Hiding?

Are you trying to hide something about yourself? Is there a part of you you’re not happy with, but instead of working on it, you cover it up? My daughter is undergoing chemotherapy for a kind of cancer reserved just for organ transplant recipients. I say that like it’s some kind of reward. I don’t think of it as a reward. She doesn’t either! Her hair is falling out in patches. She kind of looks like the tortured doll in Toy Story. She doesn’t really want to rock the whole bald thing, so she now has two wigs. She likes them. She looks good in them. In her case, I think covering up her baldness make sense. But what if we are trying to cover up something because we don’t want to deal with it?

Maybe for you it’s a fear of failure. You cover it up with procrastination. If you never get to the tasks, you don’t have to finish anything so you can avoid hearing the disapproval. Maybe you fear intimacy so you disguise it with independence. You can do life on your own so you don’t ever have to let anyone in. Or perhaps you are hiding a sense of never being good enough with high-octane production. You’ll prove you’re worth something by all the projects you can spit out, meanwhile never feeling inside that all those projects are enough.

Can you identify with any of these scenarios or ones like them? The answer is not to keep hiding but to bring the hidden parts of yourself out in the open, in a safe environment where healing can take place. This might be in recovery groups, counseling or coaching. I got to the heart of things I was hiding in a life changing coaching experience with Dr. John Townsend. Now, after several years of sitting under his teaching and guidance, he has given me (and about 17 other people around the US) the chance to lead and coach my own Townsend Leadership Program in Colorado! I am excited to bring the very processes that radically changed my life and helped me peel off the masks and stop hiding to my local community.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Townsend Leadership Program that I will be leading in 2015, call me or email me: 303-589-6274 or karen@journeyforward.net