In previous Energy Leadership™ posts, we’ve learned that the Big 4 energy blocks hold you back from living the life you desire by preventing you from making conscious, empowered choices. We’ve examined each of the first three blocks in some detail.
To recap:
- Limiting beliefs are things you accept about your life—yourself, your world or the people in it—that limit you.
- Interpretations are conclusions you draw and treat as “truth” concerning events, situations, people or experiences.
- Assumptions are expectations that, because something has happened in the past, it will always happen in the future.
In this post we’ll delve into the fourth and most challenging energy block: gremlins.
In chapter 6 of my book, Choose Your Energy Change Your Life!, I talk at some length about how gremlins show up in relation to your “personal board of directors.” Your three-member board—sage, guardian, and muse—is a useful construct for sorting your vast array of gifts, passions, options, fears, and coping mechanisms into three distinct though interrelated subsets to reduce the complexity of understanding what you’re experiencing in each moment and the specific path to finding greater equanimity.
When fueled by love, you can trust your board’s discernment—reasoning and intuition—to help you foster equanimity and access your deepest wisdom 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.
In contrast, when they switch to fear as their fuel instead of love, your board members’ gremlin personas take over and block your forward progress by focusing their energies on infighting, backbiting and one-upmanship on a grand scale.
When they first give birth to their gremlin personas, their mission is simple: to protect us from ever again experiencing painful or embarrassing situations. As we get older and our lives become more complex, our sages, guardians and muses see that many situations, while different in details, offer the same opportunity for pain. As their fears continue to grow, so do the possibilities for gremlin interference by board members who expand their job definition to include any situation or person who could ever lead to discomfort. Talk about limiting our world. The great irony is that when in the grip of fear, gremlins will do whatever it takes—including some very underhanded tactics—in order to protect us from the potential danger “out there.” In this way, they become the enemy within.
In this context, the term gremlin is used as a metaphor for a part of you that is neither inherently evil nor intentionally harmful but a deeply rooted pattern of behavior triggered by your oldest most painful scenarios and a deep need to protect yourself by any means necessary. In short, they keep you small because they believe that is what safe looks like.
Some “protect” you by sabotaging every potentially intimate relationship, thus escaping the risk—and joy—that intimacy brings. Some protect you by remembering every disappointing new experience in your past, painting every future opportunity with the same brush.
A new job might remind your sage, guardian, or muse of situations in the past where an authority figure was frightening, dangerous, or just plain unkind. As a result, its gremlin persona will be on the prowl at every new job, looking for the boss it remembers so well from the past. By leading with the same expectations, you are nearly guaranteed to attract the energy you transmit.
Like the weeds in your garden, effective long-term management of gremlins is not about elimination of surface behaviors. Lopping your gremlins off at the surface with the weed whacker of denial or superficial behavior change may yield a more cosmetic result temporarily. But because they are tenacious and deep-rooted, they usually grow back quickly. And with each failed attempt at superficial removal, they are likely to expand their purview of peril even further.
Though grappling with gremlins can be incredibly challenging, take heart! As an Energy Leadership Master Practitioner and Board-Certified Empowerment Coach, I am especially adept at helping clients employ more effective and lasting measures to neutralize and redirect their gremlins’ relentless, misguided, ever-escalating interference. In a coaching partnership, together we can examine and eliminate any of the energy blocks that are keeping you from reaching your unlimited potential.
To explore the possibilities-expanding power of grappling with your gremlins, sign up below for a 60-minute complimentary coaching session.
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“With the same energy and determination she applied in the professional world, Deborah has taken her considerable expertise in human potential and has now set her sights on the largest co-op in the world, humanity. ‘Choose Your Energy, Change Your Life!’ tackles what I believe are the most important questions we each must ask: who am I, where did I come from, why am I here, and what’s love got to do with it (cue Tina Turner)? These are not trivial or philosophical questions for the answers change what we do, why we do it, who and what we love. I am grateful for the opportunity to walk with Deborah on this critical journey.” JD Messenger, Award Winning Author of “11 Days in May: The Conversation That Will Change Your Life”
“To me the great thing about Deborah’s book is how ‘accessible’ she makes the ideas. The Oxygen Mask is probably the single best example. As with so many of the ideas in the book, she explains the principle in such a simple way that it’s got universal application to virtually any reader. I can imagine people having multiple moments of ‘Oh….I get it!’ throughout the book. The stories from her own life as well as stories of her clients’ experiences become stories about all of us—stories about which the reader will think, ‘I am living my own version of this.’ Well done—bravo!” Joe Calloway, Author of “Be The Best At What Matters Most”
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