Читать книгу The Female Leader - Sonja Becker - Страница 42

W

e can now quite simply ask, what is your goal? This is one of the elementary questions in coaching, and of course it can be answered in different ways. But first let’s bear in mind what it means to have no goal.

The average German “relationship”, an invention of the problem orientated and freedom seeking eighties when marriage was out of favor, is generally distinguished by its lack of commitment and aimlessness. Language and phrases reveal this wonderfully: “Since I’ve been in a new relationship, we solve mutual problems that I never had before.” Standard expressions are, “Give me time”, or, “We have to talk”. Talk? Try loving!

A prescribed terminology that can nip any kind of passion in the bud. One imagines a young, yearning love other than unhappy evenings drowned in red wine that you don’t want to end in which misunderstandings are cleared up, things that were said are analyzed and commented on, where once again something is said that wasn’t meant like that, what has to be explained once more, and so on. To quote Prince again: “revolving every word that is being spoken”.

Or the actor Vincent Gallo, who once defined a relationship in three phases: “hysteria, self-abandonment, exhaustion.”

Or let’s take the satirist Wiglaf Droste, whose characterization of a relationship is reflected in the functional word “Versöhnungsvögeln”or “VV” (“the forgive-me-fuck”), which often follows a bitter argument. We don’t really want to go through all the psycho-games and bizarre ,patterns of behavior in a difficult relationship again. A passionate and sincere “pardon, honey” looks somewhat different anyway. How quickly can it be discussed to death. Such a constellation, sinking in mediocrity and artificiality, has come to such a desperate state because it has no purpose, no aim.

Immanuel Kant defined the human being as “its own purpose”, which underlies what distinguishes each individual, who has hidden within himself his own unique, large, distinctive goal, the pursuit of which lasts his lifetime.

Nobody else has this one goal, for everyone has a different one. According to Kant, to discover it and cultivate it defines individual life. When a relationship has a goal - and many people resist this idea, because it supposedly doesn’t involve emotions any more – or when both partners complement each other in their aims, then you have a “power couple”, an unbeatable team, that nourishes itself on the greatest source of human energy that there is: love, which is different from a mediocre “relationship” that is always dependent on moods.

Whatever you undertake, i.e. really go for, you do it because you want to reach a goal. Sometimes it isn’t so completely clear. The party mood you are in betrays plenty of emotionality. Christopher Columbus didn’t just set to sea to have a look around a bit. He wanted to find the sea route to India. This idea gave him strength.