Tag / Trust

by Michael

Healing & Trust

Photo Thanks to Jenelle Ball

Photo Thanks to Jenelle Ball

When a person has been injured or hurt or wounded, there are usually direct ways to heal. At times, that injured person knows the way forward. Something inside tells us that we should do this, refrain from that, be gentle here, be firm there. Our healing comes from an interiority which is directive and caring and insightful.

And then, sometimes the experts know that we should do specific things to recover. The experts are those voices which are outside ourselves. They may be soul doctors or medical doctors. The experts may be spiritual directors or therapists or significant others. They are usually, in one form or another, friends.

The experts are needed people who stand outside our experience and bring to us gifts from their knowledge and experience. Their wisdom is beneficial. But sometimes what they know contradicts what we know. They suggest a plan of care that is disagreeable to us.

The discernment is in doing what the caring others say even in the face of our internal conflict. “I believe that the plan should be this but I’ll submit.” Trust inevitably leads to submission, surrender.

It takes incredible trust to heal. Trust in oneself. Trust in one’s spirit or body. Trust in time. Trust that God and God’s creation is bending toward restoration where we are concerned.

But the other incredible trust is exhibited in others. Trust to believe that someone else is wiser or more informed about your healing even if they aren’t the right-now recipient of your particular pain.

by Michael

Seth Godin on Credibility

Thanks to Luis Llerena

Thanks to Luis Llerena

You believe you have a great idea, a hit record, a press release worth running, a company worth funding. You know that the customer should use your limited-offer discount code, that the sponsor should run an ad, that the admissions office should let you in. You know that the fast-growing company should hire you, and you’re ready to throw your (excellent) resume over the transom.

This is insufficient.

Your belief, even your proof, is insufficient for you to get the attention, the trust and the action you seek.

When everyone has access, no one does. The people you most want to reach are likely to be the very people that are the most difficult to reach.

Attention is not yours to take whenever you need it. And trust is not something you can insist on.

You can earn trust, just as you can earn attention. Not with everyone, but with the people that you need, the people who need you.

This is the essence of permission marketing.

When I began in the book industry thirty years ago, if you had a stamp, you had everything you needed to get a book proposal in front of an editor. You could send as many proposals as you liked, to as many editors as you liked. All you needed to do was mail them.

In my first year, after my first book came out, I was totally unsuccessful. Not one editor invested in one of the thirty books I was busy creating.

It wasn’t that the books were lousy. It was me. I was lousy. I had no credibility. I didn’t speak the right language, in the right way. Didn’t have the credibility to be believed, and hadn’t earned the attention of the people I was attempting to work with.

Email and other poking methods have made it easy to spew and spray and cold call large numbers of people, but the very ease of this behavior has also made it even less likely to work. The economics of attention scarcity are obvious, and you might not like it, but it’s true.

The bad news is that you are not entitled to attention and trust. It is not allocated on the basis of some sort of clearly defined scale of worthiness.

The good news is that you can earn it. You can invest in the community, you can patiently lead and contribute and demonstrate that the attention you are asking be spent on you is worthwhile.

But, no matter how urgent your emergency is, you’re unlikely to be able to merely take the attention you want.

 

Read Seth’s blog. Daily.

by Michael

NaNoWriMo and “…gentle concentration.”

This is passage is from Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird (pgs. 112-113).  It’s a book about the writing life, and it’s a wonderful read, along with anything else by Anne Lamott.

You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side.  You need to trust yourself, especially on the first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place.  Trust them.  Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right.  Just dance.

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind.  The rational mind doesn’t nourish you.  You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true.  Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.

Sometimes intuition needs coaxing, because intuition is a little shy.  But if you try not to crowd it, intuition often wafts up from the soul or subconscious, and then becomes a tiny fitful little flame.  It will be blown out by too much compulsion and manic attention, but will burn quietly when watched with gentle concentration.

So try to calm down, get quiet, breathe, and listen.  Squint at the screen in your head, and if you look, you will see what you are searching for, the details of the story, its direction–maybe not right this minute, but eventually.  If you stop trying to control your mind so much, you’ll have intuitive hunches about what this or that character is all about.  It is hard to stop controlling, but you can do it.