Muse’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 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.

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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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