Have you ever seen a ‘back to the floor’ television programme where the senior manager of an organisation has decided to pose as a lower-level employee in order to see how things are really working out on the ground-floor of their day to day business?
Usually these managers would make their emotion-free decisions by looking at graphs and reports filtered and distorted by lower level staff in the organisational hierarchy. What will be missing from those reports are all the little things – the faulty water cooler; the angry employee forever upsetting customers; the stink in the customer waiting room created by who-knows-what in the ventilator.
In almost all cases of these television programmes the senior manager willing to experience the nitty-gritty of the ground-floor comes away with a wealth of ideas and having a greater respect for those staff who operate ‘down below’ in the organisation.
They usually also see where their own previous attitudes and instructions, or a lack of them, dispensed to their lower-level staff have caused the problems they now have to resolve.
With a much clearer view of what needs to be done they commit to a complete turnaround in approach.
We celebrate their adventure as an act of bravery and maybe sit there thinking ‘that is what all management need to do’. Yet not all senior managers do this – because they do not wish their minds to be changed. Having our mind changed in this way is almost always a painful experience. This applies to all of us when it comes to facing up to the realities in our lives.
When a senior manager goes back to the shop-floor they expect to be made uncomfortable yet are willing to do it because they associate discomfort with the sharp and necessary learning curve to be followed if their organisation is going to improve.
Not only does the senior manage undergo a change process – so does the ground-floor work force who feel a mixture of relief, mutual respect and a wish to help the senior manager further by changing the way they themselves function operationally.
Often when the benefits of this way of working come to fruition the approach is cascaded to all other managers as a permanent change in organisational culture. But the decision has to start at the top.
The same thing happens when we take our Conscious Point of Focus down to the level of our Unconscious Mind to observe what goes on down there when facing up to an emotional disorder.
Observation is everything.
Not just observation of the things you observe, but of the way in which you observe yourself, as you observe. Let me ask you a question here: are you aware of the viewpoint from which you currently observe your emotional system and do you think it gets the job of making you happy done?
Put yourself in front of that television programme as you watch the manager mixing with staff on the ground floor. Do you admire what the manager is doing? Most likely you do. Not often we see senior managers willing to face reality in this way, is it?
Now imagine that you watch yourself in the same way – observing what you are willing to do in order to position yourself so you can see your internal reality as it really is. This is your self image – your view of yourself that decides whether or not you admire and like how you go about observing your inner world – or not.
When you do not admire the way you observe, because you see yourself as a ‘manager who runs away’, you develop a lack of self-confidence and a poor self-image.
When you watch the manager in the television programme taking these risks, feeling their embarrassment and being changed as a result, do you have greater confidence or less confidence in them? Do you think of them as being stupid or courageous?
This is where confidence in emotional healing comes in. Not from always getting things right but from having the knowledge that when things do not feel right inside you have the courage to take your Conscious Point of Focus, your brain-changing attention system, inwards so you can observe first hand what is going on.
Strangely enough, despite the emotional pain or maybe because of it, as you watch yourself taking the risks necessary to ensure the overall ‘organisation’ called you gets back on track towards becoming happier you actually end up really liking yourself into the bargain, emotional problems or no emotional problems
Once you discover that taking your Conscious Point of Focus into the centre of your emotional pain causes beneficial change to happen merely as a result of being willing to go there and observe no matter what, you become more determined to do so again in the future – and do it much earlier so you can avoid the hard slog that results when you do not do this for long periods of time.
What goes wrong in the relationship between your Conscious and Unconscious when they refuse to come together on a regular basis?
Basically the same types of things that happen when senior managers and ground-floor workers in an organisation fail to communicate effectively. They:
- start interpreting information incorrectly
- develop a non-accepting attitude to each other and believe neither knows what is really going on producing a sense of overall mistrust and lack of confidence
- work to different value systems and
- become entrenched in unhelpful viewpoints, which they fight to hold onto when external change demands new flexibility.
In order to undo all this you have to take your Executive, planning brain down into your Unconscious ground floor brain. You do this by entering the emotional responses being presented by your Unconscious Mind – by allowing the feelings to come through.
Now you start to:
- Re-interpret life events in such a way as to reduce their emotional impact on you (for example if you blame yourself for a life event over which you had no real control you can start to see this and let yourself off the guilt-hook)
- normalise and accept even the most intense emotional experiences (my favourite metaphor for emotional disorders is they are like broken legs: undesirable but normal; if they were not normal we would not be able to have them)
- re-prioritise your value systems (for example make your emotional happiness your priority rather than making the emotional happiness of everyone else your priority) and eventually:
- develop and alternate between different viewpoints so effectively you can see all the viewpoints available and then select the appropriate viewpoint at the appropriate time (for example if you have an obsession you have a viewpoint that says thinking about this thing is unacceptable – but you can eventually move to a different viewpoint by discharging the emotional energy attached; there comes a point it stops bothering you).
The rule of observation is whatever we pay close enough attention to automatically starts to change for the better, even when ‘better’ means something we never thought of as being ‘better’ before.
But that rule comes at a price and not all of us are willing to pay.
How about you?
Regards – Carl
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