Is It Really Your Idea?

Following bad advice almost cost me a lifetime friendship. I am an advocate of using mentors, a seasoned professional you might say. I am also a mentor to others. But be careful who you pick, and be careful how you listen. Pick your mentor because they have already done what you want to do, and because you intuitively feel that they know something you don't know. However, once you pick a mentor and start listening, here's one lesson I have learnt with great pain: ensure you are congruent with whatever advice you act upon. Congruent? When you hear the right advice, you know it. A mixture of exhilaration, terror, realization, apprehension and joy can all arrive in concert with the new plan. It fits you, it excites you – it feels like a challenge you want. It gives you hope and the energy to spring out of bed in the morning. This is the kind of advice you seek to listen and act upon. Trying to follow advice that sends you cowering to a corner while chattering your teeth is missing some elementary, primal integration… So Wait. Listen. Be the author of your actions, not the actor of another person's script. How AT Helps You Find and Recognise Advice To Follow

Can guess why I am writing this? In fact, the bad advice I mentioned above was from my first business mentor. He did a superb job of helping me transition ATA into BodyChance, but then when I wanted to expand overseas into Sydney, I made the wrong assumption that he could help with that too. I actually knew this to be the case, but didn't listen. There was a moment in a café when I was asking him about how to go about launching the studio in Sydney, and there was a moment of confusion in his eyes before he launched into his familiar authoritative voice with the requested advice. As I watched his moment of vacillation, inwardly I realised "OMG. He has no idea." He told me then: "Don't let anyone else have control of BodyChance. Keep it all to yourself." So I told my two new partners this message, and started behaving out of that premise, and everything went downhill fast. Tom had helped me so much previously, that I was trusting him to help me with something he had not managed to do himself. Today I have a new mentor, and Paul's message is very different: "You have to give away something, you can't keep it all." This message was received very differently by my new partners in Los Angeles, and ensures their enthusiastic participation in making BCLA work. This mentor has spent his life advising businesses how to grow – hundreds of them. So look for that kind of mentor. Don't listen to me unless if fits you too. Ask me questions about what I have experienced, avoid seeking my advice on issues you know I have little experience with. This is true of all mentors. Many of you give each other advice in this forum, but treat that advice the same as any idea you have on your own. A good idea is not necessarily a good idea for you. I don't have enough stories to full this month as I planned, so I continue to ask for your requests, and will start write blogs on those, blogs with your stories, and a few surprises of my own as we travel together this month. Further Information on To-day's Blog Topic for the Enthusiasts

Upon hearing advice that gives you an icky feeling about doing something, rather than assume "Oh, this is just my faulty sensory perception kicking in…" instead ask your Self: "What information does my unconscious have for me about this?" Icky feelings are messages that you are out of harmony. They differ from the "unfamiliar feeling" of doing something new you get in an Alexander Technique lesson. I can't go into a long dissertation about feelings here, but the sensational experience a student has when they first encounter the operational significance of Alexander's Discovery, is always pleasant, never "icky". Understand that these are fundamentally different messages. I have often confused one for the other – thinking that the long held "something is wrong" feeling that I carried along with me during my experience of trying to build BodyChance in Sydney, was just an indication that I was doing something new. Turns out my feelings were right – I was heading for a disaster of life changing proportions. Disorientating feelings that result from a constructive change also contain a pleasant experience. If you didn't experience that, you wouldn't continue. Feeling is the engine behind your study of Alexander's Discovery: you feel better, so you want to continue. In the area I was getting my bad advice, I was not feeling better. I felt awful. So why did I continue? Because I was listening to "an expert" and being lazy with my own cognitive process. Icky feelings about doing something you have never done before need to be identified differently: they are not necessarily a positive sign that you are "really doing something new" because "I am feeling so awkward about it." It's a logic I fell for, and the reason my venture in Sydney finally collapsed. Instead, listen to that icky feeling as an indication that you are still dealing in parts, that the "whole" of your Alexander business is not known to you yet. Harmony, not dissonance, is what you seek.