lessons from half a gerbil

One day, one of the cats got to one of the (then whole) gerbils and managed to remove a leg, an ear, half his tail and a bit of his eye.  We took half a gerbil (initially costing £5, now presumably worth £2.50) to the vet (who charged considerably more) and ended up going home with a ton of medicines and instructions for wound cleaning, eye drops, antibiotics and goodness knows what, 3 times a day, until he died or got better.  The Very Competent Children who had until this point taken full responsibility for gerbildom could not cope with ramming a cotton bud into the gap where his leg had once attached and handed nursing duties over to Mum, who had only recently been able to pick a gerbil up.   And a rather magical thing happened..

I did what the doctor had ordered religiously day after day and gradually this little half a thing got better and stronger and fatter and bolder, until he started scampering round happily on his remaining 3 legs and cocking his remaining ear towards me when I came in the room and looking up at me with his one bright eye and coming up to the cage door to come out for his cuddle and his honey treat.  The Previously Very Competent Children said: “It’s not fair.  He likes you more than us!”   And I had to admit that was true.  He did.  Even though I must have hurt him and upset him dreadfully through all my nursing.  It occurred to me that he never bit me once through all that time, though the poor thing must have had good reason, and now through that experience we were completely bonded.

I was mulling all this over the other day when it struck me how much healing requires a bond and an agreement, a declaration of willingness, on the part of the healer and the one seeking healing.  I could not have simply imposed health on Flax, he could not have made himself better without me: somehow, between us, we managed it.  This is something to bear in mind for people whose business is healing, or a consultant ’healing’ businesses (problem-solving), or any kind of contracting for growth and development.  Your intervention will only be as effective as your client is willing to match your intent with theirs. 

It is important then to invest some time at the beginning of the contracting process to gauge your potential client’s intent.  How many of us are brave enough to turn a client away if this fit isn’t right?  There’s a danger that we convince ourselves that this situation will improve, or that we can do all the ‘healing work’ for them, and we might end up pouring loads of energy into a project that isn’t ever going to work.  We’ve all had experiences of this kind of ‘black hole’ project, where the worse it gets, the more energy we put into it, and it becomes very difficult either to walk away or produce a successful outcome.

If this sounds familiar to you, it might be worth considering clarifying your contracting process and building in checkpoints where you would need to consciously decide that the potential for development was mutually held before progressing.  A worthwhile question might be: How would I know that both my and my client’s intent are sufficiently matched to ensure the success of this endeavour?  How could you tell at the start that the right ingredients for success are present?