I’ve known this story for years (I can’t even remember where I first heard it), and yet I learned something new from it just last week. It’s my favourite teaching story of all.
Many years ago, there was a young Chinese boy who was fortunate enough to be given an apprenticeship to a famous jade master.
On his first morning, as he hurried to the old man’s house, the boy looked forward eagerly to his day. “Today,” he said to himself, “the master will begin to teach me about jade.”
But when he got there, the master handed him a pebble of jade to hold and began to talk about everything under the sun – except jade.
The boy was disappointed, but as he walked home he consoled himself. “The master was just getting to know me today,” he thought. “Surely tomorrow he will begin to teach me about jade.”
But the next day came, and it was just the same as the first. The old man gave the boy a pebble of jade to hold, and began to talk about all of the Ten Thousand Things – except jade.
Day after day this happened. The boy began to despair. “Did I fail some test?” he thought. “Does the master not want me as his apprentice? Will he ever begin to teach me about jade?”
He was a well-brought-up Chinese boy and had been taught not to question his elders, but one day, as he trudged to the master’s house, he had had enough. “Today,” he thought, “I will ask the master when he will begin to teach me about jade.”
But when he arrived at the house, before he could say anything, the master, as his custom was, put a pebble into the boy’s hand. And without thinking, the apprentice cried out, “Master, that’s not jade!”
So what did I learn last week? (You may be wondering.)
Well, when I told that story to myself, I always thought I was the master. You see, people come to me for help with very mundane, ordinary things. They eat too much, or they smoke, or bite their nails. They’re not confident, or they’re stressed and worried. And I help them with those things, but at the same time I give them simple tools and resources and techniques that, if they stick with them and use them as I suggest, will help to turn them into stronger, more integrated and happier people over the long-term. For example, I recently posted a video interview with one of my clients who came to me to give up smoking and ended up becoming kinder to herself, a better mother to her boys, and someone who could start to live out her creative dreams with confidence and enthusiasm.
I’m like the master who had begun to teach about jade without the apprentice even realising it.
Or so I thought.
Last week, I realised I’m the apprentice.
You see, I’ve been struggling to figure out how to present what I do so that people will want to buy it from me (so that, in turn, I can do it all the time). I was expecting that the marketing courses I’ve taken would tell me, like the jade master, all about how to do this. I was expecting knowledge at the level of words.
But through a half-hour talk with Catherine Caine, whose ability to ask just the right questions borders on the uncanny, I realised what I’d been feeling all along, what the pebbles were that I’d been given to hold. What I really want to do is help people – ordinary people, people with kids and mortgages and jobs who do the dishes and mow the lawn – to find depth and meaning and resourcefulness in their ordinary lives, to live skillfully, to make the world a noticeably better place for them and those around them to live in. That’s the work I love. That’s jade. It starts with addressing the obvious symptoms: smoking, overeating, various kinds of “bad habits” and self-harming behaviours. But the point is not to stop doing those things, but to become the kind of person who doesn’t need to do those things any more.
So what I’m going to start doing is talking about what I do in those terms. I’m not sure about the exact language yet, and what I’ll end up calling what I do, but I’m going to give up pretending that I’m here to offer the quick fix and then slipping the things that people are really missing, the meaning and the self-belief and the integration of all the parts of themselves, in through the side door.
That’s not jade!
