Written by: William Lee, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Ms C needs domestic help. Someone who can handle two-meals-a-day, basic house chores and occasional child care. She finds it impossible to last through the day with two young children. She gets tired very quickly. And when that happens, any stress is enough to trigger emotional outbursts. She gets overwhelmed by bad thoughts and is unable to stop until all that is released. Sometimes, she even talks and screams at sleep. As a result, physical and emotional exhaustion lingers, day after day. Years of medication has not improved her stamina nor ability to handle stress.
She puts it to postpartum depression.
Perhaps she is right. But, an insider can also easily identify that she was experiencing exactly the same thing before the children’s birth. It’s just another trigger.
From all that Mr K can gather, in his 12 years of marriage with Ms C, she tends to rely on anecdotal evidence leading to misinformed and prolonged (in-)decision. Her (un-)conscious choice of information consists of only her mother, some close friends, tabloids and on-line influencers. Any other additional information is ignored, processed with suspicion, or classified as threat.
Troubled Past
It’s not that Mr K didn’t realize Ms B, 62, was not the best person for their domestic work. Age had drained her energy fast, restricted her movement, obscured her senses, and incapacitated her ability to learn and adjust. All these made her hypersensitive to comments, constructive or not. Her denial made the already-agitated Ms C even more explosive.
Mr K’s senior executive experience did not help one bit, when his wife Ms C insisted on hiring old ladies. She didn’t want any younger females, nor men, in the household.
Choice became even more restricted, when Ms C insisted on achieving maximum return on the money spent with cheap labour. She got angry with sharp elevated voices when Mr K tried to help.
“If there’s no one suitable after extensive search, it’s time to change job description and/or pay. Reach a different talent pool.”
“Isn’t this obvious?” thought Mr K.
Not to Ms C.
It took years for Ms C to finally admit that her childhood was affecting her.
Her father ran away with a young woman when she was just two. He would never come and see her again, although they lived in close neighbourhoods.
In a conservative society at the time, her mother struggled socially and financially after the divorce. Maybe it was pride. Maybe it was fear. Maybe both. She refused to change. Her withdrawals created a significant knowledge gap, that she often bluffed her way out, when Ms C asked questions. It worked at first, but the magic turned as the girl got older.
So although the emotional tie is inseparable, Ms C simply cannot wholeheartedly trust her mother. Her inability to trust has been exacerbated by the entire generation’s widespread misinformation resulted from knowledge gaps, face-saving excuses and mistakes cover-ups, particularly from authorities.
Things got really tight when Ms C was in high school. There were so many times that her mother would scold at her for minor things, irrespective of their whereabouts. She felt the most humiliated when she was sitting at the back of their bike, across streets and neighbourhoods. Her mother just couldn’t stop once it got going.
The hurt feeling slowly turned her into a rose of many spikes and kept others away. So even though she’s an excellent artist, she just couldn’t portrait herself. Self-reflection was not enough to see herself wholly. She was fast asleep, in her own dreamy world.
“Without knowing one’s positioning, how can one determine which information is applicable and beneficial to one’s predicament?”
There were times when she questioned what caused her father’s desertion, when she attempted to find the root cause. The answer more or less came to that, “he was tall, successful and good-looking,” and “her mother was no match to a younger woman.” She just couldn’t get to the bottom of it all. Over time, her mother’s assessment became her (virtual) reality.
So despite the obvious differences between her father and husband, her conclusion that men simply could not be trusted with any young women was enough to exclude any constructive proposal put forward by Mr K or any others. MIS-reaction is an understatement.
Virtue, Truth and Love
As a capable third person of good intention, Mr K applied the skill of detached empathy (see Chapter 9 – Detached Empathy (brainzmagazine.com)) once he learnt enough facts. He needed to extrapolate what happened, based on the dots he gathered, relying on his past experiences as well as logic, reasoning and critical thinking.
Sleeping Beauty provides the blueprint.
Virtue shields one from bad thoughts. Mr K cannot drown before saving Ms C. He needs to protect himself first with virtuous deeds – a surrendered belief in good cause and effect put into actions.
Truth tears the evil apart and builds confidence. He has to be consistently open and transparent in whatever he does, to gain Ms C’s recognition.
Love connects souls, makes feelings good and heals. His love for his children, parents, brothers and many others out there is proof that Ms C can be loved too.
And That’s Not Enough
All that Mr K does cannot come to fruition if Ms C withdrew from the world. She needs to open her heart and mind, and feel truthfully through all of her six senses (see Chapter 1 – Born With It All (brainzmagazine.com) & Chapter 4 — Taichi Fortunate (brainzmagazine.com)).
Since one cannot truly walk into another person’s body, creating an facilitating environment is the best one can do.
For that, Mr K devoted almost everything to provide Ms C a chance to build her dream home with her own design. She never truly worked before.
She gained self-worth and confidence while dealing with other architects and landscapers receiving many genuine recognitions. She became capable of feeling good and receiving feedbacks, despite recurrent bumps here and there. She’s now finally able to sit down and start painting beautiful subjects again.
A peace of mind for Mr K, finally.
William Lee, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine William Lee, a business coach and expert in connecting people’s wheels of fortune together, excels at producing positive results in complex multi-stakeholder engagement, end-to-end customer experience satisfaction, and remote team management. Frustrated by years of conflicts and external negativities, William dug deep to understand how our minds work, how we interact with one another, and how good faith can improve our connected world together. Through a process called CentriFusion, William’s methodology and system provide an easy first step to vastly improve team empathetic capability. With increased presence and engagement, as a result, fertile mental grounds are sown to enable organic and spontaneous growth, aligned to a shared common purpose. William provides the way to attain TRUE and SUSTAINABLE COMFORT in your businesses. Enjoy life without complacency!
