You feel like a pawn at work. What are your options? Do you stay and play the game, or is leaving your best option? Transform your emotions to find out.
Overview of The "Pawn" Metaphor
NOTE: The introduction is the same for each of the four intensities of the Pawn Metaphor. If you have already read it, you may want to click to skip.
You’ve just described yourself as a pawn, but what imagery comes to mind when you say that?
Four Emotion Intensities with Four Pawn Metaphor Images
- Are you in a battle, a war where somebody is sacrificing you, like in this extreme intensity video?
- Maybe you feel it’s more politics – like in the high intensity video, where the king crashes down, and all the pawns go flying – that you don’t really have any power; you don’t have a say.
- Maybe it’s more corporate, like in the medium intensity video – you feel like you’re a pawn in the workplace and don’t have a voice.
- Or maybe you feel like a pawn in this low intensity video: You’re making moves based on technology, based on the information you’re receiving, but in reality, technology has algorithms that are only giving you part of the story.
Emotions Awareness & Transformation™
Hello, my name is Karen, and this series grows out of my book, Emotion Commotion, and The EAT Program™. In these videos, I help you Locate, Describe & Transform™ the emotions that interfere with you making your best decisions.
Your emotions present as images and metaphors, so each week, I explore new imagery, always looking at it from four different intensities: extreme, high, medium, and low. This week, we’re working with the metaphor, feeling like a pawn.
You Feel Like A Pawn: Medium Intensity Emotions
For medium intensity emotions, I’ve chosen a corporate scenario, with a chessboard and a bunch of white men sitting around it, controlling the board.
Remember, we’re working with the metaphor being a pawn. You feel like a pawn, so you’re not one of those men controlling the board; you’re one of the pawns on the board being controlled by someone else.
Or are you?
If you look closely, this is AI generated, so those men sitting around the board are also being controlled: They are pawns in someone else’s game.
That can even tie in to the high intensity image, where the king comes crashing down, because the king on this board might actually be in control of the corporate AI people. Keeping with the political theme, it could mean that the head of politics is controlling corporate business and options.
Locate Your Pawn On The Chessboard
So where are you on this chessboard? I’m actually closest to the front, on the right hand side. I’m beside the left hand of the AI generated human that’s on the right.
And the placement? Me being able to intuitively put myself there gives me more information. It means I have easy access to leave. I’m at the left hand, not at somebody’s right hand. And if we link that to a common metaphor, “the right hand man” is somebody who’s very involved in decision making for that one person: It’s who that person would rely on the most.
I’m not anybody’s right hand person. I’m at the left hand there, and I can leave without strings attached.
Feel Like A Pawn? Transformation Example
So now, my question is, do I want to leave? Or is it healthiest emotionally for me to move myself more into the centre of the board, and take more space?
And that’s actually what I’m drawn to. I see me, the pawn, moving forward into the centre to stand immediately before the king, with no particular understanding, no logic to it. I just see me removing the king from the table.
With that transformation complete, I then imagine just wiping the board clean, including all of the AI people.
So I’m the pawn, standing in the centre of the chessboard, all by myself. Recognize that I have no idea what this transformation means yet; I just know that, working intuitively, that feels healthiest to me.
No More Feeling Like A Pawn: Understanding The Transformation
With that transformation complete, I now know what the meaning is, and the meaning for me is: start my own game board. I don’t need to play in the corporate world.
It’s still a game of chess – there are still moves and counter moves – but I’m going to look for new partners to play with. If I was in a corporate job, this transformation would tell me that I can stop being a pawn in that world, and that it would be a healthy choice for me to try a new direction.
LDT™: What's Your Game Plan?
I would have located this emotion in my gut, and described it as a tension that was developing because I felt like a pawn.
- Locate it in your body.
- Describe your emotions via an imagery, if it’s this imagery that works for you, or if it’s something you come up with on your own.
- Transform it so that you get your answer to how to stop being a pawn.
A Pawn: Closing
If you’ve described yourself as feeling like a pawn, then you’re not feeling healthy in the relationship that you’re in. So describe your imagery: Make it as detailed as possible. And as you start to transform your imagery, you’ll get a sense of what your real world step is that you can take to remove yourself from that powerless position.
I respectfully acknowledge that this video was recorded on the traditional territory of Mi’kmaq people.
For more information on transforming negative emotions with the Locate, Describe & Transform™ process, check out theEATprogram.com.