Sage’s Agenda on Your Personal Board of Directors

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.

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About djwlifecoach

I am retired from 40+ years of helping individuals and teams build lives and organizations they love. One of the great joys of my retirement from professional practice is having greater bandwidth to donate my professional and creative talents to support and promote animal and social welfare charities. During my 30 years as an organization transformation consultant, I served as a senior partner in four of the world’s largest, most prestigious global professional services firms. In 2005, I took a five-year sabbatical to find healing and peace because non-stop work had taken its toll. My recovery from burnout led to finding my purpose guiding others on their journeys. As a board-certified coach, author, consultant, radio host, Reiki Master and EFT/tapping practitioner, I share hope, possibilities and empowerment with the world. 111419 DJW Sid CH Pet Corner Photo ShootI help clients achieve rapid, extraordinary, sustainable results by connecting who they are with what they do, a connection often lost through stress and the sheer busy-ness of daily life. Courageous self-awareness and unconditional self-love lead to honest choices based on priorities that nurture you and those around you on a journey to wholeness. Decades in coaching, consulting, change management, organization development, human resources and mixed media artistic expression honed my business sense, professionalism, creativity, intuition, leadership and communication skills. The result? Practical tools that help you become more insightful, creative, committed, productive and fulfilled. Even the most dedicated and hard-working individuals can shift from frustration to a sense of futility when their values, passion, work, and lives become disconnected. One of the problems with not taking care of our health is that the effects of ignoring it are often slow to show up. We continue to juggle family responsibilities, work and finances until we lose ourselves, waking up one day 50 pounds heavier in body and soul—no good to ourselves or anyone else. I love working with people who are ready to take life-changing action to make their dreams a reality. At each moment, you have inside you all the wisdom you seek to choose your life and your way of showing up. Limiting thoughts, beliefs and feelings can block you from moving forward. An absence of love and concern for yourself can result in negative head talk that holds you back with discouraging messages about who you are and what you can do. By listening and caring deeply, I guide you in connecting with your own inner wisdom. We identify the way you’d like to live. We determine what’s blocking you and release you from the hold those blocks have over you—unleashing the positive energy that will fuel you forward. Together we develop a plan to move you closer to your heart’s desire. My books, blog, radio show and signature coaching programs help individuals and organizations harness the transformative energy of love to turn unexplored possibilities into fulfilling realities and step into their greatness. What’s love got to do with it? Everything! My book, Choose Your Energy: Change Your Life! (Hay House/ Balboa Press 2013) shares my story and the stories of 10 of my clients along with my signature Discovery Framework. For fun, I love reading, sewing, knitting, yin yoga, afternoon tea, opera and movies. I live in Williamsburg, Virginia with my spouse, Wilson Abney, and the cat who runs our life, Maisy Jane.

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