By Steve Beckow, November 22, 2022
(Golden Age of Gaia)
I’m wanting to manage the predictable pitfalls in my life before the starting flag drops.
One of them is my own impatience.
Again I’m reminded of the Hitler effect.
French historian Guillaume Pretty described it and what he said has really stayed with me:
“I’d say that Hitler was a man trying to gamble and that, at the start, the fact that he neglects the whole dimension of strategic tactics, the type of ground logistical problems, all of these oversights don’t catch up with Hitler the war lord.
“And then, one day, all of these conditions for war, which should allow a war leader to grow, catch up with him, and from then on, all his bets systematically fail.” (1)
As a post-Reval CEO, I get that I could gamble that people would overlook my errors and faults because I’m “the boss.” I could gamble, like Hitler, on that being true rather than addressing my own faults. “No one’s going to question me.”
That’s what Hitler did.
The alternative is for me to get on top of my own impatience.
There are many ways I can do this. I can look at the vasana underneath impatience and complete it. (2)
I could use the universal laws of change, as above so below, and elimination to take impatience away and exchange it for love.
I could refuse to speak from impatience. I could agree to take the observer stance the minute I feel impatient. Etc., etc.
I just need to take the time to attend to it.
I’m determined in any situation to see if I can correct the matter first before asking anyone else to do something. At some point I may rein back, but for a while I’d like to do that as an exercise.
Finally, my bias is that what is a trifle or a small matter to me (the CEO), by the time it ripples down to the front lines after much retelling, can become Goliath bellowing on the battlefield. I really do have to watch that I don’t overdo anything, lest it be magnified. (3)
And I have to make patience be as OK as I’ve made impatience up till now.
Footnotes
(1) Guillaume Pretty, “1942: The Year The Germans Lost The War | Hitler’s Lost Battles,” Timeline, at [youtube.com/watch?v=BuBIpe0f91w], in “Finding Blame is like Making War on a Person,” May 29, 2022, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2022/05/29/finding-blame-is-making-war-on-a-person/.
(2) “How to Handle Unwanted Feelings: The Upset Clearing Process,” December 29, 2018, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2018/12/29/how-to-handle-unwanted-feelings-the-upset-clearing-process-2/.
(3) And I do have a temper, biases, etc.