Say what you do and do what you say

22nd Aug 2008

Hello lovely people

I tend to see myself as not very tactful. As a result people always know where they stand with me.

However, when I do clairvoyant readings, I am fully aware of the words I use, or rather of the words that are given to me. I am always focused on giving a very clear message to my clients, and on being honest, but at the same time on having empathy for them.

So maybe I am more tactful than I give myself credit for.

The problem is that I tend to expect other people to do the same – to say what they do and do what they say. And as life goes, this does not always happen.

Recently a friend who had just completed a course in Chinese face reading told me that a particular area of my face shows a strong “bull-shit detector”, in other words, don’t lie to me or create a picture that is anything but real and honest, because you will not get away with it.

Sadly this detector had failed me over the past year. I had particular expectations of some people and I did everything from my side to help them meet my expectations of them. I was quite sure that I had communicated my expectations in many different ways, but apparently I had not.

Over the past weeks I had one shock after another, and I realised that after years of knowing these people, I do not know them at all. I felt quite angry, betrayed and disappointed. I contacted them and told them how I felt, but they had nothing to say, and I know that expecting an apology would again be expecting too much. I now need to put this behind me and move on.

What went wrong? I can write an entire page condemning the people involved and pointing a finger, but they will have no idea that I am doing this because they are on the other side of the world, and I will just be in a hell that I created all by myself.

Alternatively, I can look at the three fingers that point back to me while I point my finger at them. Those three fingers tell their own story.

The first finger tells me something I have known for years, namely that you NEVER help another person because you feel pity for the person. When you do that, you take on a burden that another person must carry, and you exhaust your own resources. When you have no resources left, you cannot help yourself and you cannot help those people around you that can benefit from help that comes from objectivity rather than from emotional bias.

There is also the matter of fair exchange. If you help someone and you do not get anything in exchange, nobody is satisfied and it is easy to have negative feelings about what you did. This may sound harsh, but some people will take your help and thank you and make a huge success and help others because of what your actions taught them, while others will always come back for more until you are exhausted, and then they will move on to someone else and suck them dry.

When you expect something in exchange from the person that you help and make that clear, the person knows that your help is a conscious act and they are aware of their own obligation. They can then choose to either honour their obligation or not accept your help, and both people know where they stand. I assumed fair exchange from one person that firmly believes in sucking others dry, and from another person that I thought had the same values that I have, because I did not spell out the rules right from the beginning.

The second finger tells me that in both instances I failed to set expectations clearly. I did communicate my expectations at the beginning of both situations, and I assumed that years of “bad” habits and “wrong” ideas will be wiped out in one conversation with me. I was the one that added the judgement, because I applied my view of the world to the person. In their own minds they are sure that they did the right things for the right reasons.

It is possible to help people change their beliefs and values, but the motivation must come from them and not from me. These changes can be accelerated with a technique like NLP, but it cannot just be done by having one normal conversation. I was dealing with two completely separate worlds that will hardly ever come together, and I assumed that allowing a person into my view of the world will take away or “fix” the other person’s view of the world. I came down into my own reality very hard. I live my illusion and nobody else’s, and I cannot undo the world of another person. That is not what I am here for.

The third lesson was that once you have said what you do, you must do what you say and not fear the consequences. I made life very difficult for myself by tolerating and thinking I was being generous, charitable, and helpful. The other people took from me without thinking twice simply because I was giving, and will continue to do so for as long as I allow it. Neither of them has ever learnt to create their own destiny and use their own creativity, and I failed to teach them that lesson by creating their destiny on their behalf and never discussing it with them. Why did I not discuss it with them? Because one has a bad temper and a vocabulary from the gutter whereas I like peace, and because the other is a very old friend that I thought I was helping.

I said what I did and did what I said, and in both instances I ignored all the tiny signs that things were not going according to MY plan. I thought that both situations were only temporary, and therefore it was best for me to tolerate, be resilient and just live with it. The result was that I said what I did, but I in fact did not do what I said, because I did not want to experience a bad temper of disillusionment about a friendship. I did not live my own truth, and that is why I felt betrayed, angry and disappointed.

I can aim these feelings at the other people who will probably continue on their paths of destruction and self-destruction, or I can deal with my own feelings and accept that I did not live my own truth and am looking for someone to blame.

My challenge is to find the unconditional love that is there for these people and for everyone else. However, it does not need to be a challenge. I can simply find a way to lovingly voice my concerns, and move on. We like to think of it as a challenge when in fact unconditional love is our natural state. We still have so much to learn in this world.

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Love and Light
Elsabe