Ise Does it - Day +24
09.12.24
It’s taken me a while to get here — this last post of Ise Does It — because things always do after a transformative experience. A pilgrimage, like a psychedelic journey or a retreat or any other act that might bring you closer to something bigger is always just the beginning. It’s a rock dropped into a pond upon the surface of which the ripples will radiate for weeks, or months, or maybe even years.
I’ve dropped a lot of rocks over the past 5 years. Felt myself get close to something. And I’ve kept searching too, driven by a desire to discover how the universe comes together and what my role within it might actually be. I feel like I’m finally getting towards an answer.
I used to think I’d been in service for most of my adult life, helping organisations identify the next big thing that will make them money, or the best way to save them money, or what to do with their money, often at the expense of people and places that were mere externalities to their business model.
But it was a false kind of service, one that drained me because it didn’t come from a place of deep want. Rather, it came from a strong sense of should, a mechanistic if-this-then-that kind of exchange that suggested that “if I help you improve your top line growth, then you’ll give me the recognition and reward that will tell me I’m a valuable member of society”.
Except it didn’t quite work out that way. Turns out that the management consultancies of this world don’t really care about your sense of self-worth, nor do many of the clients. In fact, having a strong sense of self-worth probably counts against being a good, “productive” employee: I’ll never forget my last boss in London saying to me over lunch, on my first day, and without a hint of irony: “the best consultants are insecure overachievers”.
Huh.
This misinformed idea of service didn’t really work out in my previous marriage either. Here was a man who so completely had my number, so clearly saw my need to be loved in the absence of being able to love myself, that he would have driven me clear — no shadow of doubt here — to death to extract what he could from my desire to save him from his demons.
No, it’s now so clear that I wasn’t in service at all. I was a rescuer. I tied my sense of self to my ability to save others, to trying to solve their problems for them in spite of whether they actually wanted them solved or not. And when I couldn’t, I took that on as a personal failing. I’d double down on trying to find the elusive, illusory fix and burn myself out in the process.
Perhaps paradoxically, I have guided and supported other people. Sometimes it’s been colleagues at work who grew more in to themselves as a consequence of our conversations. Sometimes it’s been friends like Kalia, who I walked this pilgrimage with and whose experience you can read about here. And every single time one of these transformations took place for someone else, I learned something about myself too. I came away energised, inspired, a better person, not worse. It was a mutual exchange.
For some years now, people who know me well have told me I should become a therapist, or a psychologist, or a counsellor or a coach. I’d blush, say I was flattered, and then put the idea out of my head. Who the fuck was I to step in to that hallowed space, I’d think. In their heart-felt suggestions, they were telling me. I just didn’t — couldn’t — believe them. I didn’t love myself enough to see that supporting others as they grew might be my gift, nor could I allow that it might actually be my calling. But now I know that it is.
As I walked with Kalia across the Kii peninsula, I talked about the joy of watching people unfold in to life. I landed on the idea of unfolding because it’s what I’ve experienced myself. I arrived at 40 — mid-life, give or take — so tightly bound that the ropes of expectation were cutting to my very soul. And yet as each turn of the rope has loosened, as each part of me — hidden away for fear of shame or judgement or heartbreak — has relaxed in to the glorious light (sometimes painfully, like a dead leg coming to life), I’ve found myself living with a far greater sense of joy and ease. If I have the capability and the capacity, how could I not want to work with others to create the conditions in which they might do the same?
So this is me offering myself up as a guide and support — yes, a coach — for folk who want to unfold in to life, too.
If you'd like to read more about the kinds of questions I can help answer, I've set up a little web page. Share it with your friends if you think they'd be interested.
And if you’d like to have a chat to see if we’d be a good fit to work together, then shoot me an email at drewpasmith@icloud.com.
To those of you who joined Kalia and I on this journey, I want to express my deep gratitude. Knowing that this space has been here, with people waiting to read about what came to pass on a day's walking — in a life's transformation — has kept me honest and driven me deeper. They say that writing is thinking made legible, but it's feeling too: by walking along with me, you've helped create the conditions for me to feel in to what's coming next and that's pretty amazing.
This will be the last edition of Ise Does It, but it won't be the last time we have the chance to go for a walk together.
Until then, and with a profound feeling of love,
Drew
