, graceful in movement? Maybe not, at the moment, I’m just a tad overweight, not quite got the balance of input and output that the kite has! Maybe though, I’m becoming graceful in other ways. What takes up the kite’s attention? Like me he has a brain, all be it smaller and less complex. There will be patterns locked in to that brain, just as there are patterns, locked into mine. I wonder if he finds all the patterns useful or like me, finds some of them not helpful. Actually since he is probably not consciously aware of his thinking as we are able to be, there will never be an answer. I imagine though, that his life is lived in the present moment (all there ever is) and he is not taken up by thought patterns referencing the past or future. That’s interesting, like Eckhart Tolle says in ‘Living a Life of Inner peace’, you cannot touch the past or the future, you can only construct patterns of thought about them. How much time do I spend in these patterns of past and future? Regretting or worrying, building up resentments, reliving past experiences, feeling bad or good about things, planning to do something in another moment that is not quite here yet.
What if I were perfectly designed for my life? How would I be thinking? What would I be doing? Where would I be? Who would I be with? What would I be feeling? What would I be caring about? What would be important to me? What would my purpose be? How would I know when I’m working ‘as designed’? Who designed me? What is it I need to do actually, to become me? How do I be me? What do I need to know?
The red kite of course, has probably not constructed any of these questions and has ‘learned’ just what she needed, in order to live her life out fully, almost instinctively. For humans, well yes, we also learned a lot of things by instinct and we learned lots of other things as well. We’ve also had the conscious experience of life to colour how we are.
It may be that we have as a human being, much more to ‘learn’ or perhaps ‘unlearn’, as we shall see, in order to become our complete and fulfilled selves. So that we ‘know’ we are complete and fulfilled. That is why; along with great support and help from my wife Gill, I have begun my writing.
The writings provide some pointers to ways of thinking, being and doing that will help you, as they have helped me and others, to become more fully themselves; working as designed.
I have to acknowledge that the insights and learnings I will share, were picked up over many years and I have had time to assimilate them. You are going to read them and for sure think – “Yes I’ve read that somewhere else and it fits with what I know. Whoa, what’s he saying here? That doesn’t make sense. That’s really helpful. What on earth is he talking about? That’s ok for others maybe but it doesn’t apply to me. Well he’s just wrong there. Oh yes that’s good, I hadn’t thought of it like that before. “
I spent many years working with a large computer company. My first job was fixing hardware faults, i.e. where the computer itself is broken. My experience in that, taught that hardware will actually break, e.g. the electrical connection has physically parted from a component on a circuit board. The trick is how to find which board and which component. A printer no longer prints clearly may be due to an electronic failure e.g. a timing pulse arrives at the wrong time or a mechanical failure e.g. a clutch is slipping somewhere, or in fact many other reasons. I would say it was easier to fix a problem when we had what we called a ‘red light’ fault i.e. the machine had detected something wrong using its self checking capability and turned on a red light and stopped everything. These faults immediately caught the attention of the customer, who wants his system back, so payroll can run, otherwise none of the staff gets paid! When called to a fault like this, we could normally rule out a lot of things that were not causing the fault and focus on what the machine’s reasons were for turning on the light. It’s interesting to look at the thought patterns I produced, working to ‘fix’ things, mostly they are negative. I’d spend ages finding out what the fault wasn’t! This tended to spill over into other parts of life and created a cynical negative view. Then for one brief moment, positive affirmation, we’d found it, change this component and the red light went out, then on to the next customer and more looking at things that were not the fault! Faults are more difficult to ‘fix’ when the symptoms appear intermittently and I can remember conversations with computer operators in the middle of the night asking, “What kind of smell is it making? Or is it a high pitched kind of tinkling sound? Or a deep sort of more graunchy sound? Arrgh switch it off now.”
I did this for about twelve years or so and basically was bored, the diagnostic tests were getting better and better at telling us what to change or set up and the number of ‘interesting ‘ difficult faults were fewer, then I trained as a Program Support Rep or Engineer fixing software.
Well, a whole different world, software does not actually break. You can’t touch it or smell it or feel it. Each fault that it suffers from is a design fault, i.e. the person who wrote it hadn’t for example, considered a specific set of circumstances arising and therefore not written the code in a way that would deal with the circumstances adequately. This was much more of a challenge to ‘fix’ and stretched my thinking way more than the hardware. It was also during this time that I received some very telling feedback.
A wise Manager called me into his office one day and said, “Robin, you know, you are a very passionate man with very strong views and opinions, trouble is, they’re all negative. I can’t use negative, how about you use your power positively and help me, by bringing solutions rather than problems .” It was like a bright light turned on inside my mind. Why was I so negative? The years of ‘fixing’ problems and being focused constantly on negativity, broken machines, software not doing what it should, i.e. this is not the fault, had conditioned my mind – laid down thinking strategies, great for fixing hardware and software problems, not great in relationships with people. I began to change, slowly at first, so my engineer mates didn’t think I’d become some kind of Manager’s lapdog. As I did so, I found the power of a positive attitude.
Moving into a more specialist role, in the early 1990s, I began to work with managers and leaders and started noticing the effect of what they did and said, on my fellow engineers; although some of the effect was good, an awful lot of it was not. Now I really started to get interested in people.
One thing I learned was, people are many times more complex than any hardware or software system, we have in the world today and they have feelings and emotions and they lie!
Here, then was my vocation, I began training as a Coach and Facilitator and used these skills to help leaders, managers, teams work in ways that brings out the best from people. That was 25 years ago and I’ve been practicing ever since. I’ve now left the large corporation and work independently as a leadership coach,
I’m telling you this about me, so you can understand a bit about how I got here and why I’m writing.
I want everyone who can, to be the best that they can be and hence the title of the BLOG “How did you become You” / “How did I become Me”.