Trailheads

Anything that snags your attention and goes somewhere if you follow it.

Description

A sensation, an impulse, a phrase you keep saying, a pattern you keep repeating. Instead of fixing the surface, you follow it to the part underneath and relate to that from Self.

One of our favourite sources of trailheads is the small thing you decided to do and then did not do. You agreed to say one honest “no” this week. The week passed. You did not. That is not a failure, it is a trailhead with a return address: apparently that was not as small a thing as you thought. We design take-home practices to be win-win for exactly this reason — do the thing and your life is a bit better, or don’t and you have just found out where something lives. More on that in The parts ate my homework.

What Trailheads is NOT:

Not symptom checklisting, and not trigger hunting. The point isn’t to catalogue what set you off, it’s to find who inside got set off.

Examples:

Tight jaw, but only before the Tuesday meeting.
The urge to disappear immediately after someone is warm to you.
The same small thing you agreed to do, three weeks running.

see also:

Blending & Unblending; Parts (in IFS); Managers; Firefighters; Felt sense