The Five Tasks of Standing in WithStanding

I used to think these 5 tasks applied to mid-life people, but it turns out they apply to anyone who is on a journey to living more prosperously - to WithStanding (WSing). I discovered them while watching my 4,000 clients get good job offers. There would be one last thing they did that was different before a terrific offer came. Taking care of yourself in these five ways changes your way of being. They open up the pathways for invitations of all kinds to come to people. I hope you’ll try them and let us know what happens and how you are feeling.

To find your path, start counting with the thumb of your left hand. The 5 pathways of caring for yourself that lead to WithStanding are 

1.       Your health – whatever you mean by health: physical, mental, or emotional. Get help. Talk with people. Healing happens in connection. Don’t get hung up on spiritual health here. Too often that is a means of separating from people, or NotWithStanding. This is so you can stand up.

2.       Your roof and everything under it, including where you keep your car – plumbing clogged or dripping? These are powerful metaphors in your living space that work on your mind. Boxes of grandma’s china in the basement and 30-year old spices in the kitchen? Get rid of them; you don’t need to feel guilt for letting go of someone else’s past or wasting something that isn’t worthy. Take care of your home, your surroundings that restore you. Set them up to re-stock what is healthy and healing. This is the art. This is where you are grounding Standing.

3.       Your significant relationship with whom you are building the future – This is where money is accruing, and obviously more difficult for single people. It’s not one man + one woman or the piece of paper. It’s the commitment to building your late life stages together. It requires talking. If you don’t have a significant other, you can still talk; you can still have partners. Either way, single or coupled, get into a relationship with someone who is good at financial planning and tracking, or a coach, or someone who is good at making plans, or all three – and you help them by encouraging their planning, too. This is resource-finding.

4.       Missing and estranged family members – You will know if this is a task you need to work on because it’s like a giant hand reaches down from the sky and grabs you by the collar, pulling you to find or reconcile with the member. If it’s a missing person, it will be easy – coincidences and revelations will come quickly, in less than a couple of months.* If it’s reconciliation you need, help will be given as you proceed. Sometimes these are mixed together with a rule or three. In any event, when we take care of this energy leak, we are WSing our family.

If you are afraid, or if the missing person was ostracized for very bad behavior, know that you never have to physically connect with a dangerous person. #1 is our physical, mental, and emotional health. Yet, most often the person is not that dangerous, or not that dangerous now, and we can draw a boundary between their offensive behavior and our belonging in our family. For we do belong; we have papers. And we can stand in that. We are WSing.

*This is my observation with job seekers and the timing may be impacted by their need and effort toward building for the future, taking care of home and family, etc. and therefore may not apply in all cases. if you work on this point, I’d really like to hear your experience with timing and outcomes. You can, but you don’t have to, comment here. It can be confidential if you would like. And you don’t have to write it all out. You could reach me directly at Sue@TheJobSearchCenter.com and we can talk.

5.       Resentments – Resentments stop invitations. They are the strongest barriers to good things coming to us, bar none. I wish I could tell you that this is not always the case. I do not mean faking forgiveness or indifference, either. Resentments are different from righteous anger which we draw on to stop abuse or injustice. In resolving resentments we stand with our agency to make a plan to stop the offending, or for how to deal with the behavior if it happens again. We call this NotWithStanding NotWithStanding. Removing resentments means we maintain our equanimity regardless of what is going on around us (that is not abuse).

Sometimes, and over time, we learn more about the person’s larger context, or our own context. We see differently - literally what we are conscious of changes, and the resentment resolves itself because in this new view, there is no offense. This is our well-being. We are WithStanding.