Julio. Let’s say I’m working with an executive. Usually, if I work with an executive, the conversation begins where we have some issues in the company. But pretty soon into the conversation that person is telling me things like: “The truth of the matter is I’m lost. I don’t know where to go. I see so many signs in the market; I see so many signs in government policies; I see the real estate thing; and I see the rising price of energy.” But then I say to him or her: “Surely from the perspective of business you have a lot more possibilities to answer those challenges than I.” “But wait,” he says, “what do I do with the fact that I’ve got these situations?”
One of my clients comes from a very high level in a big corporation in America. He told me, “In two years I am retiring. And you know what I realized? Since I announced that I am retiring, I have sharks around me, all day, swimming, waiting for me to go. How do I deal with that? I have no idea. I thought the people were loyal to me, but I begin to see they were having expectations of….” My client was dealing with the rest of his life, with the meaning of what he did- with the issues of loyalty, with the level of trust. He was navigating, but not in the business tradition—for as a businessman, he has all the experience that I can never challenge. He was dealing with the simplest, deepest human issues that you can imagine. And through our conversation, what he found was a way to look at these issues.
For instance, I’m going to be specific here just to frame it in the way that we have been talking. I presented to him a new ontology of emotions, the role of emotions, and the power in learning new emotions. This, for him, was like an absolutely new territory that he never even imagined. Previously for him, talking about emotions belonged in the territory of therapy. That was his background.
Secondly, he dared, for the first time in his life, to open some conversations he never opened to anyone. Just the experience of engaging in those conversations, regardless of the outcome, was in itself liberating for him. He thought that in order to make a decision, he needed to be clear. We replaced that. So, he began to place trust in places where he never placed it before. He began to navigate with a kind of trust that was not available to him before. Clarity sometimes is simply impossible. Sometimes, the best you have is your intuitive capacities- grounding them, of course. But you may have to start there. And he discovered that the best decisions in his life were very intuitive. They were not learned in the business school.
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