I have been very sick, but I am feeling a little better. I can stay with a thing now a little longer, I can take an idea a little further.

I have been working out the toxins from my poor battered body, slowly, and somewhat effectively. Three weeks it has been since I gotten myself poisoned.

And one of the signs that I am coming back to myself is that I am noticing more.

The role of liking in following guidance, following coaching.

I have a few “clients” that keep on coming back, show up on my webinars, want stuff from me, but when I look: they follow maybe 1% of what they got from me, and the rest: they go to someone else to get guidance from.

It feels weird to me. A cognitive dissonance. But maybe it isn’t.

So let’s look what is going on?

Liking… You have no control over your liking something or someone. It has no permanence, there is nothing that you like all the time, and no one.

I still like it… is a stupid statement… liking is checked for every moment by the complex set of feedback mechanisms of any living organism, including humans.

The few “clients” I mention above don’t like me… And to take guidance, teaching from someone you don’t like is nearly impossible for a living thing.

Like and trust… say the marketing teachers all the time, and they are right. You need to be liked and trusted by your constituency to buy from you AND use what they bought.

Buying can be impulsive, but putting it into use isn’t.

I am not a particularly likeable person… I have never done anything to be liked… whereas a “normal” person does up to 90% of what they do to be liked.

Relationships between men and women, maybe even friendships are based on “if you like me, I’ll like you, even when I don’t” which is most of the time. Liking uses energy you can’t afford to spend…

The tragedy of marriage is that the couple planning to marry has no idea that they are basing a supposedly lifetime long relationship on such a flimsy concept: I will like you as long as you’ll like me.

So what do we consider being liked?

Our main concern is to be able to wear our masks in public, and our lowest self in private… and we want the other to let us do it without giving us a hard time. We want to live like we have been… with our split selves, ugly private, and pretty, heroic, etc. public persona.

And if our spouses don’t do it for us, we’ll find a willing third party who will… whatever is their gain: we don’t care.

So, as you see liking is important, but not reliable. And you can’t expect someone who liked you yesterday to like you today.

Liking is one of the cognitive biases… a feeling that if you like someone then they are good people.

Are you good people? Maybe sometimes… the more you are not good people the more you pretend that you are good people…

And then look for people who do what you do: pretend.

So you pick someone who will support your self-image that you are good, smart, and whatever the hell you want to believe about yourself.

I have a whole bunch of people sending me to videos and articles… they found good.

My hunch is often that they are telling me something totally different: that those videos and articles are good while I am sh*t… Or that they know what is good, and i should listen to them!

Whenever I check out what they send me, I find again and again that they are attracted to people pretending just like them, having about the same slow vibration, the same level of inauthenticity, and very very very low truth value.

Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?

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