Meandering Mind - Eva Dillner [4]
So the fittest don't win. Much like it has become in the corporate world. It's not about being capable. It's about blending in and making it to the top. To make it easier to advance, you work to get rid of anyone who looks better than you do in the accomplishment arena. In other words the system produces managing to mediocrity.
It makes me very sad to think of all the talent that is sidelined, not because they are not capable, but because they are perceived to be a threat to those who want to climb the ladder. It's a very sick system. My goal is not to belabor what is wrong in the world, but rather to show ways we can make organizations and relationships right again. I'm sure it was the Divine plan that I not write this book when all I could see was managing to mediocrity. I needed to grow and develop first. The book I'm writing now is about transformation, how to release what doesn't work and introduce new ways of being and doing at home and at work.
Three
Imposing beliefs
To make matters worse, during my first go at making a career out of writing, a friend of mine called one night. She had been thinking, she said, and had reached the conclusion that I wasn't meant to be a writer. Her belief was that writers are obsessed with writing, they carry pen and paper wherever they go, they are fired up about their subject matter and they write easily, the words just come pouring out. I didn't fit that mold. She spent two hours on the telephone imposing her belief on me that I shouldn't write. I didn't have enough sense to tell her to go pound sand. I had enough doubts of my own - all writers do and sometimes the internal critic gets very loud. After that two hour pounding I put away my writing and started a long search for what I was meant to do. Little did I understand how lost I was.
My friend imposed her beliefs on me. One of the things I would like to change in the world is a) that we stop taking on other people's garbage and b) that we stop imposing our beliefs on others.
Recently I have been working through the exercises from Carmen Harra's book Everyday Karma. In reviewing all the love relationships I had had, whether brief or extended, it became plain that I had cleared the emotional pain from my encounters. What remained were judgments I had about myself based on beliefs imposed by others.
Projections
In therapy speak, when we impose our beliefs on others, it is called projection. In other words, my friend who didn't think I should be a writer projected her beliefs on me based on what it meant to be a writer for her. What she was really saying was that if she were to be a writer she would need to be obsessed with writing. Perhaps this was true for her, but it sure wasn't for me. If she had said, “this is what I believe it means to be a writer,” then we could have had a dialogue about it. It would have been nice if she could have been supportive of me trying out a new career. Chances are she had been squashed in what she really wanted to do and was just passing on the favor, so to speak. We tend to unconsciously repeat what has been done to us, until we clear it up therapeutically. Then we heal not only ourselves, we help move the entire planet along. That's how important each and every one of our actions is.
In looking back at my relationships, I carried a lot of projections and imposed beliefs from others about what was ok and not ok. It was their beliefs and their projections, but I had taken them on as my own. Let me give you a few examples, and there are lots as my relationship history includes some