Itʻs Not About The Golf Clubs

The subject of my talk is “It’s Not About The Golf Clubs”.

How are you doing in this time of corona? How are you doing with lockdown? I must admit things seem to be easing. My neighbour was out over the weekend because it was the first time that you could go into pubs in a long time in the UK and he went on a mini pub crawl.

First pub he went into, he was the only person in there. It was table service. So he had a drink left there, went on to another pub where he was not the only person but almost the only person in there. I think we can say that Chipping Norton hasn’t really gone for it in a big way yet, but we’ll see how it develops.

What I want to talk about today really is about unconscious triggers and how they impact on our relationships and our communications. Actually probably in the other order, how they trigger our communications and how that impacts on our relationships and actually on our life.

We have so many unconscious memories, things that are really quite forgotten that we haven’t necessarily resolved and they’re there, something happens, they’re triggered, but we don’t even know that the memory has been triggered. Because we don’t know it’s been triggered we make certain assumptions and we make certain assumptions so we communicate in a certain way, we behave in a certain way.

That can have very positive consequences but it can also have quite negative consequences in relationships. Let’s talk about the golf clubs.

I was talking to a client of mine and she was telling me that, we were talking about lockdown, this is supervision client, so I do coaching supervision. We were talking about lockdown and she was saying that her son had left his golf clubs in her bedroom and it was irritating her. Greatly irritating her. We talked about it.

Why was this irritating? Why was this? Why was this a problem? What it was about was about space and people taking over her space without permission.

Different memories, different things from the past were all connected up with this. As we explored it a bit, it became very obvious that it wasn’t about the golf clubs, it wasn’t about her son putting his golf clubs in her bedroom. It was actually about her relationship with her personal space. We do this thing where something happens and it triggers these memories.

I’ve got another story for you. Actually, this thing is best explained through stories to be honest. This is a long time ago where I was coaching on an NLP master practitioner programme I think it was, anyway, one of the certification programmes. As a coach one of the things we had to do was to help all the delegates get through their exam. Now the exam was an open book exam, so it wasn’t complicated in that way, but they had to pass it 100%, because it was open book.

There was this one guy and he was resisting and resisting and I was trying to help him and trying to get him to get it right and he’d put something down and it’d be very half arsed and it was like, “No, no, no, you need to do it this way.” Anyway, it was, it was really, really hard work. But we did it. He got there and he got his 100%.

He came up to me afterwards and he said to me, “I’d like to thank you for your help.” I said, “No with pleasure.” Then he said, “But you know, part of the problem, I realised part of the problem of working with you for me was that you remind me of my school dinner lady.”

Now, on the one hand that’s quite funny. I’ve had subsequent feedback from other people that I remind them of their school dinner lady. But the thing is that I had no way of knowing that I reminded him of his school dinner lady. He himself didn’t even know until he really sat down and reflected on it.

For both of us in that relationship that memory of his was triggering it again and again and making things difficult. There was something about my tone of voice. There was something about my style. Every time I spoke it would trigger this old memory but he had absolutely no consciousness of it.

More recently, I had an experience with somebody who was renting a room off me and we’d set the rent, we’d agreed the rent and everything was agreed and at a certain point she decided she wasn’t happy with rent. She decided to have a conversation with me. Now, I wasn’t really up for discussion or negotiation, we’d made an agreement and in my book that was it really. Here’s the agreement, that’s what you’re paying, that’s it. That was what I said.

She then, for a whole load of reasons which I’ll talk about in a moment, decided she needed to leave. She packed up and left. No notice, no warning, no goodbye. I’d gone out, I came home and she’d gone and there was a note. Now my first reaction to that was like, “Oh my God, how could she do that? Why would she leave without saying goodbye?”

Now of course, she was paid up so it wasn’t about money, she didn’t steal the silver so it wasn’t about anything like that, but it was like, “Oh, how could she do that?” I was talking to my coach about it and she said, “Well, it does trigger every time in your life that anybody ever walked away from you without warning. The guys who dumped you, the little friends at school who decided that they didn’t want to be your little, best friend anymore. All those things are in there and if you haven’t resolved them this experience is triggering them. That’s why you’re feeling, that’s one reason why you’re feeling strange about it.” Oh, okay, fair enough.

Then I reflected on what might have triggered her into this pattern of behaviour and I realised a couple of things. First thing, I realised was that it was like a power relationship and in this power relationship. I had the power and she didn’t. I know some things about her, I know about her history, and I realised that one of the things it was doing was triggering her sense of circumstances where she felt powerless.

Of course in the moment, at the time, I wasn’t conscious of it and I wasn’t thinking of it. Those assumptions, those experiences that we have, they colour our assumptions about what’s going on in any communication, in any given moment. Because they trigger any communication in any given moment they can also trigger the rest of the relationship, impact the rest of the relationship.

I often say that the past has long fingers. Some of this is related to experiences you’ve had in your own life. Often when, long time ago, often when you were quite small, not always but often when you were quite small. But also ancestral memory, things that have come down through your parents from your grandparents.

I’ve been reading a great book recently called “My Grandmother’s Hands”. Now it’s actually about racialized trauma but it talks about, one of the things it talks about, is how trauma from the past, ancestral trauma, can really become embodied and we feel it it’s tucked away in our body and we need to learn how to release it.

Another great book on the subject is, “It Didn’t Start With You” by a guy called Mark Wolynn. It’s not about race or anything like that, but what he’s talking about is how the behaviours and memories from the past can still have an impact on us, very unconsciously, in the present. The memories of our mothers, our grandmothers, or our fathers and grandfathers.

When we are in communication with another human being then, and that communication doesn’t seem to be going well, or when we’re feeling triggered in a relationship, it really is worth thinking about what might be going on here because in the main it isn’t about the golf clubs.

It’s about what the golf clubs represent. It’s about what does that actually feed into? What is the memory? What is the experience?

Years ago I was working as a management consultant and went to work for this client and at first all was hunky dory, it was all going brilliantly. Then for a whole load of reasons it stopped going brilliantly and they started to bully me. Now I was in my forties, you don’t expect to be bullied when you’re in your forties but I was bullied.

There was a very particular thing that they were doing and we used to call it, when I was young we used to call it going into, putting somebody into Coventry.  So they were bullying me and they’d put me in Coventry which meant that they wouldn’t speak to me. There was this one guy in particular, he wouldn’t speak to me. We would go to a meeting together, he would speak to the other people in the meeting but he would not speak to me. And a couple of others were doing this.

Now at first it was just the shock of it, it was like, “Why are they doing this?” and then I remembered that when I was at school, when I’d been in, ooh, I don’t know, eight maybe, the same thing had happened. When I was at school I got put into Coventry, people wouldn’t speak to me. Actually the school itself, I went to boarding school, they did a kind of weird exclusion.

They decided I wasn’t a right person to be with the other girls so I would have to have my meals on my own. I couldn’t interact with the other girls because I was too naughty, I was too, whatever, I don’t know what I was. But I was in Coventry, not just from the girls themselves but also effectively from the staff.

Being put into Coventry as a 40-something year old adult really, really hit an old hurt spot that I had no sense of, that I didn’t realise was still with me.

So when your best beloved triggers something in you, when your best beloved is demonstrating a behaviour, or your kids or your friends, when they’re demonstrating a behaviour that has you, it just winds you up, it’s worth stopping and thinking what’s really going on? Is this just something that’s being triggered for me? Is this an old memory, an old wound and now is the time to heal it? What does their behaviour represent?

I hope this has been interesting for you and useful as well. I’m opening up the Kukui Collective which is this new group programme for women, new group coaching programme for women. One of the things we’ll be doing in the Kukui Collective is actively healing old wounds as they come up.

Those old memories, those things that are still driving our relationships, driving the assumptions that we make about other people. If you want to join then just give me a message on Facebook, just direct message me, and we can have a chat about whether it’s a good fit for you. Stay well, stay safe.

Hopefully things are starting to open up for you wherever you are in terms of corona and you’re able to move around a little bit more and spend time with your loved ones a little bit more. I’ll talk to you again very soon.

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