The Middle Manager
On the part of the mind that keeps generating work no one asked for
It was a Friday support call. She’d been working with releasing for some time and came in with something specific: a constant, relentless barrage of unhelpful thoughts. Ninety-nine percent of them are useless, she said. Fear, resentment, regret. Just mental noise.
We worked with those thoughts for a while. Welcomed them, allowed them, sat with the resistance to them. Things shifted a bit. Then I had to step away for a moment — a young child had knocked on the door. I said hello, checked in, made sure everything was okay. It was. I returned to the call.
She told me she’d been listening. Analyzing. Who was at the door? What did the child want? What did Steven say? What does she want from him?
I asked what was here now.
She said she was feeling warmth. That relentless tennis match of the mind had taken a back seat. She was too busy feeling warm in her heart.
I didn’t engineer that. She didn’t try to feel it. A child knocked on a door, and something in her turned toward it, and love was right there, available, as close as anything else.
What she discovered wasn’t warmth as a reward for good releasing. It was warmth as the default. What the mind had been blocking wasn’t an absence. It was an excess of attention in the wrong direction.
There’s an old joke that anyone with time in the corporate world will recognize: the role of middle management is to create problems that only middle management can solve.
That’s the mind. Super helpful, incredibly overactive, absolutely convinced that the solution is just one more analysis away. And it’s not. It can’t be, because the warmth was already there. It just needed a shift of focus.
The tennis match didn’t disappear. But it moved to the background on its own when attention found something else to rest in.