Have you asked yourself: Are you giving opportunities to others in your daily life?

I am half way through my first year as a Guide in the Master Key Experience (MKE) and my thoughts are going in all directions:

• First for the humbleness I feel for being in this position helping people to find their own path to discover their true selves and their bliss, and to go for it with more and more faith and trust.

• Second, my thoughts are wandering away to all my different roles I have had in life and specifically to the years as a mother of my son. Then I feel even more humbled.

• And third, I am thinking of how important it is to let everyone find their own bliss and path. Maybe you can see this in others as an observer, but then you must be aware that you see with your own eyes and those eyes can never see the whole complexity of the grid within another person. This goes even for your own children. 

Giving Opportunities: A Life in Bliss

What is most important for a parent? I think that everyone can say in chorus: My child’s happiness is most important and to grow up and live a life in bliss.

But what do you do when your child doesn’t have the tools?

And neither does your child have the tools to learn the tools?

I had a child that was hyperactive, impulsive, and filterless when it came to emotions and above all that, extremely intelligent in all learning ways, except for social skills when it came to patience, team work and blindly obeying if he couldn’t see the reason.

Yes, he was born self-directed thinker and yes he was really strong willed. Above all, he had a heart of gold.

School of Motherhood

Maybe you ask why I am telling you this? Well, it has relevance because it was through my motherhood that I learned all that is worth knowing how to function as a MKE Guide.

All my years at University are completely subordinated the wisdom I gained from being a mother. I had to find ways to guide my son through his strong abilities (oh yeah, he had many!), to listen to his true self and to build up his faith in himself.

When you are impulsive, with no filter, then you can’t trust yourself that you are going to behave as you want. I found a way that functioned. He had no patience to listen to storytelling so I started to sing small stories every night about the things he had experienced during the day. I also let him fill in the stories with details I didn’t had and which he wanted in the stories.

Song Stories

Those song stories developed to be situations where he peacefully and wisely could see his own behavior in perspective and from that decide how he wanted to behave next time. We also ”sang” in details to the stories with tools that could help him execute the wanted behavior next time he encountered a similar situation. For example, we sang the story from the day but added in his desired, perfect outcome and what he would do to accomplish that next time.

Above all were the songs filled with praise for all good things he did and for the lovely little boy he was, regardless of any behavior. I have never had use for singing in any other situation with others, but I have for sure had use of the experience to ”invent” for others different ways helping them on their own life path, their Hero’s Journey, without influencing them.

Giving Advice: Use Open Questions

It is easy, especially if you are goodhearted, to give advice to others when they come to you asking for your opinion or help to handle a certain situation. But most of the time, our advice to others is grounded in how we, ourselves, have handled similar situations, and it is certainly not always the best for another person.

The best help to give another person is actually to ask so called ”open questions” (in parenthesis below are examples for each): 

• WHAT (do you think could be the best way for you)?
• HOW (are you going to make it function)?
• WHEN (are you going to do it)?
• WHY (do you think you must do that)? This is a good question when a person has locked him/herself in thinking of ”must/should/ought”

There are four important reasons for open questions:

1. You give the person an opportunity to discover and learn things about him/herself.
2. You give the person an opportunity to be responsible of his/her own thinking and conclusions.
3. You give the person an opportunity to be proud of him/herself after coming to conclusion and decision.
4. You give the person an opportunity to be in a whole process from thinking through a problem, coming to a conclusion, deciding how to handle the issue, then executing and developing from the whole process.

If you would give the person advice, then it would not be anchored within the person and he/she would just ”try” to execute your advice. The learning from that could at worst be not to listen to advice anymore 😊.

Another aspect is since you have a ”thought through” advice with a known (for you) outcome, it can be difficult for the person to fully understand how your advice would function and you risk to end up explaining HOW and WHY that is the best way. 

As a parent, friend or MKE Guide, think of yourself as a facilitator that is great at giving opportunities to develop and discover their true selves, but above all feel the joy of ”doing nothing” because that creates miracles in people when they process your open questions. 

Check out more from Monica.

Check out the Master Key Experience.