#8 What you don’t teach is what you teach best.

Optimization has always been a primary interest for me –  I can truly be obsessed with it. This is my thing.
Like so many of us, it probably started in my childhood.

Lately, because of COVID, I’ve preferred to be locked down at my parents’ peaceful home in the mountains than at my own apartment in Paris. It’s where I’ve been for a couple of months.
In their kitchen, they have several cupboards, much like you probably do.
They also have a big ancient oak armoire, an ideal piece of furniture to store, say, duvets or bedding, but that was too large to travel up or down the stairs or anywhere else in the house and thus found its place in the kitchen.

Next to the kitchen there is a small cellar, in which they store most of the dishes and food, including my stash of  biscuits, nocciolata and tea.
One night, in the middle of my stay, I couldn’t find my favorite biscuits in the cellar anymore. I looked everywhere, next to the peas that are next to the sugar, which is just beside the soap… (are you getting the picture?)
After 10 minutes of scouring the cellar, I ended up back in the kitchen, going through all the cupboards. I found other kinds of biscuits, ones that I didn’t even know were there, but was still unable to find my biscuits.
In desperation, I turned towards the oak armoire… and there they were, transferred to a new spot!

Why this transfer? Why now? Why are there 3 different places (at least that I know of) for biscuits? Why in this armoire? Why in between the stationery shelf and the glue shelf and the paint shelf?  
Am I really the only one in this house wondering all of this?

Later that day, while contemplating my Schrödinger’s biscuit experiment, I eventually decided to tell my mom about my discovery. I asked her, “why this extravagant phenomenon of random transfers?”

She exhaled, smiled, nodded, giggled, and left the room without a single word.
She knows me so well… She knew that it wasn’t just a loaded question.
I laughed.
To be fair, no other reaction could have been more right. I would not have been convinced in any way had she done otherwise; Her logic has never been mine, and mine has never been hers. We’ve both known that for decades now.
Over the years, I’ve realized that what we share is actually far more precious than any explanation and meaning: unconditional love and accepting.

Don’t change anything, Mom.

What used to make me cringe as a child and a teenager became a vibrant vocation.
Everywhere I put my eyes I see exactly and immediately how I can improve things. I’m definitely wired like this.
Triple-checking my client’s goals and refining them, and focusing on what their true quest is, are powerful skills I use in all my coaching to prevent them from wasting their energy, time, and money committing to not-so-accurate directions and to optimize their achievement.
I believe that SHE is the one who made me become that sharpened chaser of optimization and efficiency. She forged me and shaped me this way by exposing me every day of the first 20 years of my life, to her cute, eccentric and decidedly unoptimized way of doing things.
We can all be grateful for having been offered the best tuition-free MBA (Mom’s Baffling Aberration) ever!

It is upon you to use it constructively.
And it works the same for:

DBA –  Dad’s Baffling Aberration
SBA – Sibling’s Baffling Aberration
PBA – Partner’s Baffling Aberration
BBA – Boss’s Baffling Aberration
Anyone/Anything-you’ve-been-exposed-to-for-years  –  Baffling Aberration

ETC…

Like I said, who you are AND who you are not, is what you teach on the deepest level to the closest people around you.

Your Baffling Aberration is at work.
This is what you offer the most candidly.
It is your unwilling contribution that enables the ones around you to improve our world.