The Power of Systems

“The system didn’t work, or you didn’t work the system?”

I slowed down and marinated in her response. Slowing down is one of my favorite systems so that I don’t go with my initial reaction. I don’t want to fool myself. Instead of reacting, I want to create.

began to get curious about this. What I noticed was that whenever I didn’t do what I said I was going to do (that is, I acted in a way that was inconsistent with my commitments), it was because I went with the thinking at the moment instead of my commitment.

In the systems game, we say nothing is wrong, but something may not be working. In this game, if something isn’t working, we identify the existing system and then experiment with it until it starts working.

In other words, it looked like the thinking was derailing me. But it wasn’t the thinking. It was my relationship with the thinking.

We look at what is happening or not happening in the world, and we experiment with the system currently in place, until it gives us the results we want.

system skips all that mind stuff. It moves you immediately into that magical place where all positive growth happens: a place called practice.

But I finally realized through trial and error that asking for help was a system that plugged me in to a power greater than myself. It was a system that, when followed, guided my “self” to an action well-played.

P: Hmmm, so you weren’t kidding when you said earlier that everything is a system, and my world is simply full of systems that either work or don’t, and we can always slow down to find the system that isn’t working and replace it with one that is.