By Jon Rappoport
In the past, I’ve made several efforts to describe the work I do with private clients. This time, I want to reach deeper.
When you do this work well, there is a great deal of intuition and spontaneous observation involved. It’s not mechanical. You can’t arbitrarily apply a host of rules and regulations to a human being.
The work is more involved, more complex than your standard self-improvement texts and slogans and cheerleading banners.
It begins with the client. How is he seeing his life and his ambitions at the moment?
I’m trying to hear his tune, too. Not just his words. On what frequency is he broadcasting, so to speak?
Why is that important? Because that allows you to have an instinct about his world—not just pieces of it, but the larger space of it.
Life has everything to do with imagination and creative power. Those are the twin engines of existence. They are, deep down, what we all want to kick into gear.
A problem will remain a problem only as long as a person insists on remaining uncreative.
However, issuing an order like a directive from the Pentagon to “be more creative” misses the mark, because, if it were that simple, it already would have happened.
Every human being is engaged in some kind of complex process. This process involves adjustments to reality, hidden ambitions, efforts to survive and achieve and win, dreams and fantasies, love, hope, connecting to others, and a hundred more things…
What I basically have with a person is dialogue. We talk. Fortunately, this dialogue has no pattern, just as creativity has no pattern. Just as dreaming has no pattern. But there is purpose. The guiding star is this: lifting the person from an overall sameness and repetition into a new, freer level of living.
At this level, ambitions and strategies clarify and become electric. More energy and power are available. Imagination and the creative impulse are available.
The dialogues I engage in are about transforming sameness into freedom.
Is this a simple one-two punch? Sometimes, at certain moments. But then there is dialogue that is more roundabout, that is like taking an excursion into the country. Because that’s what’s necessary.
These excursions often turn out to be about discovering or remembering what the person really wants.
Not about what he sort of wants. I’m talking about a big desire that is half-submerged under a welter of distractions—and these distractions may have been present for a month or for 40 years.
In our society, emotional resignation and passivity have been promoted as signs of honor. Sometimes, the dialogue is about stamping out that cozy campfire with a hard boot.
Sometimes, the client is engaged in business strategies, and an aura of confusion has settled in around these efforts—in which case, the dialogue is all about clarification of tactics and removing the inessentials. The road has become blurry; and re-focus, concentration, and execution are needed.
The space we call freedom doesn’t eliminate work, striving, and learning, but it does make the effort exciting. It does dispel a sense of drudgery.
Hope, a light up ahead, renewed dreams, ambition, energy, direction—these are fine things. They shouldn’t be minimized.
The dialogue has no set boundaries. It doesn’t rule out possibilities. It is ultimately based on the fact that we all can do much more than we ordinarily suppose we can.
Here’s a fairly useful analogy. Consider an inventor. We can see him at various stages. At first, he may have no idea he can invent anything or that he even wants to. He’s in the dark. He may know he has a tag-end of an idea, but he doesn’t know what it’s about. It’s an unformed dream.
Then, later, he realizes he wants to invent something, but he doesn’t yet know what it is. Still later, he has a concept of the invention—and then, in later stages he has a prototype; he’s testing the prototype; he’s refining it; he’s finished it and it works the way he wants it to work; he’s ready to scout out investors; he’s looking; he finds seed money for production; he goes into production; he’s selling the invention—and so on and so forth.
Working with such a person, I might find him at any one of these stages. I engage in dialogues with him, and he will gradually see what he needs. He’ll wake up to that. The vision and the direction will come into focus. The work that lies ahead will clarify. And then at some point, the road will have definite markers. From that moment on, it will be about action. About specific action and keeping distractions in the background. And his velocity will jump.
There is always something about the dialogue that is un-mechanical. There is spontaneous discovery. There is rising hope. There is the creative impulse. There is the energy and feeling of the dream coming into existence.
And of course, there is his deepening commitment to his enterprise.
You can’t split all these factors up into neat pieces. You can’t pretend to separate one from the other. They operate in concert. He gains clarity at every stage, but instinct and intuition are always present.
Well, we are all inventors of one kind or another. We are all creators. How any one person gets there, how he walks and runs and wanders along the road is unique biography. Trying to substitute a boiled-down fake plot for that story is a vast reduction of the process.
I’m not saying practical advice is useless. It can be quite valuable at the right moments. But we live in a culture that demands answers in short form spit out of a machine, and that’s not going to carry the freight. Human beings need something else.
In my experience over the last 20 years or so, doing this work, I’ve found that sometimes the very long story needs to have an ending, and sometimes a brief story needs a much wider plot. There’s no hard and fast rule. The dialogue works. It travels. It curves and winds. It comes to conclusions. And then it strikes out in a new direction. Many things happen.
Everyone wants a better life. Everyone glimpses what that life might look like for himself. Everyone wants to imagine a vision and a direction, and then follow and build the road. Everyone wants the road to widen and expand.
And that’s what my work is about.
It would be nice to say I apply technique 202-A, and then it’s strategy 506-R, and then I tilt my head and breathe through my nose and voila! Everything is solved. But it just doesn’t work that way.
I meet a person on common ground and we talk. The dialogue opens the door for expansion. Time and time again, I’ve seen this innocent looking setting produce good things. The work is more simple and more subtle than it seems. I stick with it.
JON RAPPOPORT
www.nomorefakenews.com
www.insolutions.info
If you’re interested in becoming a client, contact me at qjrconsulting@gmail.com