What Pronoun-Speak Do You Use?

Friday, February 18, 2011

Earlier this week, the minister who will marry my fiance and me tomorrow, gave an inspiring sermon where he spoke of “foundation” and “building.” My favorite part of the sermon, and the part that really captivated me, was when I heard the 3 two-letter words – all pronouns: “we, us, ours.”

For the almost 10 months since I have reconnected with my first love, I have felt like an “us.” Like most Coach Poppy newsletters, it got me to thinking not just about our soul mates, yet about all of our relationships. I wonder if we thought of all of our relationships in the team way of “we, us, and ours,” if they would be rife with deep caring and meaning.

Several of you have asked that I republish the “Full Circle” newsletter of the story that has once again made me an “us.” The edited and excerpted passages follow below.

“In the month of September of my senior year in college, I fell in laughter. And love.

Rollins College, a small liberal arts college in Winter Park, Florida, was the palm-treed-Spanish-moss-topped-architecture-fairytale backdrop for what was, I felt, a perfect love. After many high school and college boyfriends and dates, I knew in my heart, he was “it.”

If I had done then, a checklist of the essential properties of what constitutes a perfect love, all of the top 5 boxes would have been checked: 1) Trust 2) Faith 3) Love 4) Compassion and Passion 5) Laughter.

Yet I didn’t have a checklist then. At 21 years old, with minimal foresight and hindsight practice, I did not connect my “heart knowing” with “head knowing.” Today, many - like Dan Pink - in his bestseller, A Whole New Mind, would call this: right brain/left brain alignment; intuition and cognition; gut instinct vs. linear thinking. I didn’t have the reservoir of life’s experientials upon which to draw, and two weeks before graduation, I trusted that the right thing to do was to get out of my heart and into my head. Hearts were broken.

I went back to Wisconsin, married someone else, bore beautiful children, and 13 years later, took a peek back in time after my divorce to re-examine the wonderful characteristics I had so cherished in my college sweetheart. Pre-Google, I searched for Geoff using the archaic means of 411 to call a city in which I knew he had last lived; no listing was found. (There would be two more times I would search for him, even as recent as December, 2009, yet I was unsuccessful.)

I’ve determined now, that the “checklist” that I created had essentially developed and evolved over a span of 30 years. Decidedly, I believed, (and still do), that the 5 points of trust, faith, love, compassion - passion, and laughter, that I had discovered as key ingredients in a loving relationship, would serve me well in all of my interpersonal relations; they were/are universal tenets.

As is usually the case with Coach Poppy newsletters, it got me to some mindful thinking about how our personal lives intersect - often quite frequently – with our work lives. Many of my coaching clients will sign on to work with me to plan, strategize, and leverage their business acumen to achieve promising results. And many times, we land upon the concerns in their hearts – those priorities that are most important to them - that have nothing to do with the bottom line. It is a blending of head and heart - whole-picture thinking - that brings true desired results.

We are not quite sure of the exact impetus for the inspiration for Geoff to find me last Spring, yet somewhere in the equation there must be sprinkles of trust and faith.

We need to be able to cultivate the symmetry, synchronicity, and seamlessness of thinking, feeling and doing. Having trust and faith in the fusion of head and heart needs to be a continuous circle…in all of our relationships, not just with our soulmates.”

Tomorrow, I can hardly wait to share the “we, us, and ours,” with my first love and last love, surrounded by lifelong loved ones. I am excited to affirm those five tenets of faith, trust, love, compassion/passion, laughter that I collectively celebrate with - and hopefully inspire – all of the “we’s, us-es, and ours,” on our wedding day!

Mindfully Yours,

Poppy