Discernment: Assessing and Restoring Equanimity Real Time

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 final post drawn from chapter 6 of my book, Choose Your Energy: Change Your Life!, we consider whether/when you can trust your board’s discernment and how to assess and restore equanimity real time.

Trusting Your Board’s Discernment

Being able to trust your board members’ discernment is the key to living a life of flow and equanimity. When your board is functioning optimally, you will be able to trust their discernment in all matters. Discernment consists of two components:

Reason: Assessment based on rational thinking.
Intuition: Insight beyond education, analysis, or logic, including but not limited to
- clairvoyance (seeing),
- clairsentience (feeling/touching),
- clairaudience (hearing/listening),
- clairalience (smelling),
- claircognizance (knowing), and
- clairgustance (tasting).

In our generally left-brain-exalting world, most of us have been taught to ignore intuition in favor of reason. At a minimum, we’ve been advised to validate intuition with reason before allowing ourselves to follow it. In her book Sacred Contracts (2003), Caroline Myss proposes that such a practice is the fast path to depression and madness. Intuition is a higher, deeper form of wisdom than reason. Authenticating intuition with reason is like using preschool constructs to validate a doctoral dissertation. In the words of Albert Einstein, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

When your board members are fueled by love, you can trust their discernment—reasoning and intuition—to help you foster equanimity and access your deepest wisdom to reveal and advance the highest good for all, by creating a moment-by-moment custom blend of competencies that varies based on the optimal mix for the opportunities in each life situation.

By way of another personal story, here is a real-life example of the power of trusting intuition over reason. Because I have substantial presentation experience, some of my professional advisors urged me early on to get my message of hope, possibilities, and empowerment on video for greater impact. Each time I considered doing so, energetically I felt either flat or overwhelmed by everything already on my plate. My rule concerning such things is not to assume resistance is a problem and never to use force.

When I feel myself resisting a new possibility, I stop and look with unflinching honesty at the energy underneath the situation. If I find fear or one of its cousins, I still don’t use force to move myself forward. Instead, with a heaping dose of love, respect, curiosity, compassion, and gratitude for my thoughts and feelings, I refocus on understanding and transforming the fear into a more constructive fuel. Only after re-anchoring myself in a healthier place of love is it time to re-evaluate the opportunity itself.

If, on the other hand, I find no fear and only constructive energy underneath my resistance, then I respect my intuition and accept that there is a good reason not to move ahead with this particular idea at this particular time. In my wisest moments, I don’t even invest energy trying to figure out what that reason might be. I simply trust my intuition because it represents a much greater wisdom than my lower order logical brain can produce, even on its most brilliant day.

Maybe I will have an experience or meet someone who will offer an important contribution to even greater success. Maybe moving further down other aspects of my current path first will result in this particular opportunity being moot or much easier later. Who knows? Who cares?

This was the case with me producing a video. When the idea was first suggested more than a year ago, it was a great idea; it just wasn’t time yet. There were higher priority elements to build into the foundation of my practice before tackling videos, including robust proprietary content, additional technological comfort, and most important of all, substantial experience coaching a wide variety of people in a broad range of situations. Over a year later, when my energy finally supported me producing and releasing my first ever content in video and audio formats—a three-part series of five-minute Tools for Fostering Flow (available for free download at www.tiny.cc/djwfosterflow)—I achieved a much better result with far less effort and angst.

Developing these videos was a timely reminder of a key life lesson: always tune in to your energy and trust your intuition. Yet another opportunity to heed singer/songwriter Kathy Mattea’s wise counsel, “Spread your wings, close your eyes, and always trust your cape!”

Equanimity Scan

Now that you have greater understanding of your board members’ talents, perspectives, propensities, dynamics, and discernment, you are better equipped to notice when one or more of them becomes gripped by fear, and you know how best to return them to alignment with love.

Figure 15 above provides a simple form to guide this process. As with the other Discovery Framework scans, the process consists of five steps, with each step grounded in caring enough about yourself to do the following:

Pay attention so that you notice quickly whenever fear creeps into your board’s energetic mix.
Invest your energy in assessing the root cause of the fear. Using the fears and synonyms listed on the left side of the form, identify which member or members may have become dysfunctional based on which fears align most closely with the way that member is wired. Realize that in any given difficult situation, one, two, or all three members may have fallen into the grips of their own particular fears. Understanding what’s gotten each of them riled up is the best way to begin determining what can restore each of them to love and wholeness.
Once you have identified the root fears at work, the love alternatives, and the board members involved, determine what baby steps will strengthen the presence of love in your board’s energetic mix based on the scan’s indicator of how to restore love. Especially in the case of the guardian, make sure any “plan” is a baby step and not an eighty-seven-point fifteen-year plan in fifteen-minute increments. Such a detailed plan might thrill the guardian, but it will introduce a new challenge as it sends the sage and muse screaming into the night. Likewise, overdoing it with the sage or muse is likely to throw one or both of the other two members into a tizzy. The optimal realignment approach will take into account the entire board as individuals and a team. The plan will be infused with understanding, balance, and harmony.
Hold yourself accountable for following through on your commitment to take action.
Assess your result and continuously refine and expand your action plan to maximize the presence of love and minimize the presence of fear in your board members’ execution of their daily responsibilities.

When love takes over your core energy, you will begin building the less stressful, more fulfilling life you dream of. You are worth the effort.

For more insights into optimal synergy of intuition and reason, read A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink.

REMINDER:
August 6, 2019 Update from Deborah

After 44 years of providing individual and organizational empowerment coaching- and consulting-related services, I have retired from professional practice. While, upon request and subject to availability, I still conduct “tune-up” coaching sessions with former individual clients, I no longer accept new individual or organizational clients. Nor do I offer Reiki or EFT/tapping training or treatment sessions.

Here are my recommendations for identifying other qualified providers through the esteemed professional associations of which I was a member:

To identify credentialed professional coaches, CLICK HERE to browse the online directory hosted by the International Coach Federation.
To find EFT/tapping practitioners, CLICK HERE to browse the directory hosted by The Tapping Solution.
For Reiki training and treatment, CLICK HERE to browse the directory hosted by the Reiki Membership Association of the International Center for Reiki Training.

This is the final edition of my regular monthly empowerment blog. Hereafter, I may post ad hoc entries as the spirit moves me. My djwlifecoach website will be shut down in January 2020. You may continue to subscribe to my blog and follow me on a variety of social media channels via the links at the top right of the sidebar. And I’ve made the resource links in the sidebar of the blog even more robust to continue encouraging and supporting you on your journey.

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