It seems that each week, or sometimes only each 2nd week or month, I come across a trend or theme in my work and personal life. Its often an idea I’ve come across in my reading or searching, maybe something somebody said, or its idea that just made sense now.
I love to share these thoughts or learnings, and that seems to be what makes them the theme or trend of the week. So, I just had the idea to share this with everyone and see how that goes.
The theme for the past week has been our friend and ever present advisor, Perfect Person. Who is this Perfect Person? We all have one and you can recognise them as the person within you that tells you what you should be doing, or how you should be in order to be perfect. Perfect Person provides all the advice about what you should be doing and how you should be doing it. Essentially without perfect person we seemingly would not know just how unperfect we really are. Perfect person is the part of me, the part of you, that provides all the information on how to do things properly. Sometimes, although called Perfect Person, they are advising you on how to just be normal, acceptable, good enough, how to fit in.
Imagine now, that your own Perfect Person, lets call them P for short, was an actual person, someone that went everywhere with you, engaging with you about all those things that you should be doing, but as an outside person. What would she or he look like? Try and imagine how P would be dressed, how they might carry themselves, what kind of voice the might have. Imagine their interests and hobbies. The ultimate, perfect P.
Once you’ve done that and had a good laugh (possibly a nervous one), imagine that you can ask P to have a seat, or stand next to you for a moment, while to finish reading this blog. So now, answer this question: what kind of relationship do you and P have? Does it seem that P is your boss? Your manager? your pimp? or, Is P your friend? your caddy? your butler?
The thing is, P is part of our thoughts. It is part of an information generating system, the purpose of which is to protect and guide us. P is not trained to manage or direct. In fact P is not good an managing or directing at all. What happens though is because P can be quite convincing, and in the absence of alternative leadership, P takes over without us even knowing. The major problem comes in because P doesn’t know where we want to be going in our lives… P just knows how to fit in (often P just guesses at that too).
The trick is, we know within ourselves, through exploration of our values, through what is important to us, in which direction we are wanting to head. P can assist us, with important information in this journey, as a friend, a caddy and a butler. We need to be our leaders.
ps. my own P asks that you ignore the spelling and grammar…