Guardian’s Agenda on Your Personal Board of Directors

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.

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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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