What Your Monkey Wants To Hear From You

The words your Monkey would like to hear most from you are:

‘My dear Monkey, I believe we are missing a trick. I believe you want to help me and I believe you can. Let’s work out how we can do this together.’

Why do they think like this ?

They are as fed up with the conflict as you are with the disturbances and interruptions.

Think about it for a moment from your Monkey’s viewpoint:

Imagine if you can, how you would feel if you were trying to help a friend and they treated you as a distraction or a chattering fool?

How it would feel if you kept getting it wrong, despite your desire or need to help them?

How would it feel if it seemed your friend didn’t care what you thought and never took the time to explain what they were really doing or what they needed from you?

How do you think you would behave?

What if you thought you knew something that would make your best friend’s life a hundred times better and they refused to listen or were unable to understand you?

How much worse would you feel if you felt responsible, ‘appointed’ to look after or even save your friend from themselves and you were failing in your whole life’s purpose?

How would you behave?

• Would you nag?
• Would you remind them of the key issues as you see them?
• Would you warn of future issues?
• Would you give options and alternatives?
• Would you raise your concerns?
• Would they get any peace?

To make matters worse there is history:

• Imagine that you felt this friend was deliberately (wilfully?) ignoring you?
• That they thought you were an idiot?
• Imagine you felt like a concerned parent who had to keep trying to help this wayward child?

How effective would you and your friend work together?

What would the nature and tone of any conversation feel like?

If this had been going on for a long time, how resentful of the whole situation would you be if you were that little voice trying to help someone like you?

What if I told you it doesn’t have to be this way?

Contrast these behaviours with what you know would happen to that relationship if everything was different:

• Imagine you started being treated as someone who wanted to help.
• Imagine you started being treated as someone who could actually help.
• Imagine being listened to respectfully.
• Imagine being allowed to express your worries, fears and ideas.
• Imagine being given the time to talk.
• Imagine really understanding each other.
• Imagine sharing the same agreed-upon goal.
• Imagine being thanked for your contribution.
• Imagine having the same view of what was really going on.

You know about relationships and partnerships , so it’s obvious immediately what the difference in the performance would be if you could work with your Monkey in a partnership like this.

However, oppressed you feel by thoughts, feelings or any other Monkey activity you can reengineer your relationship – if you want to.

Read the book here