creative maverick

Following on from yesterday’s post “How you do anything is how you do everything“, I thought I’d share something from the world of psychotherapy on the same topic which will really press the point home.

I have been on a Professional Development course in Psychotherapy at Spectrum Therapy for 6 years now. In the 2nd year, the group was led by one of the founders of Spectrum, Terry Cooper. On one of the training days he used a phrase that shocked us all. He was referring to someone’s behaviour in the group and calmly drawled

“Once is a pattern.”

My interpretation of this was that even if you do something that you have never done before - storm out of a room, punch someone, have a nervous breakdown - it is still representative of the way you live the whole of your life.

Psychotherapists say that you can tell everything you need to know about how the therapeutic relationship is going to go by how the client walks into the therapy room the first time.

As an example from my own experience when I see coaching clients face to face, there is a moment when they enter the building and one of us has to walk up the stairs first. Some clients wait to be shown the way and follow me. Others start marching up the stairs even though they don’t know which direction they’re going in when they get to the top!

Can you guess which ones might be more passive or more active in the sessions? Which ones might struggle to assert what they really want from me and which ones may struggle to relinquish control enough to let themselves be helped by me?

Neither way is right or wrong. But each style of being in the world will bring its own benefits and its own challenges.

This is why when we tune into our intuition we can pick up a lot about people before they even open their mouths. Many years ago, a girlfriend was surprised that I was so clear I wanted to go out with her when, as she put it, “You don’t even know me yet”. I said “Sure I do; your personality is written through you like a stick of rock. It’s in how you sit, how you walk, how you laugh, how you dress and how you choose to style your hair”.

We give ourselves away in every moment. It’s there to see in others if we’ll only pay attention to our intuition.

Try being sensitive to your instinctual impressions of people as you meet them today.