THE VOICE OF THE SAGE
In talking to and coaching clients one of the comments that I often hear is: “I’ve learned to identify my most active saboteurs, but I’m still not sure how to activate or connect with my Sage.“As this seems to be a recurrent theme, I thought that I’d touch on it here.
It is generally much easier for us to identify the voices of our saboteurs because they are loud and obnoxious or cynical and hurtful. They cause us to experience stress, anxiety, disappointment, shame, frustration, anger, and all the plethora of other negative emotions that we as humans can feel. Unfortunately, in today’s world these are all emotions that we are highly familiar with-regardless of our economic or social circumstances, what our profession or job is, or how much we are respected. However, the voice of our Sage is gentle and soft. It nudges and guides. It does not demand or berate. It comes deep from within us, and is often perceived as an “intuition” or a “gut feeling.” It is the voice that gives us insight into a situation and calls us to trust in our deeper wisdom. It allows for discernment versus judgement, clarity versus confusion, and courage versus fear. And, the emotions that arise from listening to this voice are much rarely experienced, shared, or discussed. We have forgotten what they are, and how to find them. These are the emotions and feelings of peace, fulfillment, completeness, serenity, joy, unconditional love, etc. I have to admit that even in writing these down, I can automatically think of more of the negative emotions than the positive, which supports what I’m saying.How can we tune into and raise the volume of the Sage voice? QUIET. We need to learn to quiet our minds. This is where the training part of Mental Fitness is most relevant-the creating of “muscle”. Awareness only gets us 20% of the way to transforming our minds and our lives. So, the being aware of, recognizing our Saboteurs is essential, AND it is only the BEGINNING. Once we have this awareness, we need to put work into building the muscles (neural pathways) to quiet those saboteur voices so we can hear our Sage. This is the other 80% of the process.
Imagine that you find out that you are pre-diabetic. According to current standards you are overweight, and you know that if you drop to your ideal weight, your glucose metabolism will improve. You look at your lifestyle and realize that you live a very sedentary life (you create awareness). So, you decide that you are going to sign up for a 5K race in order to motivate yourself to go out and train regularly. Yet, you do not make a plan. You don’t consider how to start building endurance, how to strengthen your leg muscles, nor all of the daily habits that will get in the way of you actually getting out to train. You believe that you will be able to use your will power to get yourself off your butt and training-that you will be able to will your legs to run when you want them to. Unfortunately, you find will power is easily and quickly exhaustible, and that trying to will you legs to run without training is about as easy as willing the day to turn into night.
It is the same with Mental Fitness. Creating awareness is the first step. It is necessary in the journey, and it does NOT take you all the way. In order to complete the journey, to create change, work needs to be done. We must change thoughts, habits, and reactions that are deeply wired and ingrained. This takes time and commitment. It requires daily workouts that strengthen the neural pathways that give us access to the voice of our Sage. And the workouts are PQ reps.
I find the comments of Dr. Cruz to be most valuable for me and for all of us. Yes, we have to deal with our saboteurs but as she wisely says, we will do better by doing the work to become a sage with its attendant wisdom based on kindness. We do this work best together. Bravo for your contribution and for the work that you do! Best, Fred