Being a director means daring to be lonely
It was 5 p.m. sometime in November 2008 and all the people from my company were lingering and seemed to be waiting for each other. Suddenly they stood up, chatting loudly and laughing to have a fun night of karting together. With bewilderment, I watched as they ignored my business partner and me, avoided my gaze and left together. My business partner (co-owner) and I were not invited to attend. The one who had organized it I considered one of my best friends! Dejected, I looked at my business partner. The pain I felt then that I did not belong and was not one of them, I have rarely felt so deep and hard. This article (1) is an adaptation of my paper I wrote in the third year (2014) of the ‘Zijnstraining’. In this article, I describe how I understand my loneliness in the context of my role as a director(2) of my company.
I did not dare say anything to my staff about what it did to me because I was afraid that if I shared my grief it would affect my authority. I was too proud to admit that I very much wanted to be welcomed into their midst by them, especially by them. I did try to find out through all kinds of manipulative ways why I was not allowed to be there. I could barely bear the loneliness I was experiencing at the time, so I was depressed for months and even ran with the thought of quitting my business. Feelings of anger, hatred, malice and humiliation and resentment all passed the review.
I did not want my role as director on that for a long time. Especially when the consequences became explicitly clear to me. In the end, my loneliness cost some people their jobs, deprived my wife and children of the attention they needed, and alienated me from my true friends. But that same loneliness was also the driving energy to create a company with love for its employees and going for its employees, where everyone is allowed to be who they are and where people generally felt very welcome and where there was really terrible laughter.
“You cannot be friends with your staff and you will never belong to them.”
My father
Symbiosis
I was born three weeks early on February 1, 1973. In those days, it was common to put premature infants in the incubator immediately. My mother only got to hold me for an hour, after which I was taken to the incubator. For the next three weeks, she was not allowed to hold me and only watch me from behind a window.
During a skills training session, the trainer explained that in World War II in Russia, babies died like rats, not because they were not fed, but because they did not receive attention and were not touched enough. Now I was not a Russian baby, but this story helped me better understand my own context.
When you come into the world, you are completely helpless and dependent. You have no sense of yourself or your mother. Your mother is your ground and you are not even aware of it. There is no sense of duality yet. As children, we create that emotional ground, a bed, for ourselves because we need a context for our functioning in the world. We do this instinctively and, as already mentioned, unconsciously. Where this bed has become disturbed, we constantly seek bedding in someone or something. This happens completely unconsciously and reflexively and therefore cannot be properly cemented. It thus permanently disrupts the sense of security with the result that we cling to people, objects, situations, possessions, etcetera in an attempt to find the security we have long lost at a deeper level.
I dare say, I was trying to make my company and especially the people who worked there into a kind of “bedding”. Because I was in control I could set my mood. There were years when I didn’t take time off just to be with my people. There I could relax because “they” were always there for me. That I was trying to create a bedding in my company only became clear when my oldest son (then 15) joined my staff. The first thing he said when we got home was, “Dad, at work you are much more fun and relaxed than at home.” Then I realized that apparently I could relax better there than at home and was therefore more fun and relaxed for him.
“Your mother is your ground and you are not even aware of it.”
Hans knibbe
The I-cramp
The child is completely dependent on his environment. In order to build a stable self-image and bond as a child, you must have a recognizable image of mother. You need that image as a child to feel safe enough to start exploring the world. The child projects his mother and the relationship he has with her onto the world. When the child does not feel met, it is intolerable to the child. It protects itself reflexively by permanent contraction. This movement of withdrawal points to both the differentiation from the environment as the connection to our environment on which we depend. We call this movement the I-cramp. This becomes our artificial keynote, an independent autonomous “I”. This “I” has formed its own map of what the world is like and what its relationship to that world (mother) looks like. This keynote becomes the starting point of our orientation to the world.
During my training and (my own) personal coaching, I discovered that I actually experienced a keynote of not feeling a connection and of not belonging from very early in life. Its frequency eventually resonated through almost all aspects of my life: in everything I feel, think, do and experience. Being a director for me meant that that keynote came fully into the light and, in response, I made desperate attempts to stay away from the feeling of “absence of contact”.
The strategic and withdrawn self
Where the child has not met and experienced non-contact, a split into a strategic and withdrawn self occurs. This split is an attempt to maintain the safe image of mother (and later the world) by denying the “absence of contact”. The strategic self goes to work to still get the love it never had. In short it wants to undo contactlessness. In fact, for the child, it is very threatening not to experience connection. The withdrawn self simultaneously dives into hiding, away from the pain of the experience of the “absence of contact.” The sensitivity and liveliness slows down, freezes as it were. The “knowing” that mother was “absent” also freezes and is “forgotten. I discovered my first strategy to counteract the loss of connection at the age of four: giving sweets. For my girlfriend, I always had sweets (I don’t like sweets myself) in my pocket, so she wouldn’t leave me for her neighbor boy, who lived a few doors down and tried to entice her with licorice to play with him instead of me. Giving candy turned out to be a very successful method that gave me many days of playtime with my friend. I have also used this strategy very successfully as a director of my company. Giving candy became: giving attention, showing interest and especially giving princely pay raises, not naming when someone did a bad job and especially no imposed overtime. Because then they stayed, liked me and worked hard for my business. At the same time, I was outraged that people never offered to work overtime at the busiest times of the year. Or worse: even asked for time off at times when they could know they could not be missed. I got even angrier when I had to limit employees, when they took breaks for too long structurally, for example. That meant I had to say something, at the risk of being unwelcome in their midst. When an employee refused what I thought was a small request, all hell broke loose! One example I remember well was of a man who worked for me and refused to empty the garbage cans because it was not in his job description. That refusal came in like a sledgehammer blow. That he did not have it in for me, I could not understand. After all I had given, he was unwilling to make a gesture toward me. The generous salary increase became a normal one and eventually he himself resigned and left.
As a human being, you are ultimately insolubly alone in everything you feel, think, experience and choose.
Hans knibbe
Loneliness as a reminder of Spirit
“Every feeling, every thought, every cramp, can be liberated into a “Being quality”. When we then look back at the cramp from the liberated state, it becomes clear that the Being quality had ‘translated’ into a defensive neurotic pattern.” (Handbook of Being Orientation, Hans Knibbe, 2010, p. 61)
Folded into the feeling of loneliness is the desire for contact and connection: a deep desire to feel loved and connected to those around you. By being present, right where you are, this feeling can unfold to the reality that connection is already given. And when this does not “work out” for me and I do not see this, I try to remember that my deepest desire is to be in touch and present in life. Loneliness as a reminder of Spirit. This memory helps me see the loneliness I am experiencing and ultimately helps me remember who I am at the deepest level.
Being a director means assuming your role
In a relationship with others, you always assume a role. There is no escaping that in the relational field. You are always a brother, partner, friend, son, father, mother, boss, subordinate of someone. I eventually came to realize that the role of director was not glued to me as a person, but was linked to the relationship I had with employees or customers. This realization alone gave space.
In our daily lives, we view the world from different perspectives. An optic is a way of perceiving yourself and the world. An optic is a living world from which we manifest ourselves in a way that is appropriate for that optic. In Zijnsoriëntatie we distinguish the following optics: symbiotic, narcissistic, participant, mature adult, existential, original wholeness, spirit and enlightened. It takes too far for this article to explain all the optics. I limit myself to the point of view of participant (3).
When you manifest yourself and experience the world from the point of view of participant, you take your place in the group and abide by the rules of the group. Roles are respected. I am a director, you are an employee and you are a customer.
By remembering and taking your role, you raise your optics to the participant (rule/role) level. It takes you out of the symbiotic or narcissistic optics (which are of a lower order) where it is still only about you and that the other person is there primarily for your needs. When you take your role you see yourself, the other person and the group again. It also reminds you of your adult form in the context of the relationship. It gives you support. Suddenly you know what is expected of you and what needs to be done.
What I find special about the role of director is that, in addition to the social loneliness the role entails, you are also thrown back into your existential loneliness. As a human being, you are ultimately insolubly alone in everything you feel, think, experience and choose. Eventually, as director, I chose which direction to take the company in the hope that it was the right direction. In that, I was and always felt alone.
Gradually I noticed in my role as director that I became clearer and remembering my role strengthened my steersmanship. Paradoxically, this attitude made my contact with my people much more real and authentic. It felt much more like giving instead of taking, because I no longer wanted to use them to solve my loneliness.
Being
It was day nine of the 2013 summer retreat. During bodywork, Hans Knibbe spoke about the doer in us: “The doer has an intention. The nature of mind, your nature, is without any intention. There is a doer and see if you can recognize that project aspect of the doer. The doer always has a project, a script, a goal, an ambition, makes something of it. If you were to examine that closely, you can find your whole history in that. You might already get an impression of that. You are moving toward something and also away from something. So that’s how fast that happens. The doer is the re-creation of your history.”
Suddenly I saw how I had been planning the whole retreat and actually my whole life for survival and how busy I was with that. A huge fear became apparent, which I covered with a hundred thousand ideas and projects: to belong to something, to avoid something, to improve my position, ultimately not to be alone.
Our psyche is a bonding organ. From the third perspective (4) viewed from space and openness is a coverer of fear. Indeed, seen from the openness, there is no longer an “I” that has fear or experiences loneliness. With all its might, the psyche tries to sustain itself, in my case in the form of the feeling of loneliness. Loneliness as lender of last resort.
As I become accustomed to letting go and daring to let myself “die,” somewhere I am beginning to like “dying” more and more. Especially in the summer retreat, I could spontaneously enjoy my trekchö (5) phrase: “You are nowhere to be found. And if I am nowhere to be found, then loneliness is nowhere to be found. The psyche is designed precisely to keep the experience of that-you-are-not-going-to-be (not existing) out of the picture. It is equivalent to dying. However, when you fully relax into space and give in to your existential solitude, you notice that everything is made of space, that there are no more boundaries and that it is timeless and everything is empty. Nothing stands alone or is independent in its existence.
As director, I was constantly making plans. Plans to secure the company’s future and ultimately, of course, to survive itself. I succeeded more and more in leaving these plans to themselves and being present to how things are. Of course you need a strategy and goals to work toward, but it’s important to let go of them right away, too. Because that is exactly where the space lies to respond appropriately and make the right choices!
Being a director means daring to be lonely and so ultimately just being human. As a director of my company, I encountered my own loneliness on a daily basis. It became a trusted companion that I learned to relate to step by step. By turning my nose back to His every time and seeing the emptiness in solitude.
Literature
Knibbe, H. Handboek Zijnsoriëntatie, Utrecht, Stichting Zijnsoriëntatie, 2010
Knibbe, H. De Cirkel 36, De ladder van optieken, Utrecht, Stichting Zijnsoriëntatie, 2008
Knibbe, H. Handboek Zijnsoriëntatie Supplement, Supplement 3: Symbiose, Utrecht, Stichting Zijnsoriëntatie, 2010
Knibbe, H. Zie, je bent al vrij!, Melinda Uitgevers bv, 2014
Transcript summer retreat 2013
Footnotes
- This article was published in the journal for Zijnsoriëntatie: The Circle No. 52, Stichting Zijnsoriëntatie, June 2016
- From January 18, 2001 to March 23, 2016, I was director and co-owner of my company Easyflex.
- If you want to read more about optics, I refer you to Hans Knibbe’s article “The ladder of optics” in Circle 36. See also the bibliography.
- The third perspective is a way of working where you rest beyond the forms in the openness of your mind and where all the splits between an I and an other with a relationship between them are not present.
- The art of cutting through the reality illusion of the psyche to the enlightened nature at any moment is called trekchö in Dzogchen. Trekchö literally means to thoroughly cut through.
Ronald van der Lee
Teacher of Zijnsoriëntatie in Breda
Ronald van der Lee (1973) is a Teacher of Being Orientation and founder of the Learning Space for Being Orientation – Ronald van der Lee, a learning space for Being Orientation in Breda. He is a student of Hans Knibbe, the founder of Zijnsoriëntatie, and is in permanent supervision with him at the School for Zijnsoriëntatie.
After studying Computer Science, he founded and led a number of software companies as CEO: Trinc, Easyflex and Flexwrapp. In April 2016, he decided to continue through life as a Teacher forf Zijnsoriëntatie and has since been giving workshops, trainings and individual counseling to both individuals and organizations in the practice of Zijnsoriëntatie as a path of enlightened living.
Since September 2020, he has worked as a path counselor at the School for Zijnsoriëntatie, and as of September 2022, he is one of the teachers of the “Zijnstraining”. He is also a teacher of Spirit Year (for young adults) which he developed with Esther Hamers.
He is a registered member of the Beroepsvereniging Leraren Zijnsoriëntatie ( Professional Association of Teachers of Zijnsoriëntatie). From September 2018 to September 2020, Ronald served as a board member of the professional association. As of 2020, he is responsible within the professional association for the marketing communication of the courses and for the implementation of the new graphic identity of Being Orientation for teachers for Zijnsoriëntatie in the Netherlands and Belgium.
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