Posts Tagged Law of Reversibility
Tip for the Day: The Purpose of Duality
Posted by Doctapaul in Healing, Life's Changes, Love, Personal, Pitfalls I've Fallen Into, Relationships, Self Development, Soundbytes of Wisdom, Tip for the Day on March 13, 2013
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Take a quiet moment to yourself. What’s the biggest issue you face? Now look at yourself in an imaginary mirror. Which part of you attracted that issue? For what purpose?
Remember the ‘wet and dry’ of life. You can’t know what love or joy is without knowing what not-love and not-joy is.
Wisdom
Life’s journey is about discerning that part of you that attracts love from that part that doesn’t – and putting that wisdom into practice.
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(If you feel you can’t put your heart and soul into practice then ‘act as if’. Pretend, like an innocent child, with no ulterior motive other than the curiosity of seeing what happens.)
Picture sourced from Handwriting Analysis
Shine on…!
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Paul C Burr
Author of Learn to Love and Be Loved in Return, 2012: a twist in the tail and Defrag your Soul
Follow @paulburr
Tip for the Day: Combine Patience with Serenity
Posted by Doctapaul in Healing, Love, Personal, Relationships, Self Development, Soundbytes of Wisdom, Tip for the Day, Visions and Dreams on March 12, 2013
Patience
Serenity
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Practise patience and view all things around you with serene eyes. The world will no longer withold the love you were born to receive.
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(If you feel you can’t put your heart and soul into practice then ‘act as if’. Pretend, like an innocent child, with no ulterior motive other than the curiosity of seeing what happens.)
Pictures sourced from Handwriting Analysis
Shine on…!
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Paul C Burr
Author of Learn to Love and Be Loved in Return, 2012: a twist in the tail and Defrag your Soul.
Follow @paulburr
New Moon in Pisces Tonight and Comet PAN-STARRS visits
New Moon at 19:51 GMT, 11 March 2013: a time of new beginnings and/or emotional awakenings and with 7 planets in Pisces…. it should be powerful.
With Mercury in retrograde – these awakenings might occur because you have a re-think about something or you may re-awaken to an idea that you once had. this could also be a good time to re-invent yourself.
Comet PAN-STARRS is making a close approach to Earth this week. Check it out (once the snow blizzards have gone here in UK) in the Northern sky just after sunset. Hopefully we’ll get a good siting because it won’t be back for a 100 million years – so its kinda special, is it not?
Picture sourced from Discovery Magazine
Shine on…!
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Paul C Burr
Author of Learn to Love and Be Loved in Return, 2012: a twist in the tail and Defrag your Soul
Follow @paulburr
The Psychic Vampire, Unseen in the Mirror
Posted by Doctapaul in Healing, Love, Personal, Pitfalls I've Fallen Into, Relationships, Self Development on February 20, 2013
They suck you in. You[1] don’t feel their fangs puncture your neck. One minute you are drawn to the creature’s alluring charm. The next, you are smitten by their mesmerising power that deceives and lulls you into submission. You allow them under your skin and your life-force starts to bleed out of you.
What was the attraction to someone so beautiful, in dire need of your help? Was it ‘noblesse-oblige?’ What reward did you seek for your chivalry and kindness? Did you hope that you would receive a thank you in the form of love – be it physical, emotional or spiritual? If not, did you seek the dependency of another to satisfy your own false-ego? Either way, you belong to them for now.
You feel an urge to rescue the creature from all its woes. You pay each ‘bill’ they send your way – in the form of time, money, physical and emotional energy. You submit to the creature’s will. You allow yourself to become psychically enslaved. You, the ‘rescuer’, become their ‘victim’. They, ‘the victim’ become your ‘persecutor’. The deeper you allow their ‘bite’; the greater the duress, intensity, frequency and duration of the energy that flows out from your life-force.
You chastise and remonstrate with them your frustrations but you still hold back – for fear of losing them completely. They tell you how wrong and misguided you are – but not for too long. They feign a weakening of spirit. They reveal their inner hurt to you and place themselves at your mercy. Duped, you feel worse for their suffering than you do your own – and so they ensnare you again. You give all your power to them once more and they take it, only more voraciously than ever.
They may not even be wholly aware of the powers they have over you and others like you. It’s as if they can’t help themselves. They possess an insatiable desire for all that you (and others) have to give and more. Yet they show no signs of giving you that one thing you want most from them, love. They show no willingness or capability to love you, the way you want them to love you.
For they can only love someone (or something) that they can’t have. They are doubly bound by not-love – as by now are you. Loveless, they feed on the life-energy of those like you so that they don’t face their biggest and most misguided fear… the fear of love itself.
They choose not the courage to love and be loved. They can only conjure an illusion of love-liness. Love, to them, is a game of smoke and mirrors. Unresolved issues from their childhood cast too dark a shadow in which for them to venture to find love. And so they live in a half light, capable of hypnotic power but incapable of love – not there, right now, with you.
And still you persist with the vision of light that you see inside the creature; wishing, hoping, or perhaps convinced, that they will share it with you one day. But no inner-beacon shines your way. You sicken and tire. You live from minute to minute in servility. You give when you have no more to give and still the blood-letting of your life energy continues until…
You sicken and tire of being sickened and tired by your addiction to this illusory hero/ine. The day comes when you bid “begone!” and hold nothing back. The creature leaves knowing that you truly have nothing more to give.
You both suffer. The habit is not broken yet – ‘cold-turkey has got you (both) on the run[2]’. Given the chance, the vampire returns to test your mettle. They try to ensnare you again but this time it’s different, you’re different. They realise that all you can share with them is your truth – the truth of your feelings (regardless of the correctness/incorrectness of your perceptions). And truth drives out all falsity, including theirs. You thus bid a farewell that is ‘final and definite’ – and so the task of grieving really starts.
Day by day, week by week, month by month, the hurt lessens; the clouds of anger, sadness, shame and fear dissipate. Slowly but steadily, you regain your power. You seek to learn from the devastation you allowed to be inflicted upon you. As you reflect in the ‘mirror that was you’, you begin to realise (real-eyes) the nature of a now-familiar dark energy within yourself.
You account for how it was you who attracted the creature. You recognise a like-for-like, psychic and vampiric part of their nature within yourself. You appreciate more fully the depth and nature of the pain you have caused, or been capable of causing, others.
You see more clearly the definition of love, innately incorrect, given to you by your parents. You bring to the surface unresolved issues with your parents that you’ve carried all your life. And now you can bid farewell to these issues from your past.
Now you have the chance to resolve the unresolved. Today you ‘throw those curtains wide’ and allow the light (the same light that you saw hidden inside the creature) of the sun within you to shine throughout your whole body and radiate beyond. Through willpower, patience and courage you release the psychic vampire inside. Once gone, it never needs to return.
You graduate from the Wisdom School to the Love School – and that’s another story.
Shine on…!
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Paul C Burr
Follow @paulburr
Author of Learn to Love and Be Loved in Return, 2012: a twist in the tail and Defrag your Soul.
Taking Spir(itu)al Steps
Posted by Doctapaul in book, Healing, Pitfalls I've Fallen Into, Self Development, Soundbytes of Wisdom, Tarot on February 16, 2013
“When you achieve mastery at one level, you become a blithering idiot at the next level up, at the same time.”
Dr Thomas Maughan, Chief Druid, The Druid Order, London, 1964-76
Read more….. in Kindred Spirit magazine
Shine on…!
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Paul C Burr
Follow @paulburr
Author of Learn to Love and Be Loved in Return, 2012: a twist in the tail and Defrag your Soul.
The S(piritual)-Curve of ‘Dragon Steps’
Posted by Doctapaul in Healing, Life's Changes, Personal, Pitfalls I've Fallen Into, Self Development, Tarot on January 22, 2013
Most us have to take many steps to find, open, become and express our true nature. In my book, Defrag your Soul, I refer to these as spiritual steps. According to ancient Chinese and Druidic wisdom, though we may take many spiritual steps in our lives, there are fundamentally 7 key levels of consciousness development, known by the Chinese as dragon steps. These are the major steps we take to increase our vibration to the highest level a human can attain – Level 7. (I ain’t there – yet!)
Towards the end of each of these dragon steps we meet the most resistance – in the form of shame, anger, sadness/hurt and most of all fear. The most negative of these emotions often dwell in our subconscious. In his insightful book, The Missing Secret, Joe Vitale calls such negative emotions, subconscious counter intentions. They form the lowest parts of the aggregate vibration we project out into the world.
We operate in an elastic bandwidth. What stops us increasing our consciousness (wisdom of truth) is the lowest part of our vibration. We can only climb as high as the lowest part of our vibration permits (or stretches).
(picture courtesy of Rogue Christianity)
Let us stay with the ‘elastic band’ metaphor. Counter intentions pull us down and enabling intentions pull us upwards. As the ‘elastic band’ stretches we meet resistance. Our lowest vibration stops us pulling ourselves upwards (and vice versa).
As we climb, resistance increases, we slow down. Our climb begins to level off as if we are approaching the end of an S-bend in our consciousness expansion. The levelling off means we really have to stretch ourselves to make the last ‘few yards’ to ‘step up’ from one ‘S’ to the next. When the ‘elastic-band’ (our pysche) is fully stretched – and we must be sure not to snap it – we can only pull ourselves upwards (raise our consciousness) by releasing pressure (negative emotions) from the downward pull.
Upon approaching the uppermost part of the S-bend in this leg of our journey we slow down, we cast out that which no longer serves a purpose. (Picture courtesy of X-Ray Delta.) Sometimes though we cling on – either through fear or ignorance. That which we don’t let go of drains our energy. We are now at the highest part of this leg of our climb – AND the air is thin. Our negative emotional baggage (which was always going to be the heaviest part to unload anyway) thus feels a lot heavier. If we are not careful, we can drain our very life force until we are on reserves and then running on empty. Yet somehow we keep going and THEN…
We let go. We may panic. BUT we also realise there’s no useful reason for going back – we have passed the step up point of no return. We can allow ourselves to slow down, take a breather. Take baby steps as we make our way forward.
We’ve achieved self mastery of the last dragon step. We are both Magician (self master) at the last level and Fool (as in the Tarot) at the next. So we put trust in ourselves – listen carefully to our intuition and start the next step.
Like the fool, who is naive as to what they are about to face, we trundle along gaily until we start the next stretch of our climb.
Shine on…!
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Paul C Burr
Follow @paulburr
Health = Mind and Body at Ease. Not-Health = Dis-ease (extract from Defrag your Soul).
Posted by Doctapaul in Healing, Personal, Self Development on January 16, 2013
Let me start by announcing:
- I have no medical qualifications whatsoever.
- Before you make any decision about your health, you should seek advice from an appropriately qualified health practitioner.
My interest in the mind-body connection to physical well-being really took off in 2006 when attending an Introduction to Meta-Medicine® course facilitated by Susanne Billander[1]. I submitted myself to and delivered (under supervision) basic therapy sessions. I found out first hand that there was something to the relationship between mind, body and the environment we live in.
Photo from The University of the West of England site.
Thousands of client case studies of the ‘mind-body connection’ causes of ill health have been researched. The links between significant emotional events (singular points in time triggered by a traumatic or near-traumatic experience) and the diseases that can ensue as a result are well established. The International Meta-Medicine Association®[2] (IMMA) now offers training and certification as an Integrative Health Consultant in mind-body healing. Integrative Medicine is still not regarded seriously by many of the mainstream scientific, medical authorities, healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. Interest is growing though, thanks to people like Rob Van Overbruggen (author of The Healing Psyche), Susanne Billander (author of The Secret of Cancer and Other Diseases), Dawson Church (author of The Genie in your Genes), and Bruce Lipton (author of The Biology of Belief).
Professor João Magueijo[3] writes how science has an “argumentative tradition” and “has no shortage of very clever people who love to show off”. In fairness, Professor Magueijo extols how such an environment has merits. It increases the rigour and diligence by which new science sets out to prove its worth. But… (and this is a deliberate but)
There exists a conflict of interest, especially a financial interest, between Allopathic (conventional) and Integrative (alternative) Medicine. One cannot help but suspect that ‘very clever people’ (scientists, marketers and politicians) are using their talent to defend against, if not attack, Integrative Medicine – and corner the supply of herbal remedies to the public in the UK. In the name of ‘science’, they seek to protect and expand the financial and illusionary sacrosanct ‘turf’ of multi-billion dollar industries in pharmacy and healthcare.
Meta-Medicine®, in my mind, is now a well grounded science.
The nub of the scientific research reveals that all disease is linked to significant emotional events in our lives. The onset of every disease is preceded by an unexpected, unwanted, deeply upsetting event.
Put another way, the ontology of this research implies that all disease (= dis-ease) begins in the mind – which means: to heal we first need to put our minds at ease, i.e. we must change our interpretation of the significant emotional event that we attracted before the onset of our disease.
In practise we are often unwilling to talk about significant emotional events or the symptoms of the disease.
- The event may be so traumatic that we refuse to acknowledge it. We literally blot it out from our conscious thinking or, at very least, we refuse to talk about it.
- We may feel shame about the event. It weakens or destroys a self image that we dearly wish to hold on to, and project on to others.
- We may feel shame about the ‘weakness’ we would reveal by talking openly about our malady. We feel embarrassed. We don’t wish to be seen as a second class citizen.
- We may fear the consequences of being told that we have a serious health condition. We fear possible ‘future fear’. We fear a possibility that we don’t want to happen. We ignore early symptoms. We stick our head in the sand, metaphorically speaking, and hope the symptoms go away.
- We may even lack the self worth needed to call out for help. We may feel we don’t deserve others’ attention. We don’t want those that we love and care about to worry about us. We place their emotional wellbeing before our own.
- We may be in a Machiavellian environment (for example, in corporate business or politics) where problems translate into weakness. Where there lurk many, envious of our power, who will seize the opportunity to brings us down, and hopefully gain our power.
If there is one piece of wisdom to counteract all the above, it’s this:
Love and care for yourself wholly so that you can love and care for others wholly too. You cannot give to others that which you do not give to yourself first.
(Continued in Defrag your Soul)
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Paul C Burr
Follow @paulburr
[1] Susanne Billander, META-Medicine® Master Trainer, META-Health Coach, Master Practitioner of NLP, Time Based Technique, Vortex Healing®, Soulrealignment® ref: http://www.metamedicine.se/
[3] Faster than the Speed of Light, by João Magueijo, cosmologist and professor in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London. He is a pioneer of the varying speed of light (VSL) theory.
Temperance
Posted by Doctapaul in Healing, Life's Changes, Love, Personal, Pitfalls I've Fallen Into, Self Development, Soundbytes of Wisdom on December 19, 2012
…does not mean ‘do without or prohibit’.
It means balance.
Temperance: Major Arcana card no 14, from the Ancient Tarot Deck of Marseilles by Jean Dodal, 1718.
Remove balance in life and you limit your perspective. The workaholic might not give themselves the time to enjoy a healthy personal life. The addict can’t see outside the control of their habit. The drunkard inebriates themselves from sobriety. In all three cases, the protagonist lives their life in denial.
Should you avoid temperance, not only do you limit your learning, you can do yourself harm – physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. As such, you harm the environment you live in and those nearest and dearest to you. Lack of temperance, by definition, means an excess of, or gluttony for, one thing over another. Be it work, alcohol, drugs, mindless TV or computer games – the excess means that you deny yourself health, which has consequences.
Have you ever watched downhill tobogganing on TV? The more often a sleigh hits the wall, the more it slows down through friction. And when it bounces off sideways the team are using their energy laterally to get back on track. Whilst it’s traversing it has to travel farther than a direct descent down the middle of the run. The middle way is the fastest and smoothest.
Study the Temperance card, from the 18th Century, Ancient Tarot Deck of Marseilles, by Jean Dodal. You observe a grounded female angel clad evenly in red (fire, hot, male) and blue (water, cool, female). Her arms are dressed in red, to signify strength and power of Mars. Her blue covered torso signifies the love and beauty of Venus. Water from the higher cup flows into and cleanses that of the lower. Not a drop is spilt or wasted; the flow is steady and harmonious. Her wings reveal she is an angel who may advise, guide and protect us. Her work embraces the harmony of opposites.
The Angel of Temperance teaches us that life’s direction leads eventually to the middle path. We do not need to swing extremely and continually between feast and famine, peace and war, love and hate, mercy and severity, prosperity and poverty, abundance and scarcity, riches and debt, victory and defeat, mine and yours, property and theft. When we embrace both aspects of duality as one, we create oneness. Something is only good for one, when it is good for all. There is no us and them, there is no me without not me. There is only us, together we become oneness.
When we bring temperance into our lives, we exemplify oneness.
(extract from my forthcoming book, from Defrag your Soul, due out next week.)
Shine on…!
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Paul C Burr
Follow @paulburr
Defrag your Soul: audio recording of talk about parts of the this forthcoming book, due for publication Summer 2012
Posted by Doctapaul in book, Healing, Life's Changes, Love, Personal, Pitfalls I've Fallen Into, Self Development, Soundbytes of Wisdom, Training & Development, Visions and Dreams on May 14, 2012
Click here: DEFRAG YOUR SOUL
Transform your Consciousness:
a practical guide for the beginner and seasoned traveller within…
Illustration by Andrea Kurucz, selected as part of a gallery of drawings for Defrag your Soul.
Extended extract from a talk I gave to the National Federation of Spiritual Healers, on Saturday 12 May 2012, in central London. The talk contains some topics from my book, Defrag your Soul, due for publication in Summer of 2012.
Parts of the talk include:
- Beyond NLP
- What is your purpose in life?
- Duality
- How do you take spiritual steps on your journey within? How do you know you’ve taken them?
- The Etheric Body aka The Vital Body
- The links between the Etheric Body and Health
- The path to magic
Shine on…!
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Paul C Burr
Follow @paulburr
The Alchemy of Life: from Low Self Worth to Self Worth
Posted by Doctapaul in Healing, Life's Changes, Love, Personal, Pitfalls I've Fallen Into, Relationships, Self Development, Soundbytes of Wisdom on March 13, 2012
When you filter out, ignore or deny feelings of low self worth, you filter out self worth as well. Remember, the “wet and dry” of life. You can’t know one without the other. So life is about knowing self worth and its shadow, low-self worth. When you understand both and how to transmute the shadow into light, then you understand the alchemy of life.
Image sourced from Spagyric Arts
Shine on…!
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Paul C Burr
Follow @paulburr
Love your Bubble of Fear
Posted by Doctapaul in book, Healing, Life's Changes, Love, Personal, Pitfalls I've Fallen Into, Poetry, Relationships, Self Development, Soundbytes of Wisdom, Visions and Dreams on March 1, 2012
Allow your fear into your consciousness. Place it in a bubble. Neither attempt to hold the bubble nor prod it. Let the bubble float freely. Surround the bubble skin with love. Be patient. Wait for love’s miraculous power of osmosis to weave its magic. The fear will wave farewell.
Image sourced from Fine Art America
Shine on…!
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Paul C Burr
Follow @paulburr
The Law of Reversibility – the What and How – more Powerful than the Law of Attraction
Posted by Doctapaul in Healing, Life's Changes, Love, Personal, Pitfalls I've Fallen Into, Relationships, Self Development, Soundbytes of Wisdom on February 28, 2012
An extract from
Defrag your Soul
- Image from http://exper.3drecursions.com/
The Law of Reversibility
If situations (events and people) can affect your emotional state, then inducing that same emotional state will manifest the same events and people into your life. Manifesting is not attracting. It’s creating something that’s already there, should you really want it. It requires focus, imagination and faith – in yourself.
(But you also need to know clearly what you are manifesting.)
About the Law of Duality
To know love, for example, you need to know not-love. So learning not-love serves a purpose. You are indirectly learning about love. And you won’t experience love wholly until you complete your learning. Here lies the rub of duality. This is how life works.
So…
Be clear that what you imagine will bring you what your soul seeks. And know that all the things that you experience – that you don’t want – serve a purpose.
The Law of Reversibility is far more powerful than the Law of Attraction. Rather than attract what you don’t have, you know you can have exactly what you want. It already exists in the field of unlimited possibilities. Manifesting requires practice, faith and imagination. Try it.
Imagination – takes place in your mind. It means place an image-in-ions (atoms). Your conscious mind passes the information (your emotional state) pertaining to that image to your unconscious mind. The unconscious mind then signals your DNA to send out the corresponding vibe to the universe.
DNA – is your transmitter to the universe. It transmits your signal of how you are feeling in the moment – your vibe. Its signal is governed by your unconscious mind.
Unconscious mind – passes the decisions made by the conscious mind to each and every body cell in your body. It also collects the vibes you pick up unknowingly and stores that information away too. It protects you from information that it feels you cannot cope with. All the information, good and bad, is stored away in your holographic Etheric Body. Each and every body cell is a fractal (the whole is contained in each fractal) of your Etheric Body’s hologram.
Body cell – Each and every body cell contains your whole life history, your memories, feelings, reactions and actions, everything that’s happened to you knowingly and unknowingly. It is placed in cellular memory.
Vibe – is the vibration that your DNA sends out to the universe. You can increase the power of this vibe by acting as if you already have what you seek.
Act as if – The brain executes the same neural pathways in the same way, whether you’re viewing real life situations or dreaming about them. The mind cannot tell the difference between the real world and an imaginary world. By acting as if you already have what you want in your imagination – you fool the mind into thinking the same. The conscious mind thus directs the unconscious mind to inform your DNA to send out a corresponding vibe. Over time, you attract what you want, as long as you keep faith in yourself and live your dream.
Soul – The body cells that constitute your physical body, inform your soul of the direction you seek to take. The soul cross references your intentions and behaviours with its quest – your life purpose. Soul then signals, via the mind, spirit to inform it of the new experiences it seeks to attract.
Spirit – is the force which manifests form: people things and events, to take you down your chosen life’s path, to your true self, your soul’s quest. But spirit can only manifest via the mind. The decision as to what to manifest is taken by the mind. The mind contains four things that sully spirit’s power to attract what your soul wants: guilt, anger, sadness and fear – the four seeds of karma.
Karma – you invoke a karmic response when you veer from the path of your chosen life’s journey. Karma tells you that you are allowing guilt, anger, sadness and fear to cloud your decisions; that you have gone astray.
False ego – is the keeper of guilt, anger, sadness and fear. It’s has a dual edged sword type of existence. It holds on to these negative emotions and attempts to control your mind with them. But also, it knows full and well that its purpose is to reveal the source of these negative emotions to you when the time is right – so that you can release them. In a paradoxical way, your false ego beckons your light. It knows when to submit to your light to shine within in its dark shadows. Each time you shine more light into your false ego’s shadows, you take a spiritual step on your chosen life’s journey – toward your true self.
Spiritual steps – are what you take when you allow and release all the guilt, anger, sadness and fear in your life that stops you from taking that step. Each step takes you closer to your true self.
True self – the purpose of your life is to find, open, become and express your true self. If you don’t know it already, you find the purpose of your life by following your passions. Once you find out what your purpose is, you open up it up to understand the implications it holds for you. Becoming your true self takes time. You have to find and open each spiritual step on the way. As you take each step, you become closer to your true self. You gain wisdom. You complete that step when you apply that wisdom to serve humankind. You shine. You express more of your true self – a deathless solar star.
Shine on…!
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Paul C Burr
Follow @paulburr
7 key traits, CEOs use to break through those wretched “Corporate Firewalls”
Posted by Doctapaul in Business, Leadership on August 16, 2011
I’ve seen a wide variety of researched estimates of the average tenure of a CEO. They range from 2.5 to 7+ years. I don’t know many private investors who are that patient. The last two CEOs I met, gave themselves considerably less time to make their mark; 1 year and 6 months respectively.
CEOs seem to have a honeymoon period of around 18 months. By the end of which, if things aren’t significantly better, their ‘marriage’ with the investors will probably not last.
A chat with Professor Colin Coulson Thomas prompted me to write this blog. Colin, author of Winning Companies:Winning People, is Chairman and fellow board member of Cotoco Ltd .
Here are the warning signs that CEOs fear most.
- Bad earnings news: the most likely and quickest sign of departure.
- Corporate programs don’t deliver: mergers and acquisitions “achieve 70% of their potential” at best.
- Failure to turnaround ailing sales quick enough.
- Change takes too long: “Corporate Firewalls” prevent people from getting it done. More on this later.
- Investors don’t understand: a CEO spends 40% of their time articulating strategy and some argue that’s not enough.
- Personal wealth at risk: e.g. missed deadlines can lead to private investors swallowing up the shareholding of a company
- Lack of innovation: playing it safe is no longer an option these days. Competitors and customers are moving too quickly.
- Talent gaps in performance: e.g. 20% of the salesforce bring in 80% of the revenue (and probably a much higher percentage of the profit).
- Conflict in the boardroom: too much time spent looking inwards leaves too little time to focus on the customer.
- Personal credibility at risk: any of the above means less likelihood of stepping up the ladder of success and/or lack of a legacy of note. These in turn can lead to…
- Personal health at risk: where the stressed mind-body connection can have serious consequences. I know of one CEO who, after missing targets set by investors, developed terrible eye problems because he didn’t like what he saw. Another developed disabling back pain through a lack of self esteem. Another who was deemed too rigid and inflexible developed problems with their joints.
Getting the strategy right will largely depend on the advice the CEO receives from those around them and experts (those they know who have done it before). This is called mentorship. And many stop there because it’s traditionally acceptable to have mentors.
But the CEO’s job is not just about getting it right. It’s about influencing people who don’t want to be influenced at first. If they were easily influenceable they’d have done what was needed long ago. This leads us to those constructs that get in the way – I call them….
Corporate Firewalls
With a select group of people, the CEO works out what tomorrow’s reality for their organisation will look like – and the strategy to get there. They find the first firewall just outside this group. Everyone on the inside ‘gets it’. Those on the outside don’t – certainly not the whole picture. Which means they miss perhaps key pieces to the corporate jigsaw. The more select the CEO’s inner group, the higher or tougher the ‘wall’ is to breach.
The wall filters out some of the cognition and understanding of what went on inside. It only takes a small amount to create ambiguity. Once ambiguity kicks it can start a trail as follows:
ambiguity –> confusion –> stress –> dysfunction.
This occurs especially in organisational cultures where ‘not understanding’ is perceived as a weakness. And when a ‘senior middle manager’ (say, from outside the group) doesn’t get it, they tend to do one of 4 things. They…
- Ask for clarity (’tis surprising how little often this happens)
- Put their head down, pay lip-service, and hope it will go away
- Push back (the larger the hierarchy the less egalitarian the culture)
- (Most dangerous of all) Make up the missing pieces of the jigsaw for themselves
The latter habit creates the most confusion for everyone in the value chain right through to the customer interface or the grass roots level of the organisation. For just behind this ‘grass roots’ operational level we observe a second firewall. Curiously, those at the ‘grass roots’ level seem to get the gist of CEO messages quite easily. It’s how those messages are translated into action where the confusion lies. And they are sometimes less prone to keeping quiet when things don’t add up. So the CEO has the challenge of involving those who will carry their message wholly and articulately into the organisation on their behalf.
7 Key Traits
CEOs require a mixed repertoire of personal strategies to influence influencers. In my personal research (of several hundred top performers in organisations around the globe) I’ve observed 7 key traits (or characteristics) in those who influence the best:
- Faith-in-Self – when there is no data (or time to gather it) to make big decisions.
- Passion – if you don’t radiate passion how can you expect others to shine?
- Sensibility – to see where others are at, where they come from and where they are headed, in their minds
- Articulate – to simplify complex concepts and make them compelling
- Curiosity – to explore what’s going on below the surface of things
- Networker – it’s not what you know it’s who you go to, to find and share wisdom to get things done
- Composure – under pressure or facing the unknown
We demonstrate traits. They describe how we come across to others. We do not learn them in a classroom through conventional training. We nurture traits. A good Executive Coach accelerates the process of how a CEO nurtures winning traits and behaviours (that may feel uncomfortable at first) – to forge a strategic personal-identity with those people whom they do not have personal contact with. If these winning traits were purely intellectual or comfortable they wouldn’t need a coach – would they? With this in mind, we can see the difference between mentoring and coaching.
We get what we project.
CEOs get people to copy what they project. The onus they face: to transfer the above traits and characteristics to others. Some CEOs see coaching as something for other people with problems. They are part right. It is. But the problems I talk about are all associated with an inability to influence those people who will block/thwart even the best thought out plans. CEOs might not even know what those that hinder are up to – because they are hidden behind a Corporate Firewall.
Shine on…!
Paul C Burr
Business/Personal Performance Coach & Author
Facebook: Beowulf (>16,000 followers)
Follow @paulburr
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Paul C Burr 