Sales to “mom-and-pop franchisees” grow well in the soil of the wounded.

The real work begins, whether personal financial net worth rises or falls.

Thanks to The Shining Earth FB Community

Why do stressed franchisees often look so stupid, so “frozen”?

Like a “deer caught in a car’s headlights”?

Dr. Peter A. Levine in his 1997 book, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, suggests that under threat, franchisees are behaving perfectly naturally:

Chapter 1: Shadows From a Forgotten Past

 Nature’s Plan

A herd of impala grazes peacefully in a lush wadi [valley]. Suddenly, the wind shifts, carrying with it a new, but familiar scent. The impala senses danger in the air and become instantly tensed to a hair trigger of alertness. They sniff, look, and listen carefully for a few moments, but when no threat appears, the animals return to their grazing, relaxed yet vigilant.

Seizing he moment, a stalking cheetah leaps from its cover of dense shrubbery. As if it were one organism, the herd springs quickly toward a protective thicket at the wadi’s edge. One young impala trips for a split second, then recovers. but it is too late. In a blur, the cheetah lunges toward its intended victim, and the chase is on at a blazing sixty to seventy miles an hour.

At the moment of contact (or just before), the young impala falls to the ground, surrendering to its impending death. Yet, it may be uninjured. The stone-still animal is not pretending to be dead. It has instinctively entered an altered state of consciousness shared by all mammals when death appears imminent. many indigenous peoples view this phenomenon as a surrender of the spirit of the prey to the predator, which, in a manner of speaking, it is.

Physiologists call this altered state the “immobility” or “freezing” response. It is one of the three primary responses available to reptiles and mammals when faced with an overwhelming threat. The other two, fight and flight, are much more familiar to most of  us. Less is known about the immobility response…

Tim Hortons franchisees know enough not to race to any brand lawyer to solve their problem.

• They know that the franchise bar serves only franchisor interests: just like the lapdog franchisee advisory groups.

They stick with the few peers they trust and watch.

It is in the middle of misery that so much becomes clear. The one who says, ‘Nothing good came of this’ is not yet listening.

When a creature is exposed to violence, it will tend to adapt to that disturbance, so that when the violence ceases or the creature is allowed its freedom, the healthy instinct to flee is hugely diminished, and the creature stays put instead.

Dr. Estés offers important insight to the central inner work that is left to be done within franchising: healthy anima integration.

Quotes:

It’s not the failure that holds us back but the reluctance to begin over again that causes us to stagnate.

Forgiveness is an act of creation. You can choose from many ways to do it. You can forgive for now, forgive till then, forgive till the next time, forgive but give no more chances it’s a whole new game if there is another incident. You can give one more chance, give several more chances, give many chances, give chances only if. You can forgive part, all, or half of the offense. You can devise a blanket of forgiveness. You decide.

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.

I’ll tell you right now, the doors to the world of the wild self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door; if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much that you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Your quest for franchisee justice will lead you to a “white knight” lawyer who will betray you.

The franchise bar appears to 1st time user franchisees as fundamentally fair, adversarial and zero sum. That is a dangerous myth.

The economic incentives for the “franchisee-friendly attorneys” are to give the pretence of a fair fight (definition: an attempt to make something that is not the case appear true OED) since your being sold-out can be easily explained. Franchisee stupidity and shortsightedness is the most cited, least reality-based reason given.

Answer:

Your franchisee attorney will defect on 100% of all large cases because the franchise industry is effectively a single-payer industry for legal services (franchisors: +95%). As in other human waste treatment systems, the franchise bar functions to let pass the little cases go to trial (to keep the payers fearful and motivated) but skims off the large chunks for the elite 2 firms.

Question:

Why would any franchisor pay out 100% of a massive claim to a group of franchisees for multi-year bad faith dealings when they could cut two cheques (1. their own lawyers and 2. your attorney) to manage the case to a “satisfactory conclusion”? Would 10 per cent of what franchisees are owed be a reasonably figure?

If you were a rational, profit-maximizing multi-decade career Big Franchising professional (who has their own very high sunk costs invested in the status quo industry practices and structure, btw), Wouldn’t YOU just keep your mouth shut, turn a blind eye and play along, too?

There are ways to deal with these perfectly explainable and rational, multiple-level credence good dangers but you may need to start serving legitimate authority instead of the posers that scatter when the light switch goes on the industry.

— Sir Galahad:The Quest of the Holy Grail,  Arthur Hughes, 1870.

Things get very clear when you’re cornered.

The real function of a spiritual friend is to insult you.

Quote:

Idiot compassion is the highly conceptualized idea that you want to do good….Of course, [according to the mahayana teachings of Buddhism] you should do everything for everybody; there is no selection involved at all. But that doesn’t mean to say that you have to be gentle all the time. Your gentleness should have heart, strength. In order that your compassion doesn’t become idiot compassion, you have to use your intelligence. Otherwise, there could be self-indulgence of thinking that you are creating a compassionate situation when in fact you are feeding the other person’s aggression. If you go to a shop and the shopkeeper cheats you and you go back and let him cheat you again, that doesn’t seem to be a very healthy thing to do for others.

— Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche 1939 – 1987

Modern suffering man is the heir to this psychological event which took place culturally some eight hundred years ago.

Usually he seeks an unconscious solution outside of himself, complaining about this work, his marriage, or his place in the world.

The Fisher King

Our story begins with the Grail castle, which is in serious trouble. The Fisher King, the king of the castle, has been wounded. His wounds are so severe that he cannot live, yet he is incapable of dying. he groans; he cries out; he suffers constantly. The whole land is in desolation, for a land mirrors the condition of its king, inwardly in a mythological dimension, as well as outwardly in the physical work. The cattle do not reproduce; the crops won’t grow; maidens weep; there is mourning everywhere – all because the Fisher King is wounded.

[…]

The whole Grail castle is in serious trouble because the Fisher King is wounded. The myth tells us that years before, early in his adolescence, when he was out wandering around in the woods doing his knight errantry, the Fisher King came to a camp. All the people of the camp were gone, but there was a salmon roasting on a spit. He was hungry, there was a salmon roasting over the fire, and he took a bit of it to eat. He found that the salmon was very hot. After burning his fingers on it he dropped the salmon and put his fingers into his mouth to assuage the burn. In so doing he got a bit of the salmon into his mouth. This is the Fisher King wound and gives its name to the ruler of much of our modern psychology. Modern suffering man is the heir to this psychological event which took place culturally some eight hundred years ago.

[…]

Much is to learned from the symbol of the wounded Fisher King. The salmon or, more generally, the fish, is one of the many symbols of Christ. As in the story of the Fisher King coming upon the roasting salmon, a boy in his early adolescence touches something of the Christ nature within himself but touches it too soon. He is unexpectedly wounded by it and drops it immediately as being too hot. But a bit of it gets into his mouth and he can never forget the experience. His first contact with what will be redemption for him later in his life is a wounding. This is what turns him into a wounded Fisher King. The first touch of consciousness in a youth appears as wound or as suffering. Parsifal finds his Garden of Eden experience by way of the bit of salmon. That suffering stays with him until his redemption or enlightenment many years later.

Most western men are Fisher Kings. Every boy has naively blundered into something that is too big for him. He proceeds halfway through his masculine development and then drops it as being too hot. Often a certain bitterness arises, because, like the Fisher King, he can neither live with the new consciousness he has touched nor can he entirely drop it.

Every adolescent receive his Fisher King wound. He would never proceed into consciousness if it were not so. The church speaks of this wounding as the felix culpa the happy fall which ushers one into the process of redemption. This is the fall from the Garden of Eden, the graduation from naive consciousness into self consciousness.

[…]

I doubt if there is a woman in the world who has not had to mutely stand by as she watched a man agonize over his Fisher King aspect. She may be the one who notices, even before the man himself is aware of it, that there is suffering and a haunting sense of injury and incompleteness in him. A man suffering in this way is often driven to do idiotic things to cure the wound and ease the desperation he feels. Usually he seeks an unconscious solution outside of himself, complaining about this work, his marriage, or his place in the world.

The Fisher King is carried about in his litter, groaning, crying in his suffering. There is no respite for him – except when he is fishing. This is to say that the wound, which represents consciousness, is bearable only when the wounded is doing his inner work, proceeding with the task of consciousness which was inadvertently started with the wound in his youth. This close association with fishing will soon play a large part in our story.

— He: Understanding Masculine Psychology, Robert A. Johnson, 1989.

I, more times than I care to admit, find myself playing “old tapes” of the child I was.

I was taught TA and it has helped me decide my destiny and story.

Transactional analysis, commonly known as TA to its adherents, is an integrative approach to the theory of psychology and psychotherapy. It is described as integrative because it has elements of psychoanalytic, humanist and cognitive approaches. TA was first developed by Canadian-born US psychiatrist, Eric Berne, starting in the late 1950s.

Outline
According to the International Transactional Analysis Association, TA ‘is a theory of personality and a systematic psychotherapy for personal growth and personal change’.

1. As a theory of personality, TA describes how people are structured psychologically. It uses what is perhaps its best known model, the ego-state (Parent-Adult-Child) model, to do this. The same model helps explain how people function and express their personality in their behavior.
2. It is a theory of communication that can be extended to the analysis of systems and organisations.
3. It offers a theory for child development by explaining how our adult patterns of life originated in childhood. This explanation is based on the idea of a “Life (or Childhood) Script”: the assumption that we continue to re-play childhood strategies, even when this results in pain or defeat. Thus it claims to offer a theory of psychopathology.
4. In practical application, it can be used in the diagnosis and treatment of many types of psychological disorders and provides a method of therapy for individuals, couples, families and groups.
5. Outside the therapeutic field, it has been used in education to help teachers remain in clear communication at an appropriate level, in counselling and consultancy, in management and communications training and by other bodies.

Philosophy

• People are OK; thus each person has validity, importance, equality of respect.
• Everyone (with only few exceptions, such as the severely brain-damaged) has the capacity to think.
• People decide their story and destiny, therefore these decisions can be changed.

Freedom from historical maladaptations embedded in the childhood script is required in order to become free of inappropriate, inauthentic and displaced emotions which are not a fair and honest reflection of here-and-now life (such as echoes of childhood suffering, pity-me and other mind games, compulsive behavior and repetitive dysfunctional life patterns).

The aim of change under TA is to move toward autonomy (freedom from childhood script), spontaneity, intimacy, problem solving as opposed to avoidance or passivity, cure as an ideal rather than merely making progress and learning new choices.

Lifted from Wikipedia

I swear.

😉

One explanation of where the strength of the materially poor comes from.

THE BUDDHA IN THE HUMAN REALM

In traditional portrayals of the six realms of existence, the Buddha in the human realm is shown with a begging bowl. We may associate this with a mentality of poverty, which is the largest concern in the human realm. But by carrying a begging bowl, in fact, it is as though you always have something to put things into. In other words, the ultimate mentality of poverty is also the mentality of richness at the same time.

In that way, you are in command of the whole situation.

So that is extremely wealthy.

— The Six Realms of Existence in Buddhism

No matter what you’ve lost, be it a home, a love a friend…Rise again

Rise again, rise again – though your heart it be broken and life about to end
No matter what you’ve lost, be it a home, a love, a friend.
Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

Stan Rogers, Mary Ellen Carter from the album Between the Breaks ….Live

She went down last October in a pouring driving rain.
The skipper, he’d been drinking and the Mate, he felt no pain.
Too close to Three Mile Rock, and she was dealt her mortal blow,
And the Mary Ellen Carter settled low.

There were just us five aboard her when she finally was awash.
We’d worked like hell to save her, all heedless of the cost.
And the groan she gave as she went down, it caused us to proclaim
That the Mary Ellen Carter would rise again.

Well, the owners wrote her off; not a nickel would they spend.
“She gave twenty years of service, boys, then met her sorry end.
But insurance paid the loss to us, so let her rest below.”
Then they laughed at us and said we had to go.

But we talked of her all winter, some days around the clock,
For she’s worth a quarter million, afloat and at the dock.
And with every jar that hit the bar, we swore we would remain
And make the Mary Ellen Carter rise again.

All spring, now, we’ve been with her on a barge lent by a friend.
Three dives a day in hard hat suit and twice I’ve had the bends.
Thank God it’s only sixty feet and the currents here are slow
Or I’d never have the strength to go below.

But we’ve patched her rents, stopped her vents, dogged hatch and porthole down.
Put cables to her, ‘fore and aft and girded her around.
Tomorrow, noon, we hit the air and then take up the strain.
And watch the Mary Ellen Carter rise again.

Rise again, rise again, that her name not be lost
To the knowledge of men.
Those who loved her best and were with her till the end
Will make the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

For we couldn’t leave her there, you see, to crumble into scale.
She’d saved our lives so many times, living through the gales
And the laughing, drunken rats who left her to a sorry grave
They won’t be laughing in another day. . .

And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

Rise again, rise again – though your heart it be broken
And life about to end
No matter what you’ve lost, be it a home, a love, a friend.
Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

[Repeat]

Franchising can be seen as a journey from innocence to experience.

A death and a birth (both). It’s good to have a model once the inevitable pain arises.

Wikipedia: The repetitive lyrics are believed to have a connection with mythology. The song describes the ferryman as “the hooded old man at the rudder,” and seems to connect to the classic image of the Grim Reaper, a hooded being (usually a skeleton) who leads lost souls to “the other side,” also a lyric in the song.The ferryman demanding his payment is also similar to the Greek ferryman of the dead, Charon. He demanded an obolus (coin) to ferry dead souls across the River Styx. Those who did not pay were doomed to remain as ghosts, remaining on the plane of the mare, the restless dead. Therefore in former cultures coins were laid below the tongues of dead persons.

Psychopomp [guide of the souls]: In Jungian psychology, the psychopomp is a mediator between the unconscious and conscious realms. It is symbolically personified in dreams as a wise man or woman, or sometimes as a helpful animal. In many cultures, the shaman also fulfills the role of the psychopomp. This may include not only accompanying the soul of the dead, but also vice versa: to help at birth, to introduce the newborn child’s soul to the world (p. 36 of). This also accounts for the contemporary title of “midwife to the dying,” which is another form of psychopomp work.

— Chris de Burgh, Don’t Pay the Ferryman, 1982