Whining to Win Wine
Nynke June 8th, 2006
At European Consultants Camp this year we held a “Whining to win wine” contest. The winner was a truly courageous man.
Another participant, with lots of performance experience on stage, asked me how “It” works, and how the contest would help, since “whining” seemed like an addiction to him: No matter what you bring up the answer is “No” and the whining continues.
To create any “addiction” I need to distinguish a “good” and a “bad”. “Bad” in this perception is “whining”, making bullying the “good” thing of course.
This way I can stifle myself by creating opportunities for “transgression” from the one state to the other, so that I can blame myself for each transgression, further stifling myself. An eXtremely effective tactic when, for instance, I wish to serve my “fear of success” by not having a single success.
When “transgressing” I can feel guilty and feel a victim of myself. So, no matter what you bring up, the answer is “No”, and I want some more whining. Downward spiral.
Abstraction of possible paths based on systems thinking to get out of this downward spiral:
- Transform any “guilt” traps into “regret”.
- Leap to top of spiral and undo the whole “thing”.
We can stop the world in a balancing act for undoing “whining” by undoing the distinction once made — for example by desensitization games where we can find whining not judged by self and others to be “bad”, where instead our whining is greeted with joy and many good laughs, and actually rewarded with wine. And people that get upset with it, are apparently the “good” guys, the powerplayers, the bullies. Too bad for them. They can buy us beer as their reward.
When we stifle our selves by judging our “whining”, we stifle our higher selves listening to our deeper selves, and we will never discover the needs of self, life, and others we have been and are overlooking. If we do allow our selves some “whining”, and (with some help or not) truly listen to our selves when we do that, we can (learn to) channel lower energies by which we become more effective at channelling our higher energies.
And how can we truly listen to others if we can’t hear our own inner voices, and choose consciously which ones are helpful and which ones are not helpful for a particular context and purpose?
Meaning, we can safely focus on other things and follow up on finite boundaries we feel passionate about in action-able ways, like by making a loose open ended plan, and stepping back (example) from desired state to current state using our imagination.
Avanta is, for example, starting a Virginia Satir Wall. And we will be making a plan with at least three different paths for putting on a new contest the whole group came up with for European Consultants Camp next year. The “good” version of the Whine game, “Bully to Buy Beer”.
[…] This is going to be a very short blog entry. For designing “Whining to Win Wine” I used the following requirements: […]