The Five Tasks: #2, Your Roof and Everything Under It

Me to client: Hi! How are you?

Client (slumping into chair, with head hanging): I know I was supposed to work on my resume, but I didn’t get to it. I just had to clean out the kitchen cabinets.

Me:

Yaaassssss!!!!

Now the work is coming up to be done.

When I first started career coaching, I was surprised that this exact scene was repeated by so many clients before they worked on their resumes. Kitchens really do seem to be the heart of the family and making ourselves at home comes first. Like every other career coach, I believed and worked with Bill Bridges’ 3 Stages of Transition with all the feelings that go with them. But I didn’t know the need for guides through the Four Phases of the Journey, or that there were 5 Tasks people needed to do to clear the pathway for receiving invitations to join new companies and everything else they were wishing for.

What I did learn (because these conversations happened so often) was that if a person needs to take care of their home, the Universe will give them time to do it, to get their life back in order. A good offer will come after the tasks are worked on.

Tone of the Energy in Your Spaces

You want the energetics of your surroundings to support, like muscle tone, what you’re WSing – moving ahead in your career, balancing career and family, making friends, pursuing interests, making your inner work manifest in your outer life. When you have broken appliances or plugged up plumbing, you are NotWithStanding and will have trouble making progress.

The energies of your surroundings are magnets of your dreams – attracting what you desire. If you desire a new job offer, you need to be ready to receive it. If you are draining life-giving water through leaky faucets, it is harder for the employer to find you. It’s like a bell ringing – your tone sounds lethargic, not loud and clear.[1]

If all this is Greek to you, you might like to try Chinese. Feng Shui is an ancient system in the design pathway for homemaking, like the healing pathway described in the 1st Task blog post. Artistry for WithStanding, you might call it. You may like Feng Shui for the insights it gives you in considering your space and placing objects around your home to help make you magnetic in the way you want to be. You will still need to do the other 4 Tasks to receive enough invitations, and do the work of being found by employers, but see what you can do to make your home welcoming of everyone who lives there or stops by. (By the way, kindness to work people who come to help you will come back to you. Plumbers, electricians, landscapers, and Salvation Army movers are bringing energy with them. You want to attract good people, so you need to be embodying welcoming[2] energy to be attracting what you need.)

We are working with ‘house’ with multiple meanings

These fixes are not just metaphorical. The broken appliances and dripping faucets are messages in your surroundings that “you need to get your house in order!” They are messages that block your receiving pathway. This task is part of the financial aspect of your life. You may need to clean house! If someone is angry, you need to talk with them. If you are angry, you need to talk. This is why we need people, so we can talk to the right people to get to the meat of the matter, change our course, and then communicate with the people in our home about our need to change course. Maybe if you make a compelling example, they will want to get onboard with the changes you are making.

House is a word with embedded meanings. Many of us heard the phrase, “But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” from the Book of Joshua as we were growing up. A house with that meaning is family, perhaps extended family and those who are active in it, like tenants. House can also mean a family line, like the House of Windsor. Or a warehouse for storing till you are needed. (That’s what tragedy is - someone not being needed.) House is different from shelter, which is without warmth or permanence - just getting out of danger. What does house mean to you? What kind of house are you longing for?

What are your surroundings telling you?

Day in and day out, what standing are you grounding, rooting in your space and the ground under your space? What messages do you receive from your surroundings? Are they pinging your nervous system with more disregarding? That you are not worth taking care of? That you have too much to do? That you should not have friends who are close enough to invite to your home?

Or, are you getting healthier and in the process notice that your floor is cleaner, your dishes are put away more easily, that even if your income is low, you arrange what you have with style and grace, looking forward to having friends over. Maybe you made space for your family to get together, and to have space from each other when any of you need it. Taking care of your physical, mental and emotional health begins disentangling the Rope of Disregarding from the Rules of Don’t Speak Up, Don’t Stand Up and Don’t Keep Standing. These are your fears, the aspects of yourself that you are disregarding. But for now, just start with fixing the faucets and clearing out the attic.

In case it helps your imagination, here are some coincidences I’ve seen over time. These are not predictive – I’m not a fortuneteller. But I have heard these pairings a number of times:

·       Clogged plumbing goes with heart problems

·       Leaking faucets go with draining resources in other ways

·       Hoarding goes with clinging to past anger

·       Messiness - not projects and play in progress, but food, papers, and empty bottles on the floor - goes with disruption in a house member’s nervous system

·       Keeping boxes or shelves full of things you don’t use anymore goes with knee pain, and putting off paying bills. You may have regret about something that passed you by that you need to process.

·       Faulty electricity goes with missing or not sharing information – or too much detailing if it’s shorting out.

·       A roof needing repair goes with all of this and a feeling of insecure finances

Grounding matters

While it may be true that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, it is definitely true that dreams come true in reality - 3-dimensional reality. Otherwise, they are still wishes. Where we are dreaming from - home - is where we are grounding the dream. The energy for the dream is found in our health. Grounding our dreams where we are standing helps the dream come together.

This is the art. This is Grounding Standing.

Maybe you’re not living in a safe space

#1 is Your Health – physical, mental, and emotional. If you are in a place that is not safe, either because the house is literally falling down around your ears, or because “the house is falling down around your ears” from fighting, cold seething, or angry outbursts. Getting out of a situation like this is not a one-person project. You need WithStanding, someone standing with you.

Telling someone is the first step. But you may have tried that and found you do not have someone who is safe to tell. You may even doubt your perceptions, or worry that no one will believe you. I have told people my problems and they said I wasn’t trying hard enough, or should put up with something bad because the good parts were all I would ever get. It turned out they just didn’t know how or want to help me find help. They didn’t have faith. Each one of them was relieved when I made changes.

I learned when I talked with professionals, I got accurate and actionable answers. This made the difference with the people I had asked before. It’s ok for you to ask what help is available and make a plan. Giving help is what communities are designed for. We vote for taxes to make sure resources are available to help people like you and me. Go ahead and ask.

If you don’t know where to start, call 211. It is free and confidential. Here is a screenshot from their website, www.211.org.

[1] I’m not just mixing metaphors, though I wish a sound engineer would weigh in here. This is what I found from Scientific American about magnets in speakers: When one of the magnets (either the electromagnet or the permanent magnet) is attached to a thin membrane the rapidly changing magnetic field makes the membrane vibrate. The vibrating membrane bumps into nearby air molecules causing them to vibrate as well. This vibration travels through the air as a sound wave.

[2] I just have to add in here, that embodying involves talking and moving muscles - tell people what you need and how nice it will be when you get the need met. And not just tell what you need in general, but with some detail about it. Expand and sharpen the picture in your and other people’s minds. The actions you move to make will help energize your newly repaired reality that’s coming into being.