We live in a rhythm where patterns, beliefs and systems drive us more than we know. We seem to make decisions, think for ourselves, run our lives … But when you look deep down – is this really the case?
Have you noticed that sometimes:
🔹 you reply to emails before you even think about whether it’s important?
🔹 you’re in a meeting, but you don’t ask whether the meeting is really necessary?
🔹 you’re in a hurry, but don’t know exactly where you’re going?
🔹 you want to change something, but the “right moment” always comes later or “something gets missed”?
We are machines – trained to react, to adapt, to perform, to process. And, like a well-oiled system, it all works. Until at some point you notice that you are no longer in charge, and you even expect someone to be in charge, because taking control into your own hands seems totally unacceptable, unaccustomed.
But how do you get out of the machine?
First you have to see yourself as a machine. Recognise it for yourself. And that can be painful.
– Painful because it means you have to take an honest look at what you’ve set your life out to achieve and it didn’t lead to the result you expected.
– Painful, because it means you have to admit that many of your choices have not been conscious, or even free-willed, as we like to talk about ourselves – human beings as the crown of nature, with free choice and free will.
– Painful, because we understand the emptiness and the loneliness within ourselves.
– Painful, because the machine system does not love those who try to become machine to human.
And yet, this experience of pain is the first step towards the freedom that is so much talked and written about.
Are you ready to ask yourself:
❓ Is what I am doing really my choice?
❓ If I didn’t have to prove to anyone what I really wanted?
❓ What would I dare to do if I wasn’t afraid of losing?
❓ Whose dream am I fulfilling – my own or someone else’s?
Leadership does not start with influencing others. It starts with seeing through your own mechanisms and, of course, recognising them first. Before leading others, such issues need to be addressed within oneself. Otherwise, we turn others into a machine, or we create pain.
Once again, I met one of these 1-1 customers who had just come to these questions. And how beautiful it is to see this journey, where there is pain, but where behind the pain there is a peace of allowing the pain to come, and an abundance of choices to shape one’s life. These are the most beautiful moments, where I feel that I have been able to be a support alongside this pain and, by being there, to shed a little light on the possibilities that things really will get better soon.
