Tripped by Typos

If you read the "Trying Times" column you might have been surprised to learn that I now have a relationship with the martial arts. Well, no one was more shocked than me! I love the spell check feature, and use it faithfully, but every once in a while martial stands in for marital and all I can really do is groan.

Of course, I proofread the monthly prose before delivering them to your mailbox each month, but checking errors in one's own work can present a bit of a problem. I know what I'm trying to say, and even when I read it backwards (which is the trick I learned from my newspaper days), I tend to see what I expect to see, just as I saw the essence of "husband and wife" in martial...I guess sometimes it may feel a bit like karate at my house, but generally, no.

So, it got me thinking about what a perfect life lesson this little typo provides. I believe we see what we expect to see. We do it all the time. But because we're living in our own heads with our own stories, we fail to see what truly is, rather we see what we want or anticipate...be it positive or negative; we see what we expect.

There's an exercise we do during the What's Next?! Workshop series that relates to this theme. One person stands still and a partner approaches with an assigned posture. For example, the partner may simply stand beside you, facing you. I have no reaction to this one, as I have no story about what this might mean; but for some, this simple posture evokes feelings of discomfort, judgment, and a strong desire to push the partner away because it feels like they want something. The "still" person feels what they have learned to expect. The pattern of this story has been repeated so many times, the mind/body simply reacts.

My least favorite posture is when someone approaches me gently, and then tugs on me...literally, tugging on my shirt. Uggh! If I believe my old story, I feel that someone is coming to me broken and they want something from me, as though I must "fix it." I feel, not only do I not want to fix anything, but more importantly I am being asked to do something that was never doable - an impossible job. My childhood was filled with adults who had unrealistic expectations of what any child could do, and me in particular. I couldn't cure my mom's schizophrenia, nor was I the cause of it, although I was asked regularly to "fix it" or the resulting chaos. That's what I learned. If someone approaches you tugging, they want something impossible.

Before I worked with what I believed about a friendly tug, I truly believed this was the only possible reason for such an approach. It was my personal typo. Spell check couldn't catch it, because sometimes people do tug a bit, and it doesn't mean there's anything to do or that the only reason to tug is to ask the impossible. I saw what I expected to see, and without the help of a "professional proofreader" I'm not sure when or if I ever would have caught it.

Imagine me coaching people and believing that every tug is a request for me to do the impossible - good grief! How could I ever walk this path, doing what I love, without that clarity? With this, I issue an invitation to you: Be brave! Allow yourself the benefit of a "professional proofreader," be it a coach, therapist, or honest and intuitive friend. Discover what personal typo keeps coming up in the prose of your life story, and how shifting a single letter, like the "i" in marital can make such a difference.

Without expectation,
Joanne Lutz