Hello Reader,

Welcome to the conversation.

In certain personal growth spaces, there's an unwritten agreement: when someone is doing deep work, someone else takes notes. Not because they're asked. Just because that's what you do when you're paying attention.

I didn't think to ask before I sat down with my teacher at a recent retreat. I was present, I was in it, and it wasn't until I returned to my seat that I noticed the absence. No paper waiting, no handoff, nothing to help me hold what had just happened.

So I asked the room. Had anyone, by chance, taken notes for me?

The silence that followed told me everything I needed to know. Not about the room. About me.

“ Expectations are resentments waiting to happen. — Anne Lamott

From My Chair to Yours

My disappointment surprised me. Not because it showed up, but because of what was underneath it.

I hadn't asked anyone to take notes for me. I had assumed. And somewhere between those two things was a story I'd been telling myself without knowing it, that people who are paying attention will simply know what you need before you name it.

That's not attentiveness. For my enneagram type, I recognized it for what it actually was: control wearing the clothes of expectation.

I take notes for people. I notice when someone is in the work and I quietly show up for them. Somewhere along the way I had turned my own way of loving people into a standard for being and handed it to a room that never agreed to hold it.

The assumption made perfect sense to me. That was the problem.

The Lens

Reflection is the stage in the Depletion to Fulfillment framework where the mirror finally turns around.

Up until this point, the story has had other characters in it. The circumstance, the room, the people who didn't show up the way you needed. Reflection is where you start to see your own face in the story, your assumptions, your unspoken expectations, your role in the dynamic you've been living inside and often naming and complaining about.

That sounds like progress. And it is. But it doesn't feel like it.

The mirror in Reflection is cloudy. What you're seeing is true, but it's uncomfortable enough that the mind starts looking for the exit. This is where Reflection Relapse happens, the pull back down into the Depletion Loop, where at least the story is familiar and you aren't the one holding the measuring stick.

Most people don't collapse because they can't see their own part of what they've been living. They collapse because of what they see.

Integration is on the other side of that sometimes uncomfortable moment. But you have to stay in the mirror long enough to let what's there actually land. That's the work, not the insight itself, but the willingness to sit with it before the mind starts negotiating.

If you want to locate yourself in the full framework, I've linked it here.

Reflection

• Where in your life are you holding an expectation you never voiced? Not a request you made and was ignored. An assumption you carried quietly, measuring people against a standard they didn't know existed.
• What would it look like to name it, even just to yourself, before the disappointment has a chance to land?

Until we see each other again, I hope you have a powerful day.

-Joanna

Joanna Douglas
Conscious Leadership Coach, Speaker, Teacher Founder of Enneagram Ensight