Choose Your Energy: Change Your Life!

In previous posts, we’ve been exploring how conscious collaboration with the members of  Your Personal Board of Directors (Sage, Guardian, and Muse) helps you reveal and advance the highest good with equanimity in each moment. In this final post drawn from chapter 6 of my book, Choose Your Energy: Change Your Life!, we consider whether/when you can trust your board’s discernment and how to assess and restore equanimity real time.

Trusting Your Board’s Discernment

Being able to trust your board members’ discernment is the key to living a life of flow and equanimity. When your board is functioning optimally, you will be able to trust their discernment in all matters. Discernment consists of two components:

1. Reason: Assessment based on rational thinking.
2. Intuition: Insight beyond education, analysis, or logic, including but not limited to
   • clairvoyance (seeing),
   • clairsentience (feeling/touching),
   • clairaudience (hearing/listening),
   • clairalience (smelling),
   • claircognizance (knowing), and
   • clairgustance (tasting).

In our generally left-brain-exalting world, most of us have been taught to ignore intuition in favor of reason. At a minimum, we’ve been advised to validate intuition with reason before allowing ourselves to follow it. In her book Sacred Contracts (2003), Caroline Myss proposes that such a practice is the fast path to depression and madness. Intuition is a higher, deeper form of wisdom than reason. Authenticating intuition with reason is like using preschool constructs to validate a doctoral dissertation. In the words of Albert Einstein, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

When your board members are fueled by love, you can trust their discernment—reasoning and intuition—to help you foster equanimity and access your deepest wisdom to reveal and advance the highest good for all, by creating a moment-by-moment custom blend of competencies that varies based on the optimal mix for the opportunities in each life situation.

By way of another personal story, here is a real-life example of the power of trusting intuition over reason. Because I have substantial presentation experience, some of my professional advisors urged me early on to get my message of hope, possibilities, and empowerment on video for greater impact. Each time I considered doing so, energetically I felt either flat or overwhelmed by everything already on my plate. My rule concerning such things is not to assume resistance is a problem and never to use force.

When I feel myself resisting a new possibility, I stop and look with unflinching honesty at the energy underneath the situation. If I find fear or one of its cousins, I still don’t use force to move myself forward. Instead, with a heaping dose of love, respect, curiosity, compassion, and gratitude for my thoughts and feelings, I refocus on understanding and transforming the fear into a more constructive fuel. Only after re-anchoring myself in a healthier place of love is it time to re-evaluate the opportunity itself.

If, on the other hand, I find no fear and only constructive energy underneath my resistance, then I respect my intuition and accept that there is a good reason not to move ahead with this particular idea at this particular time. In my wisest moments, I don’t even invest energy trying to figure out what that reason might be. I simply trust my intuition because it represents a much greater wisdom than my lower order logical brain can produce, even on its most brilliant day.

Maybe I will have an experience or meet someone who will offer an important contribution to even greater success. Maybe moving further down other aspects of my current path first will result in this particular opportunity being moot or much easier later. Who knows? Who cares?

This was the case with me producing a video. When the idea was first suggested more than a year ago, it was a great idea; it just wasn’t time yet. There were higher priority elements to build into the foundation of my practice before tackling videos, including robust proprietary content, additional technological comfort, and most important of all, substantial experience coaching a wide variety of people in a broad range of situations. Over a year later, when my energy finally supported me producing and releasing my first ever content in video and audio formats—a three-part series of five-minute Tools for Fostering Flow (available for free download at www.tiny.cc/djwfosterflow)—I achieved a much better result with far less effort and angst.

Developing these videos was a timely reminder of a key life lesson: always tune in to your energy and trust your intuition. Yet another opportunity to heed singer/songwriter Kathy Mattea’s wise counsel, “Spread your wings, close your eyes, and always trust your cape!” 

Equanimity Scan

Now that you have greater understanding of your board members’ talents, perspectives, propensities, dynamics, and discernment, you are better equipped to notice when one or more of them becomes gripped by fear, and you know how best to return them to alignment with love.

Figure 15 above provides a simple form to guide this process. As with the other Discovery Framework scans, the process consists of five steps, with each step grounded in caring enough about yourself to do the following:

• Pay attention so that you notice quickly whenever fear creeps into your board’s energetic mix.
• Invest your energy in assessing the root cause of the fear. Using the fears and synonyms listed on the left side of the form, identify which member or members may have become dysfunctional based on which fears align most closely with the way that member is wired. Realize that in any given difficult situation, one, two, or all three members may have fallen into the grips of their own particular fears. Understanding what’s gotten each of them riled up is the best way to begin determining what can restore each of them to love and wholeness.
• Once you have identified the root fears at work, the love alternatives, and the board members involved, determine what baby steps will strengthen the presence of love in your board’s energetic mix based on the scan’s indicator of how to restore love. Especially in the case of the guardian, make sure any “plan” is a baby step and not an eighty-seven-point fifteen-year plan in fifteen-minute increments. Such a detailed plan might thrill the guardian, but it will introduce a new challenge as it sends the sage and muse screaming into the night. Likewise, overdoing it with the sage or muse is likely to throw one or both of the other two members into a tizzy. The optimal realignment approach will take into account the entire board as individuals and a team. The plan will be infused with understanding, balance, and harmony.
• Hold yourself accountable for following through on your commitment to take action.
• Assess your result and continuously refine and expand your action plan to maximize the presence of love and minimize the presence of fear in your board members’ execution of their daily responsibilities.

When love takes over your core energy, you will begin building the less stressful, more fulfilling life you dream of. You are worth the effort.

For more insights into optimal synergy of intuition and reason, read A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink.

Excerpt from “Choose Your Energy: Change Your Life!” © Copyright 2013-2019 DJW Life Coach LLC. All rights reserved.

REMINDER:
August 6, 2019 Update from Deborah

After 44 years of providing individual and organizational empowerment coaching- and consulting-related services, I have retired from professional practice. While, upon request and subject to availability, I still conduct “tune-up” coaching sessions with former individual clients, I no longer accept new individual or organizational clients. Nor do I offer Reiki or EFT/tapping training or treatment sessions.

Here are my recommendations for identifying other qualified providers through the esteemed professional associations of which I was a member:

• To identify credentialed professional coaches, CLICK HERE to browse the online directory hosted by the International Coach Federation.
• To find EFT/tapping practitioners, CLICK HERE to browse the directory hosted by The Tapping Solution.
• For Reiki training and treatment, CLICK HERE to browse the directory hosted by the Reiki Membership Association of the International Center for Reiki Training.

This is the final edition of my regular monthly empowerment blog. Hereafter, I may post ad hoc entries as the spirit moves me. My djwlifecoach website will be shut down in January 2020. You may continue to subscribe to my blog and  follow me on a variety of social media channels via the links at the top right of the sidebar. And I’ve made the resource links in the sidebar of the blog even more robust to continue encouraging and supporting you on your journey.

If you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to CLICK HERE and download my FREE Manifestation Toolkit ($997 VALUE). These value-filled, power-packed resources are focused on encouraging you with hope, possibilities and empowerment to help you anchor your perspective, energy and experience in a constructive frequency. The kit includes robust tools and resources for living on purpose, stress management, mindfulness, meditation, EFT/Tapping, Reiki, daily spiritual practice and more—including over a dozen self-paced workbooks based on my book and more than 60 on-demand radio episode recordings. DOWNLOAD NOW BEFORE THE WEBSITE IS SHUT DOWN IN JANUARY 2020.

Click here to explore Deborah’s book.

EXPANDED EDITION
in hardback, softcover and ebook

In previous posts, we’ve been exploring how conscious collaboration with the members of  Your Personal Board of Directors (Sage, Guardian, and Muse) helps you reveal and advance the highest good with equanimity in each moment. In this post, I share a personal example to demonstrate some of the common ways the members show up and interact in real life.

A Personal Example

Now that you have a solid footing in personal board principles and dynamics, I will breathe additional life into the construct by sharing a story about one of the many ways they have shown up in my life recently.

The fifteen months before releasing this book were amazing for me. High productivity of the effortless centered-in-love kind, not the forced march variety. A nonstop shower of insights and opportunities, doors opening right and left, with me stepping across the portals in flow with confidence, enthusiasm, creativity, and serenity. These opportunities included

• hosting a monthly public access group coaching program sponsored by the Colorado Library System in Aurora;
• rebranding my practice under Choose Your Energy: Change Your Life;
• revamping and expanding my website;
• implementing a total of nine social media channels through which I publish regularly;
• writing my first book with Hay House/Balboa Press;
• producing a weekly talk radio show on VoiceAmerica’s EmPOWERment Channel;
• doing multiple speaking engagements;
• completing ordination as a spiritual celebrant;
• being initiated as a Deeksha or oneness blessing giver;
• completing the Karuna level as a Reiki master teacher;
• being chosen by the city of Aurora as one of two local personalities with a three-page feature interview in the 2013 Aurora Guide (www.tiny.cc/djwauroraguide);
• building new individual and group coaching programs, seminars, and workbooks based on my Discovery Framework; and
• receiving a steady stream of new clients—individuals and groups.

I am honored by the calling the Universe has entrusted to me and grateful for Its never-ending flow of support. These developments have required lots of deep breathing and self-awareness. I’ve learned to demonstrate genuine respect for my personal board of directors—Claire, Ella, and Bee—when fear overtakes them and they shift into gremlin mode. Their clever and dire warnings have included such classics as, “Honey, it’s been hard enough to keep you safe as it is. How are we going to manage to protect you if your presence in the Universe gets any bigger? You do this and you might as well paint a big old bull’s-eye on your back for all the naysayers to aim at. You remember how badly that’s gone in the past, right?”

When my clients report that their fears have reached up and grabbed them by the ankles yet again, I congratulate them. That means you are on the threshold of a big growth spurt, and your sage, guardian, and muse have “gone gremlin” because they are afraid they won’t be able to keep you safe when you get that big. The answer?

• Seek to understand what old concerns have been brought out of hiding.
• Help them differentiate the remnants of past pain from today’s reality.
• Remind them that small does not necessarily equal safe for an adult.
• Clarify that following your authentic path with love and without fear is what safe looks like now.
• Harness their loyalty.
• Leverage their core gifts of discernment, discipline, and imagination to keep moving yourself forward into a life you love.

So how did that particular scenario play out for me in January 2013? A while back, I recorded some unscripted radio interviews with a friend who is a professional radio personality. I loved the process and result so much that I set my intention to manifest a regular radio presence through which I could share my message of hope, possibilities, and empowerment more broadly and facilitate the ability of others to do likewise.

Just a few hours later, I received a call from a senior executive producer with VoiceAmerica, a leader in Internet broadcasting, inviting me to host a weekly sixty-minute talk radio program. During the final stages of completing my proposal, I reinforced my intention to express love, clarity, and energy. The result? Out of all the proposals submitted, I was one of three hosts invited to launch a new show on their new EmPOWERment channel in January.

I am often asked whether my board’s gremlin energies are stirred up by big opportunities. Yes, when they choose to be gripped by fear, because that is what fear does to us. What do I do when that happens? I do what I encourage my clients to do. As with so many of the things I coach, the only way I know it works so well is that I have the opportunity to practice it myself with regularity:

• Pay attention and breathe.
• Engage with love, respect, curiosity, compassion, and gratitude.
• Reassure and redirect.
• Repeat as necessary.

The way to develop a stronger rapport with your board members and help them build more constructive working relationships with each other is to pay attention and get curious (two of the 14 tools for declaring your independence from stress shared in my 7/21/12, 7/25/12 and 7/28/12 three-part blog post on fostering flow).

To help support you in optimizing your equanimity in each moment, we’ll take a look at the nature of discernment, reason, and intuition in the next post.

Excerpt from “Choose Your Energy: Change Your Life!” © Copyright 2013-2019 DJW Life Coach LLC. All rights reserved.

Click here to explore Deborah’s book.

EXPANDED EDITION
in hardback, softcover and ebook

In previous posts, we’ve been exploring how conscious collaboration with the members of  Your Personal Board of Directors (Sage, Guardian, and Muse) helps you reveal and advance the highest good with equanimity in each moment. In this post, we continue exploring some of the common ways the members show up and interact.

Why the Guardian Takes Over

There are two primary reasons why the guardian tends to take over early in life: First, survival is the top priority in the early years, and the guardian’s specialty is safety and survival. Second, the guardian’s proclivities for order, structure, and hard work make it popular with many cultures and parents. Raising a child is challenging. An obedient, predictable child makes the parents’ job easier, though at a huge cost to the healthy development of that child into a confident, self-sufficient adult.

How the Muse Learns to Be Sneaky

For the very reasons that cultures and parents in general love the guardian’s energy, many find the muse a handful. All that unbridled imagination, lack of fear, and willingness to experiment make raising a muse exhausting and downright scary at times. For that reason, many children get the message early on that to be popular and feel secure at home, they’d better learn to ratchet their muse back a few notches and toe the line. Those who do not can have a very tumultuous childhood. Even without any real threat of abuse or abandonment, many children learn early on to be seen and not heard.

To accomplish this long term, they must silence their muses. Because the guardian’s prime directive is to keep you safe, often he will help the muse find a place to hide. I’ve facilitated deeply touching guardian/muse reconciliations with clients, including one where the guardian pulled a skeleton key out of his pocket so he could unlock the door to the closet where he and the muse agreed she would hide forty years earlier for the safety of the child.

Because all aspects of ourselves long to be expressed, even locked in a closet the typical muse will just find more devious ways to make its influence known. For its own energetic survival, the muse becomes quite adept at being sneaky.

Why the Sage Is Out to Lunch

Some clients think they don’t have a sage. So far that hasn’t proven to be the case. For the very reasons that guardians and muses tend to clash (egged on by our culture and parents), sages tend to hide. The constant discord is upsetting and discouraging to the sage’s energetic constitution. When even its extraordinary gift of discernment proves ineffective at resolving conflict, the sage’s first line of defense is withdrawal. If the discord continues to escalate such that it invades the sage’s sanctuary, then it might change tactics and go ballistic, harming itself or others. Typically it just wants to be left alone, unless there is hope of reconciliation and a return to synergy. Be patient, trust your gut, and invite your sage to become active again in helping you discern the optimal path for your life and the best way to restore the guardian and muse to a relationship centered in love and light. A sage respectfully petitioned and offered an opportunity for hope will respond with greater courage in time.

Thorny Combinations

Sit with a copy of figure 11 below and study the board members in pairs and as a team. Looking at their individual gifts, bear in mind that a virtue overdone becomes a defect. You will immediately see that the members are tailor-made to complement each other when fueled by love and drive each other nuts when fueled by fear.

In the grip of fear, the guardian will become a control freak or drill sergeant, imposing a stranglehold of structure and discipline that will result in the muse (who loves flexibility) and the sage (who loves flow) going berserk. They’ll then become afraid as well and retaliate in the only ways they know how, which will incite the guardian, and each other, to behave even more detrimentally.

Remember that any member “gone gremlin” will quickly pull your other board members out of alignment as well. Keep a watchful eye on each of them at all times and intervene the moment things feel at all off-kilter. The equanimity scan shared in the 12/27/19 post is an invaluable tool for managing the trickier permutations of their disparate agendas.

Keeping in mind the sensory balance teachings on relationships in the belonging section of chapter 5, you can also begin to imagine the added complexity that results from your board members’ constant interaction with and reaction to the board members of everyone you encounter. Paying attention to what you’re thinking, feeling, saying, and doing—and using the scan to identify and remedy any anomalies quickly and constructively—will go a long way to enjoying more loving, constructive, harmonious relationships with others. The relationship dynamics and opportunities of board members “gone Gremlin” is addressed in greater detail in my individual and group coaching programs. Interpersonal gremlin dynamics are a powerful reminder that relationships are the doctoral program of life lessons.

Excerpt from “Choose Your Energy: Change Your Life!” © Copyright 2013-2019 DJW Life Coach LLC. All rights reserved.

Click here to explore Deborah’s book.

EXPANDED EDITION
in hardback, softcover and ebook

In previous posts, we’ve been exploring how conscious collaboration with the members of  Your Personal Board of Directors (Sage, Guardian, and Muse) helps you reveal and advance the highest good with equanimity in each moment. Equipped with an understanding of the nature and roles of each member of your personal board, in this post we begin exploring some of the common ways the members show up and interact.

If your board members could remain completely empowered by love in every moment, with deep and abiding respect for the full range of team strengths and perspectives, what a smooth and fulfilling life it could be. Your muse would apply its creative genius to producing a never-ending stream of potential opportunities along with a variety of possibilities for bringing them to life. Your sage would assess the options, mine them for deeper insights, and recognize relevant considerations to discern what should be pursued and when. Your guardian would serve as chief engineer to create, execute, monitor, and adjust the optimal plan for manifestation. No jealousy, no bickering, no sabotage. Just a love-fueled, collaborative journey to wholeness with a single objective: endlessly encouraging you with hope, possibilities, and empowerment to support you in revealing and advancing the highest good for all, in all, through all.

To achieve the more fluid and fulfilling life you seek, those are the board dynamics you are aiming for. Why does your board so often fall short of that goal, and what can you do to improve its functioning? Here are some additional insights to help you understand the elements of success, recognize when trouble is brewing, and employ the most reliable remedies to get things back on track quickly.

Gender Identity

In terms of gender, many clients sense the energetic gender of their board members long before they know their board members’ names. Remember, we’re not talking anatomy; we’re talking male, female, and androgynous energy. One way to think of it is that male energy is more left brain, female is more right, and androgynous is a blend. There are many books on the subject of energetic gender. You can read them if you are so inclined, or you can trust your intuition. If it feels male, it probably is. If it feels female, it probably is. If it feels androgynous, it probably is. Your gender identity has nothing to do with the genders of your board members. They can all be male, all female, all androgynous, or mixed.

Choosing Names

That is a trick subtitle: you don’t choose names for your board members. When they trust you and you are ready to connect with them more deeply, they will tell you their names. Honest. No, they aren’t named after your first pet, your most memorable teacher, or members of your family—beloved or reviled. They have their own names, generally with very relevant etymologies. Once you know their names, if you look up the meanings and derivations, you’ll find they hold great relevance to the roles they play and gifts they bring. Here are two quick examples in that regard.

The first example is my client Sarah who, as is so often the case, knew the names of her guardian and muse as soon as we began exploring the personal board/gremlin construct. She sensed a third distinct energy and described it as calm and wise but gave no name. Throughout our session, in an effort to help her tap into her intuition, I would say, “I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten the name of your sage. What is it?” She replied, “I told you. I don’t know the name of my sage.” I repeated variations on this tactic a couple more times during our forty-five-minute session and received the same reply. At the end of the session, as we were wrapping up, I said, “In looking over my notes, I realize I never wrote down the name of your sage.” This time, she replied, “I have a name, but it doesn’t make any sense.” I encouraged her to ignore logic and trust her gut. She blurted out, “It’s Sophia. But I don’t even know anyone named Sophia.” I became very still. “Sarah, do you or does anyone in your family have ties to Greece (language, travel, origin)?” She replied, “No.” I told her, “Sophia means ‘wisdom’ in Greek. It’s the name given to the wisdom aspect of God in the Bible. Congratulations, Sarah, I’m fairly certain your sage just told you her name.”

The second example is my client Mark who also knew the names of his guardian and muse right off the bat. His sage’s energy and name proved elusive over a period of weeks. Each week, we’d check in concerning his sage, and he’d report his sense that he’d made no progress. We would re-establish his intention to be open to connecting more deeply with his sage whenever it was ready to reveal itself. Then we would focus on other coaching matters. Periodically during sessions, I would try the techniques I used with Sarah and others (“I’ve forgotten your sage’s name; I neglected to write down your sage’s name; etc.”). A number of weeks passed during which Mark had no awareness of the name. Then I received a midweek email from Mark, excitedly reporting that he had connected with his sage and knew her name. He said it was Sylvia. When he looked up the derivation of her name, he was blown away. Sylvia means “from the forest.” Beginning at a very young age, when Mark was upset or frustrated by life, he would escape to the woods near his home for comfort. He has always loved being in the woods, whether camping, hiking, writing, or just thinking. Mark’s sage had indeed introduced herself. She had been present in his life all along, leading him into the woods for solace.

Some clients know the names of their most dominant board member the moment we begin discussing the construct. Others know the guardian and muse right away because they have been listening to them bicker for decades. Some clients don’t know any names for quite a while. One day, when your board member trusts you, it will tell you. It’s like any other relationship that you hope will go to a more intimate level. As you prove to each board member that you are respectful, honorable, and committed to the long haul, they will each tell you their names in their own time.

It’s not uncommon to have one member’s name take longer than others. Often that member’s set of competencies is the one you least value or most fear expressing. Don’t expect any of them to tell you their names if your intention is to try to banish them the next time they pop their heads out of their foxholes by “going gremlin.” Be patient, don’t force it, and let your intuition tell you when it’s time. Meanwhile, just do all of the things you already do to build other mutually respectful, trusting, and fulfilling relationships. Before you know it, you’ll be engaging your board members in real-time, out-loud discussions and debates in the lobby of your favorite restaurant, boutique, or movie theater. They are eager to know you better too. They are just understandably skeptical about your motivations.

In the Beginning

When you and your board members were born, everything was love and light. The minute you began encountering opportunities for fear, the love and light began to unravel. Because you were small, young, and fairly helpless, those initial fears had a big impact, and your board members developed a tendency to overreact to perceived threats.

Life gets even riskier as you get older. As you grow and mature, life presents even more potential slings and arrows, and you present an ever-larger target for them to hit. If your board members become focused on all the fears, they can erroneously conclude that everything is dangerous and the only escape is to keep you as small and invisible as possible.

In the next post, we’ll continue examining some of the common ways the members show up and interact.

Excerpt from “Choose Your Energy: Change Your Life!” © Copyright 2013-2020 DJW Life Coach LLC. All rights reserved.

Click here to explore Deborah’s book.

EXPANDED EDITION
in hardback, softcover and ebook

In previous posts, we’ve been exploring how conscious collaboration with the members of  Your Personal Board of Directors (Sage, Guardian, and Muse) helps you reveal and advance the highest good with equanimity in each moment. In this post, we take a closer look at the core competencies and role of the Muse.

The muse’s agenda and core competencies are summarized in figure 14 below. The muse places its primary attention on matters of the heart. When its core energy is fueled by love, it shows up as the grand visionary and, of the three board members, is most identified with the construct of the inner child. The muse centered in love is in complete agreement with Frank Sinatra that “fairy tales can come true … when you’re young at heart.” When the muse forgets the truth of a reality based in love and oneness and chooses instead to become a victim to the lie of an illusion based in fear and a sense of separation, its core fear is the same two-part core fear of your other personal board members: I don’t matter; I am powerless.

The specifics of how that core fear manifests for the muse are aligned with the muse’s love-based qualities and attributes. Its goal, or utmost desire, is having fun and believing life is a game. The specific fear that challenges that desire is drudgery: the possibility that anything—or worse yet, everything—is a grind. The muse is especially susceptible to stubbornness and avoidance when it perceives chores or toil.

The muse’s means, or preferred way of fulfilling its desire for fun, is flexibility, believing maximizing freedom enhances everyone and everything. The specific fear that can test the muse’s belief in the power of flexibility to maximize fun is constraint: any form of limitation, constriction, or restraint.

The muse’s gift, greatest natural aptitude, and most valuable contribution to every situation is imagination. The specific fear that undercuts the muse’s ability to demonstrate and contribute imagination is monotony of any sort: flatness, boredom, or tedium.

The muse’s passion and chief delight—what brings the muse the most joy in life—is a sense of play: recreation and amusement. The specific fear that thwarts the muse’s passion for play is any feeling of servitude: subservience, subjugation, or bondage.

When any or all of the muse’s specific fears awaken the core fear that the muse does not matter or is powerless, it stops showing up as the grand visionary. Instead, it takes on one of its many gremlin personas, including the dabbling dilettante, sneak, wild child, or loose cannon.

The muse’s initial passive aggressive technique to dissuade you from your chosen path is often a form of deceit. Avoidance and trickery are the tools of the frustrated muse. The dilettante and sneak personas are most common in this stage. When passive aggressive techniques prove ineffective, as the fear continues to grow, the muse will switch to more aggressive tactics of rebellion: the unsatisfied desire for fun now finding an outlet in a level of thrill-seeking abandon that introduces a risk of real and very un-fun harm. The fear is so unbearable that the muse will do anything to make it stop, including choosing activities and companions that are antithetical and horrifying to its sweet, fun-loving norm. The gremlin personas of the wild child and loose cannon are common in this stage.

There is a simple remedy for breaking this self-destructive cycle, leading the muse out of its fear-based, sabotaging gremlin persona and restoring it to love and a sense of oneness. The key is to help the muse find the fun. Not the adrenaline high of real danger. Just a small suggestion that with a little imagination, what appears to be drudgery could be transformed into something much easier than it appears. With a baby step in the right direction, the task might become downright entertaining. Fun is the medium in which the muse thrives. Fun will cause the muse’s natural aptitudes and abilities to return, strengthen, and grow. When that happens, harmony and synergy with your other board members will be restored.

Whenever you start to feel whiny or put-upon, be alert for the possibility that your muse is shifting into gremlin mode due to fear. The equanimity scan shared in the 12/27/19 post can help you diagnose the root cause and return your muse to its more constructive persona.

Equipped with an understanding of the nature and roles of each member of your personal board, in the next post we’ll examine some of the common ways the members show up and interact.

Excerpt from “Choose Your Energy: Change Your Life!” © Copyright 2013-2019 DJW Life Coach LLC. All rights reserved.

Click here to explore Deborah’s book.

EXPANDED EDITION
in hardback, softcover and ebook

In previous posts, we’ve been exploring how conscious collaboration with the members of  Your Personal Board of Directors (Sage, Guardian, and Muse) helps you reveal and advance the highest good with equanimity in each moment. In this post, we take a closer look at the core competencies and role of the Guardian.

The guardian’s agenda and core competencies are summarized in figure 13 below. The guardian places its primary attention on matters of the head. When its core energy is fueled by love, it shows up as the chief engineer: everything is a puzzle to be solved to the guardian centered in love. When the guardian forgets the truth of a reality based in love and oneness and chooses instead to become a victim to the lie of an illusion based in fear and a sense of separation, its core fear is the same two-part core fear of your other personal board members: I don’t matter; I am powerless.

The specifics of how that core fear manifests for the guardian are aligned with the guardian’s love-based qualities and attributes. Its goal, or utmost desire, is finding safety and believing there is no risk of harm. The specific fear that challenges that desire is danger: the possibility that anything—or worse yet, everything—is a threat. The guardian is especially susceptible to overreacting by seeing every instance of the unexpected as a harbinger of jeopardy or peril.

The guardian’s means, or preferred way of fulfilling its desire for safety, is structure, believing that maximizing order, specificity, and predictability always enhances everyone and everything. The specific fear that can test the guardian’s belief in the power of structure to ensure safety is chaos: any form of unruliness, pandemonium, or anarchy.

The guardian’s gift, greatest natural aptitude, and most valuable contribution to every situation is discipline. The specific fear that undercuts the guardian’s ability to demonstrate and contribute discipline is laziness of any sort: lethargy, sloth, or inertia.

The guardian’s passion and chief delight—what brings the guardian the most joy in life—is a sense of work: quality and productivity. The specific fear that thwarts the guardian’s passion for work is any feeling of waste: carelessness, extravagance, or redundancy.

When any or all of the guardian’s specific fears awaken the core fear that the guardian does not matter or is powerless, it stops showing up as the chief engineer. Instead, it takes on one of its many gremlin personas, including the killjoy, workaholic, drill sergeant, or control freak.

The guardian’s initial passive aggressive technique to dissuade you from your chosen path is often a form of condescension. Sarcasm and superiority are the tools of the frustrated guardian. The killjoy and workaholic personas are most common in this stage. When passive aggressive techniques prove ineffective, as the fear continues to grow, the guardian will switch to more aggressive tactics of coercion: brute force to remove any perceived barriers to safety. The fear is so unbearable that the guardian will do anything to make it stop, including bullying and screaming that are antithetical and horrifying to its cool-headed, analytical norm. The gremlin personas of the drill sergeant and control freak are common in this stage.

There is a simple remedy for breaking this self-destructive cycle, leading the guardian out of its fear-based, sabotaging gremlin persona and restoring it to love and a sense of oneness. The key is to help the guardian make a plan. Not a fear-based three-thousand-item fifty-year plan in twelve-hour increments. Just a small suggestion of a path out of the chaos and then the first baby step in the right direction. Await feedback from the Universe and then take the next baby step. Planning is the medium in which the guardian thrives. Planning will cause the guardian’s natural aptitudes and abilities to return, strengthen, and grow. When that happens, harmony and synergy with your other board members will be restored.

Whenever you start to feel rushed or tense, be alert for the possibility that your guardian is shifting into gremlin mode due to fear. The equanimity scan shared in the 12/27/19 post can help you diagnose the root cause and return your guardian to its more constructive persona.

In the next post, we take a closer look at the core competencies and role of the Muse on your Personal Board of Directors.

Excerpt from “Choose Your Energy: Change Your Life!” © Copyright 2013-2019 DJW Life Coach LLC. All rights reserved.

Click here to explore Deborah’s book.

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In the previous post we began exploring how conscious collaboration with the members of  Your Personal Board of Directors (Sage, Guardian, and Muse) helps you reveal and advance the highest good with equanimity in each moment. In this post, we take a closer look at the core competencies and role of the Sage.

The sage’s agenda and core competencies are summarized in figure 12 below. The sage places its primary attention on matters of the soul. When its core energy is fueled by love, it shows up as the eternal optimist: everything’s an opportunity to the sage centered in love. When the sage forgets the truth of a reality based in love and oneness and chooses instead to become a victim to the lie of an illusion based in fear and a sense of separation, its core fear is the same two-part core fear of your other personal board members: I don’t matter; I am powerless.

The specifics of how that core fear manifests for the sage are aligned with the sage’s love-based qualities and attributes. Its goal, or utmost desire, is finding meaning and believing that everything has a constructive purpose. The specific fear that challenges that desire is nihilism: the possibility that anything—or worse yet, everything—is random and meaningless. The sage is especially susceptible to pessimism and despair.

The sage’s means, or preferred way of fulfilling its desire for meaning, is synergy, believing that maximizing collaboration always enhances everyone and everything. The specific fear that can test the sage’s belief in the universality of a synergistic path to meaning is discord: any form of conflict, friction, or arguing.

The sage’s gift, greatest natural aptitude, and most valuable contribution to every situation is discernment—a dynamic, in-the-moment blending of reason and intuition optimal for whatever’s at hand. The specific fear that undercuts the sage’s ability to demonstrate and contribute discernment is confusion of any sort: bewilderment, disorientation, or upheaval.

The sage’s passion and chief delight—what brings the sage the most joy in life—is a sense of flow: a generous, effortless, gracious way of being. The specific fear that thwarts the sage’s passion for flow is any feeling of force: pressure, coercion, or bullying.

When any or all of the sage’s specific fears awaken the core fear that the sage does not matter or is powerless, it stops showing up as the eternal optimist. Instead, it takes on one of its many gremlin personas, including the bleeding heart, hermit, know-it-all, or zealot.

The sage’s initial passive aggressive technique to dissuade you from your chosen path is often a form of withdrawal. Denial and depression are the tools of the frustrated sage. The bleeding heart and hermit personas are most common in this stage. When passive aggressive techniques prove ineffective, as the fear continues to grow, the sage will switch to more aggressive tactics of annihilation: elimination of itself in the form of suicide (figurative or literal) or elimination of others through ruthlessness and murder (figurative or literal). The fear is so unbearable that the sage will do anything to make it stop, including employing force-based tactics that are antithetical and horrifying to its normal passion for flow. The gremlin personas of the know-it-all and zealot are common in this stage.

There is a simple remedy for breaking this self-destructive cycle, leading the sage out of its fear-based, sabotaging gremlin personas and restoring it to love and a sense of oneness. The key is to help the sage see the opportunity. Just a small glimmer of a possibility buried under all the fear and then the first baby step in the direction of manifesting that possibility is all it will take. Opportunity is the medium in which the sage thrives. Opportunity will cause the sage’s natural aptitudes and abilities to return, strengthen, and grow. When that happens, harmony and synergy with your other board members will be restored.

Whenever you start to feel pessimistic or melancholy, be alert for the possibility that your sage is shifting into gremlin mode due to fear. The equanimity scan shared in the 12/27/19 post can help you diagnose the root cause and return your sage to its more constructive persona.

One of the interesting and challenging realities is that once one board member becomes aligned with fear, the nature of the passive and aggressive tactics to which it defaults will increase the likelihood that one or both of your other board members will be pulled out of alignment in reaction to the first member’s antics. For this reason, it is especially important to form deep, intimate relationships with each board member and pay attention to the earliest warning signs that something may be amiss. A sage not quickly restored to love will result potentially in a much more complex task of working to restore two or more members with very different agendas at the same time.

When life feels like it’s running amok and gremlin voices are the only ones you hear, it is quite common to find that each of your board members has become afraid of different aspects of the same situation. It is possible to work with all of them at the same time by addressing each patiently and individually based on their particular orientations. It’s just more advanced work. It is much easier to always stay tuned to their distinct frequencies and address any fear-based anomalies in their perceptions before they grow to mammoth proportions.

In the next post, we take a closer look at the core competencies and role of the Guardian on your Personal Board of Directors.

Excerpt from “Choose Your Energy: Change Your Life!” © Copyright 2013-2019 DJW Life Coach LLC. All rights reserved.

Click here to explore Deborah’s book.

EXPANDED EDITION
in hardback, softcover and ebook

This is the first of eight posts based on the principles shared in Chapter 6 of my book Choose Your Energy: Change Your Life! These insights and tools will help you boost your ability to reveal and advance the highest good with equanimity in each moment by consciously collaborating with your Personal Board of Directors. 

You may say, “So far, the principles you share, Deborah, sound great in theory, but you’ve neglected to take into account the oppressive power of the judgmental voice in my head. Every time I start to break free from thoughts of self-imposed limitation and lack, that voice puts me back in my place by reminding me that I’m not good enough and never will be.” Good news! Help is on the way. Once you build a more constructive relationship with your personal board of directors—the sage, guardian, and muse depicted in figure 10 below—you will find that disparaging voice becomes less prevalent and less powerful.

When your board members collaborate respectfully, they leverage their vast collection of competencies, seamlessly drawing on your constructive core energy and feeding all of your senses in a balanced way. When fueled by love, your board members are capable of synthesizing their diverse strengths and talents into a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts. They collaborate mindfully, respectfully, and artfully, ever-dedicated to their singular shared mission of encouraging you with hope, possibilities, and empowerment in every situation, encounter and circumstance.

When your board is working smoothly and constructively, as they were when you arrived in this world, they function much like a single-lever water faucet that seamlessly mixes hot and cold water to the optimal temperature for a variety of purposes.

When your board members are fueled by love, you can trust their mindfulness, imagination, discernment, and discipline to encourage you by fostering equanimity and facilitating your ability to reveal and advance the highest good for all, in all, through all. They do this by creating a moment-by-moment custom blend of competencies that varies based on the optimal mix for the opportunities in each life situation.

I am reminded of the teaching I heard from Deepak Chopra: EGO stands for “edging God out.” Based on the laws of algebra, if EGO equals edging God out and God equals love, then EGO equals edging love out. That’s precisely what happens when your board members become dysfunctional. When they switch to fear as their fuel instead of love, their shared mission of encouragement goes out the window. Instead of fostering hope, possibilities, and empowerment, they block your forward progress by focusing their energies on infighting, backbiting, and one-upmanship on a grand scale. In short, they keep you small because they believe that is what safe looks like. The answer is for you to get to know each of them intimately and coach them into a more expansive, love-fueled approach to life.

Awareness of your board of directors is not an indication that you have multiple personality disorder. The construct of a personal board is a useful device. Sorting your vast array of gifts, passions, options, fears, and coping mechanisms into three distinct though interrelated subsets reduces the complexity of understanding what’s going on in each moment and the specific path to finding greater equanimity.

A reminder: whatever pronoun is used, assume gender neutrality in all descriptions. It makes for smoother reading just to vary the use of masculine, feminine, and neutral pronouns than to constantly indicate female and male in every instance. While it is true that an individual board member may show up as primarily male or female, such designation refers to the member’s energetic signature, not its anatomic gender. Your board members may all be male, all female, all androgynous, or any combination thereof.

Each member of your personal board of directors has its own agenda and unique set of core competencies. The elements of those agendas are shown in figure 11 above and include the following:

• Focus: Where each places its primary attention.
• Love Persona: Their optimal constructive way of showing up when fueled by love.
• Core Fear: Their lowest common denominator shared fear. This core fear leads each of them to forget the truth of a reality based in love and oneness and choose instead to become victims to the lie of an illusion based in fear and a sense of separation.
• Attributes: Their primary love-based qualities and specific fears that can undermine those qualities, including their
• Goal: Utmost desire;
• Means: Preferred way of fulfilling their goal;
• Gift: Greatest natural aptitude and most valuable contribution to every situation; and
• Passion: Chief delight, what brings them the most joy in life.
• Fear Persona: Their most common destructive ways of showing up when fueled by fear, also known as their gremlin personas or “going gremlin.”
• Defense Mechanism: Their favorite passive and aggressive forms of sabotaging you. Typically, they begin to assuage their fear by using passive aggressive techniques to dissuade you from your chosen path. If those prove ineffective, as their fear continues to grow, they usually switch to more aggressive tactics.
• Remedy: The nature of the first baby step that will begin to lead them out of their fear-based, sabotaging gremlin persona and restore them to love and a sense of oneness.

In the next post we take a closer look at the core competencies and role of the Sage on your Personal Board of Directors.

Excerpt from “Choose Your Energy: Change Your Life!” © Copyright 2013-2019 DJW Life Coach LLC. All rights reserved.

Click here to explore Deborah’s book.

EXPANDED EDITION
in hardback, softcover and ebook