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.

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