Working with Dr. Flower
Welcome back! Feel free to comment or ask a qustion below. If you might want to schedule some time with me, email jennifer "at" The-Live-Edge "dot" com.
Clinical Supervision and Business Coaching; The Live-Edge Philosophy
It’s all wiggly, this territory, when we are thinking about helping people grow because people don’t grow in a straight line. We’ve created a lot of tidy little terms and boxes to put different kinds of help in, like business coaching, clinical supervision, mentoring, and management consulting, but, I’m sure you’ll agree, there’s really nothing tidy about it if you’re prepared to follow the live edge.
As I’ve said elsewhere the live edge is the place where you are ready to grow. Growing, in the brain, means creating new pathways and new connections. Doing that inevitably means you’re going to route through memories, experiences, and unresolved personal and professional conflicts, all represented in the grey stuff that makes up your mind.
From one month, or week, or day, or – really – one moment to the next, you are navigating an internal terrain that has bumps and unexpected twists. If I’m a business coach and you, my client, have suddenly had a dust-up in your private life, I’m not going to get very far if I tell you to “get that handled” before I proceed with you. Not really, not at a deep level, and certainly not if I already have the skills and experience to help you get just enough leverage with it so that we can proceed with our work.
No, I don’t do psychoanalysis with my clients, but, yes, there are periods in any growth process when I use psychoanalytic ideas and techniques to help you get unstuck. More than that, I teach you those techniques and give you more ways to think about and feel into your challenges. It’s just unrealistic and impractical to go to a different professional every time you run into a snag. How often I’ve heard people tell me, but I don’t have time to hire a consultant for each of these problems!
The Live Edge is the Way My Mind Works
Let’s be honest about this. We grow and teach in our own ways. I arrived at this approach because it’s the way my mind works. I have a problem with proponents of one or another approach who claim some kind of ultimate and total truth about what they’re doing as though it had nothing to do with their personal choices. Chances are if a particular technique or explanatory system appeals to a practitioner and they practice it, it’s grown out of some aspect of who he or she is; the same goes for psychotherapists, coaches, and consultants of all kinds.
What does that mean for you as a client? Well, The Live Edge approach is about flow, tracking where you’re interested, tracking the limits of your competence. If you are a rigid compartmentalizer and you like define the boundaries of where you’re going before you start, you may be afraid that my Live-Edge approach will make you too anxious. And if you’re a hard-ass, you may feel like you should be in some kind of boot-camp.
Vice versa, if you’re a softy and you’re fed up with your self-indulgence, you may believe that it’s your turn to be in a bootcamp. The problem with the jerk-around or ecstatic seminar approaches is that they often don’t have results that can stick. They rely on creating a unique atmosphere of total control in which you’ll behave in an unusual way. But then you get home and, for the most part, you’re still you. That’s never worked for me, so I don’t work that way.
More important, I’ve found that the definition of the problem is half the battle. And often a surprise. Deciding whether you have a personality problem or a management style problem or a staff problem or a training deficit or some combination is a process. If you aren’t willing to question the boundaries of the problem, you have no chance of arriving at a good solution.
While on occasional shot in the arm – like a seminar – can be helpful, I’ve found the incremental approach to work better. And I’m also better off working from my own strengths as a professional instead of spending most of my time trying to shore up weaknesses. So I developed the Live Edge approach which is just that. Starting from where you are (but where you may not quite notice you are yet) and removing some of the barriers between there and where you would naturally go. Working from your strengths enables you to pick up momentum on your weaknesses along the way. You open doors instead of plowing into them with your head.
When we open doors a little anxiety is inevitable and optimal; all change involves some risk and risk involves uncertainty. But you can also call it excitement. Neurologically, anxiety and excitement are one and the same. It depends on how you think about what’s going on.
So, if you’re obsessional and you compartmentalize too much, I might be able to help you see what’s exciting about stepping away from your boxes for long enough to reorganize them a little.
The whole point of Live-Edge work is to find the places inside yourself from which you can move naturally toward where you would be going if you weren’t freaked out, bored, burned out, or out of ideas.
If you want to learn more, go ahead, email me: jennifer “at” The-Live-Edge “dot” com.
