“I’m A Good Person”… No You’re Not

I was working with one of my coaches this week, discussing how we build trans-aware and trans-affirming spaces. Spaces of relative safety, spaces that encourage and value diversity, spaces that are 15% more accessible. Deep in a conversation of binary perspectives and duality in the universe… we might have started in yogic philosophy but I quickly began to shift gears into exploring better decision making utilising a non-binary worldview. Allé said “… I heard 2 people in the last day say “I’m a good person” … and that’s very binary thinking because there are no good and bad people. We all have times where we might do great things for great people. And we have times we might have wished we’d done things better, or someone else might have wished we’d done things better.” Wait. Did you catch it? I don’t know about you but I tell myself this regularly “I’m going to do this because I’m a good person” Oh, how insidious. How innocent, and yet there’s that moment of spinach in my teeth – here’s a way that I have given myself only two choices when in reality those choices are infinite. I wonder how often I do that? How many other little hooks like this exist – so that whilst I preach to my clients to embrace a less black and white world view, a world view that says “there is no right or wrong choice in this, it’s simply that choice A will open up one set of options, choice B another set of options, and so which path do you want to choose today, which set of options do you want to explore?” Secretly, without realising, I thought I’d made it to a place of the spectrum – and yet here’s this little binary notch that I hadn’t even seen existed. And in some capacity that takes away from my ability to see options. Those little moments when we think we’re done, we’re changed, and then we stop looking. Those little accumulations of stories or experiences or cultural norms or sayings we picked up this year or twenty-five years ago… Like fine silt these little things eat away at what we thought we had. The good news? Exploring it, acknowledging it, sitting with it, helps us to dig that little bit deeper into entrenching new mindsets and new ways of thinking – so that maybe next time we get stuck and it seems black and white… that little moment we took today to reflect on the smallest notch of ‘right vs wrong’ … well maybe that was just enough that the next time we call on that muscle to give us options, maybe it’s just strong enough to give us a few more.