The Power of Story & Pulling Teeth

Good Evening Friends,

I'm now a mere three days into my Steemit adventure and have been very exercised as to how to genuinely add value to the lives of people here on this platform. I love the desire to bring genuine wealth to the table and so I felt it would be helpful to lay out in a little more detail what I hope to bring to the table.

Gotta love story...

The reason I titled this post 'The Power of Story' is because I believe narrative and story is one of the most powerful tools that we have as humans, and consequently I want to use my experience, my story, give an insight into some of the things that I am learning and then communicate those learnings in a way that helps others to connect to those experiences! I hope I am making some sense so far...

So my goal is to post something on a weekly basis of what I am learning, in real time, with real emotions, with real context, in order that you, the reader, can lay hold of something and use it as a springboard into new thoughts or new ideas. I invite you to comment and discuss and wrestle with me in the things I am learning.

Here goes...

I was reading a book by an author called Dr Henry Cloud titled '9 Things You Simply Must Do to Succeed in Love and Life'. Initially writing it off as another self-help manual with maybe a sentence or two or good stuff, I decided to see where it led. I came upon a chapter all about this concept of 'pulling the tooth'.

Now I recently had my wisdom teeth yanked out by an overly enthusiastic dental nurse - luckily my gums and face were suitably numbed out but I could still feel that pliers crunch and de-rascinate my poor wisdom tooth right out of its fleshy home, but the thing about it was that what was a five minute operation (thanks to said efficient nurse) saved a whole lot of pain experienced on and off during the rest of my life. The point is, sometimes you need to confront a situation head on and actually people who do life well know when it's time to confront an issue and deal with it. I definitely have some learning in this department.

So why use this grotesque analogy? Well, the point is that over the last few months I've been harbouring resentment, bitterness and anger towards a person because the truth is that I didn't know how to confront the issue in front of me. This proverbial tooth (in the form of relational lack-of-clarity) has been hanging over my head and actually caused a substantial amount of confusion, frustration and sense of feeling disempowered. The realisation struck that I am needing to 'pull the tooth' before the relationship and situation move past breaking point.

Now scale this up a few notches to where it affects culture. I'm convinced it is these 'sore teeth' that are integral in causing organisations and cultures to cave in on itself. I can see how my powerlessness and apathy combine to disempower others because of fear of conflict. Healthy cultures rely on authenticity of relationship to develop and grow and I realised that my focus on blaming the external circumstance was ultimately relational immaturity on my part. I needed to choose the less comfortable road in order to walk in authenticity and bring momentum to a situation that I was in fact responsible for causing to stagnate.

Anyways, hopefully this gives some food to chew on. A word of warning though, following through on the whole tooth pulling is sometimes much harder than finding comfort in the resentment. I would say though, that the short pain is utterly worth the long term trust and relational integrity it creates. So if you're wondering what's next, below are some homework points if you're kind of task orientated ;)

To Conclude...

1. Read '9 Things You Simply Must Do to Succeed in Love and Life'.

2. Pull any teeth that need yanking out - confront the issue head on.

3. Give me feedback and tell me what you think.

4. Follow for all of my future failures and learnings.