Steve

Steve is a man in his early 40s who has been struggling in his role at work. He wants to be successful in his career. But he is stuck. And his career is not moving.

I look at my manager and even his manager. They both hold senior positions, but they’re not perfect. I see what they are really like. I see their faults. They are frauds. Shams.

Steve grew up in a family where both parents worked hard and achieved well in their fields. They were kind, thoughtful and encouraging. He is intelligent and well-educated. And yet — somewhere along the way — the desire to achieve fermented into something else. Fear and negative thinking about others and the way the world works.

He was locked down, locked in, too afraid to try.

In Steve’s mind, to be successful meant to be excellent at everything. He looked ahead at his career and saw a soaring mountain of achievement above him. And to reach the top, he thought he had to be perfect.

With no faults.

In his two-dimensional, all or nothing thinking, he was either nothing or he was everything. If he tried and didn’t reach the top, that would mean failure. He did not want to be a failure. He held his untested ability in the safety of the Basement. He could not risk putting himself out there.

In the Basement, you can protect your “I could be perfect self” from judgement. Nothing is risked. Nothing will be lost. But nothing is gained either. The Basement state of mind has its own thought pattern, its own world view. Stay restricted. Stay safe. Nothing risked. Nothing can fail.

With a skill in the delivery of a sharp cynical comment, Steve became known at work for having a chip on his shoulder. In team meetings he sat on the fringe, contributing little, offering predictably sceptical comments at intervals. He was critical of colleagues he perceived as more successful. He found their flaws quickly and labelled them accordingly — shams, frauds, people who had somehow convinced the system that they were something they were not. But he saw through them. And he was going let them know, with the determination of a man with a mission.

There is a logic to this, through the Basement world view. If you have to be perfect to succeed, and yet people around you are succeeding without being perfect, then either they are frauds — or the system is a sham. Steve was not being irrational. He was being entirely consistent with Basement thinking.

Fear of failure, a belief that perfection is a requirement, can keep people locked in a Basement state of mind for a very long time.

When Steve came for counselling, he needed help to know that he was not alone. Not bad or a hopeless case. Not mentally ill. He was experiencing what many people feel. It was a great achievement that he had the courage to seek help.

For Steve, letting him know he was not alone was important.

We all have the same five floors. Your Basement is the same as everyone else’s. The same as mine too. I can understand your Basement because I understand mine.

That normalisation — offered without judgement, because all Basements really do sound the same — gave Steve something to hold onto. He was not a special case of failure. He was a person on a particular floor of a house that everyone lives in. And no floor is permanent.

Over time, a different picture of Steve began to emerge. The cynicism that had cost him so much — the ability to see the faults in people and societal structures that others accepted without challenge— was not a character defect. It was perception. Acute, accurate, often unsettling perception. What the Basement had done was turn his perceptive skills against the world, and against himself. The work was not to correct this or tell him to stop. It was to first understand where this was happening in him. To help him see that his way of being in the world was about a location on a map of his internal world. His Basement. You can move from one location to another. With the help of a map.

Over time Steve was encouraged to try something small. In a team meeting, instead of the familiar sceptical comment from the fringe, he made a couple of observations. He consciously tried to be helpful to the discussion. He was nervous, but he wanted to get unstuck.

Afterwards his manager caught up with him and had some encouraging words.

In the team meeting this week I made a couple of comments. I tried to raise an issue about why the project was not going well. I tried trying to be helpful. My manager caught up with me afterwards and thanked me for those specific contributions. He said I was insightful.

Insightful.

His negative cynicism, when released from the bonds of his restrictive Basement, became skilful insight as it emerged on his Ground floor and he became part of the team. No longer on its fringe.

As the team tackled new projects, he was given the opportunity to lead a small subgroup. He was pleased. He gathered the group and they began work. Bit by bit — he found he enjoyed helping others in the group discover what they could contribute. He liked nurturing skills in other people. He hadn’t known this about himself. This new ability was being given its first airing. And he let it grow stronger as the subgroup met each week.

As the counselling work progressed, Steve was shown a famous mediaeval painting which in a beautiful and simple way provides a visual image of the structure of our internal worlds as described in the House Within approach.

Michelino painting. The Comedy Illuminating Florence— painted by Domenico di Michelino in 1465 and hanging still in the Cathedral in Florence.

Steve had come to understand his House Within. He knew the five floors. He knew the staircase and what happened when it spun. He had been climbing, one careful step at a time, out of his Basement. He looked at the painting.

He knew nothing about Dante or The Divine Comedy. He did not look with academic eyes. He just let the alignment between his House Within and the painting sink in. There was silence. Not the silence of confusion or resistance. The silence of immediate, unarguable recognition. Something in the painting reached across six hundred years and named exactly where Steve had been, exactly where he was now, and exactly where the path led. With just a few words of explanation, he understood its message.

A brief word about the painting. In it, the spiral descends into Inferno — like the Basement and the Cellar, the floors of withdrawal and self-focus. The spiral rises into Purgatorio, with people bending over, climbing and climbing, and heavy loads on their back, – like the Upstairs and the Attic, striving, over thinking over analysing, the exhausting pursuit of a perfection that is not real. Dante stands tall, neither spiralling up or down. He stands on the horizontal plane — with just dry earth and weeds at first, plain and undramatic, flat and dull, nothing like the vivid intensity of the spirals on either side. He shines his light on the city of Florence. And with his left hand he gestures as if saying;- You can spiral up and down if you want to. But you will never get to Florence if you do.

The name Florence means to flower. To reach your full potential. Not to be perfect. Not to be better than others. Simply to become, fully, who you are. Your Florence is where you will find meaning and purpose and become who can truly be.

Steve had spent years staring at the mountain of perfection, of expectation, of worldly achievement, of social success. The painting showed him something he had never been able to see from the Basement. There was a path. A horizontal path. Ordinary. Less dramatic. Humble in many ways. But offering him a way to find his Florence — step by step, insightful comment by insightful comment, helping others develop, small contribution by small contribution.

Intimidated by what he saw as the requirement to be perfect, he had remained stuck in a negative and cynical state of mind. The Basement world view had stopped him growing and developing as a person.

Perfection is a phantasy. Perfection does not exist. Perfection in not real.

For six hundred years this painting has been hanging in the cathedral in Florence, quietly, softly, offering us this message. Steve got the message.

When Steve first reached the Ground Floor it felt quiet. Almost boring. After the drama of the Basement — the cynical performances, the mountain, the phantasy of perfection — the Ground Floor offered nothing like that intensity. In the painting there is just dry earth and weeds at first. That ordinariness is what the Ground Floor actually feels like when you first land there. It feels like something is not right. There is nothing there!

This is what the beginning of forward movement feels like. It is just a humble horizontal path. But it is the beginning of a new direction. Steve came to see that his Florence was not a senior title or an impressive salary or external validation. His Florence was the moment he helped someone in his team find their own voice. The moment his perception — finally turned outward, finally offered as a gift rather than a weapon — made a difference to someone else. He had not known that was in him. The Basement had kept it safe, and unused, for a long time.

It took approximately eighteen months of counselling for Steve to genuinely integrate how the Ground Floor works and what it offered him.

Change takes time. Change needs practice.

To his great credit, Steve was willing to do the work.