The kitchen is finally moving towards completion. Gary has put together his “Schindler” of all the things that need to be done before we can say it’s finished. I am looking forward to populating the cupboards which need to be painted inside before I can finally move in (meantime, Gary and Wills have been making liberal use of them for tools and other items of their trade).
Wills was full of cold at the beginning of last week and I, too, succumbed so that on Friday I caught myself reflecting on all the reasons why I might have caught the cold – catching it from Wills, the impact of the long hard slog of accommodating work in the kitchen, the cold weather…
…and then I caught myself in the act of thinking that somehow the cold had “happened to me”. To a degree it had of course. Henry Dreher, in his book The Immune Power Personality (which I’ve mentioned before on this blog), talks of breakthroughs in 19th century science, when “the researches of German physician Robert Koch and French physician Louis Pasteur led to the theory of specific etiology – the idea that diseases were caused by a single microorganism and could be eradicated by a single strategy for destroying the invader”.
Dreher also talks, though, of the work of Claude Bernard, the mid-19th-century French physiologist. To quote briefly from Dreher’s already much abbreviated description of Bernard’s work, “Health was predicated on balance, and disease was a by-product of imbalance in the interior environment”. Germs were not so much omnipotent as ready to to take root when the conditions were right. Reflecting on my own health at this time brought home the tiny deteriorations in my normal health regimes in recent months – drinking far less of my usual “Supergreens“, overlooking my usual vitamin supplements, a diet that isn’t quite up to par, less walking… I knew I was reaping the results of small changes I was already aware of. I have been telling myself that I’ll get back on track when the kitchen is done. This is true – and still, the accumulation of small changes is also the sum of my own decisions in recent weeks.
At one level, I’m talking about a common cold. At another level, I’m also talking about the wider question of what mindset we bring to our lives. When something goes wrong, do you focus on what has happened to you? Perhaps wish things were different that are beyond your control? Or do you focus on your own contribution – what you have done that has made a contribution and what you can do to move forward?
There is a phrase used by some coaches (and no doubt others, too) – “being at choice”. We are at choice when we focus on our own choices rather than seeing ourselves as the helpless victim of circumstance. Others use the term “in your own power”. Over the years I have seen how successful leaders have mastered the art of being at choice. These are the leaders who use their power of choice to achieve outcomes they desire. They are often optimistic and resilient in the most difficult of circumstances. Rather than expend energy in wishing (fruitlessly) that things were different, they harness their creativity to the question “what can I do?”
And lest you are beating yourself up right now or yearning to do things differently and not knowing how, I hasten to add that this isn’t an “either/or” scenario. Most of us have moments when we are at choice (standing in our power) and others when we are not. Moving to a more powerful position is something we do one step at a time. For me, in recent days, just noticing that I am not at choice has opened up possibilities to make different choices.
