It’s My Way or the Highway

“It’s my way or the highway!” Vince Lombardi, Football Coach

In times of uncertainty, doubt and fear, our self-will takes over. In these moments, we believe that the only thing that will make it all okay (or for it all to go away) is for our most desired solution to come to pass.

You know how it is. If only God, Life or the Universe would listen to us, things would be just fine. And since we have determined that there’s no evidence of any other power out there, we feel that all solutions must emanate from us.

And yes. When absolutely backed into a corner we will attempt to force any solution that comes to hand.

The problem with this approach, of course, is that what we imagine is the best or only solution to ours and sometimes others’ woes often will not work. It might also be that our solution will make matters worse, if not immediately, then somewhere down the track.

Mother Knows Best

“As long as everything is exactly how I want it, I’m totally flexible.” Anonymous

Toni worries about the wellbeing of her offspring and so she does everything she can think of to keep them safe.

You see, Toni herself didn’t have the easiest of childhoods. She grew up with addicts for parents who were not there for her physically, mentally or emotionally. As a consequence, she basically had to pull herself up by her own bootstraps. She needed to figure out life and deal with all its challenges on her own. And, as the eldest child in her family, she had to figure it all out for her younger siblings as well.

Today, while Toni’s motives are pure and loving, her style of helicopter parenting doesn’t play well with her own children. Routinely, they resist her rules, edicts and advice by ignoring her and/or doing the opposite of what she demands of them. Toni’s reaction to their “push-back” is to up the ante by setting even more draconian rules and regulations.

Of course, Toni doesn’t listen to anyone else’s viewpoint – and most certainly not her partner’s. She adamantly believes only she know best while her family life is disintegrating before her very eyes.

Billy Lets Go

“I didn’t get my way, but what I got was better.” Anonymous

Billy takes a different approach to problem handling. It’s not that he had an easy early life, it’s just that he learned different lessons from the hardships that he experienced.

The particular lesson he learned is that there was a time to intervene and a time to let go of a problem and let it find its own level.

Case in point. His brother and sister had a long standing disagreement that made it difficult for them to attend the same family functions much less maintain a relationship of any sort.

When their last remaining parent died, the family had to work out how to divide up their parents’ personal effects – thankfully there was no money left in the estate to argue over. Billy made a list of the things he would like to have and then handed the list to them, making it clear that he was happy to negotiate the items on his list. He then expressed that he had confidence in them to work out the rest and left them to it.

Nothing happened for several weeks and finally they came back to him with a plan about how to divide what remained of the estate. Billy was shocked – it was balanced and fair. If he had come up with it, he is certain that they would not have been satisfied. They would have called him Mr. Bossy Boots and rejected his solution out of hand.

But because Billy kept his nose out it, they were forced to talk and work things out between them. That wasn’t his intention or his plan, however. It’s just that, in this situation, he accepted that he was powerless and so he simply let go of the problem and trusted that a higher good would somehow or in some way be served.

And it was.