Vehicles for Creating A Team with the Anxious One's Energy

© 2000 Michele Toomey, PhD

 

June 13, 2000

We must find vehicles for creating a team with the anxious one's energy, the reflective ones leadership, and the relaxed one's capacity to receive, appreciate and enjoy.

A team needs: leadership, warm and inviting energy, capable and committed members, respectful and caring relationships, a willingness to join together to collaborate, a desire for creativity and a valuing of insight and vision. Add to that a shared agenda and shared goals, a legitimate voice for each member and success in achieving its goals, and we have an effective team.

To harness the anxious one's energy requires a recognition of its potential by all the team members. They must also value the relaxed one's capacity to appreciate and the reflective one's leadership. Courage is needed to dare to go near the chaotic and frenetic forces that can get going in your system because they intimidate, distort and turn off any desire to go near them, say nothing of teaming up with them.

However, you don't have evil forces, they are anxious ones. They frighten by their intensity and their out-of-control momentum, but their motivation is survival and protection, coupled with caring, desire, good will, and a need dtomake something happen now.

Fortunately, you are more than able to go toward these forces and calm them, listen to them, respond to them, harness them and become a team leader of and with them.

The irony, anxiety has fear as its source, and going toward it means facing your fear of your fear, yet, you really are not afraid of yourself. It is an old pattern of a bullied and frightened child. Even then, you needed to fear others, not yourself. Even when you were reckless or heedless, you were caught in a childhood trap. Now every spot in your psyche is a friend and every force, other than damaged brain spots, is capable and desirous of integrity and accountability. Even disabled, you've got a great inner world and wonderful re-claimed processing ability. The trick is still to find your courage and wisdom, caring and desire in the face of fear and the maze of the unpredictability of damaged brain power.

This brain is working its buns off to recover its capacity for integrity and your system is responding well.

It's really a tiring and relentless process, but, the truth be known, it's more than worth it, so none of us can get stingy at this point. We all have to pay our dues so we can reap the wonder of reconciling gift with curse and coming up with shaded but glorious gifts.

 
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