At Down To Earth, we certainly wish we could invent a pill that would give people common sense. We would become millionaires and never have to work again. But wait, we love our work. Life would be boring without work. So, best just forget that pill and try instead to teach common sense.
What is common sense? We suppose there are as many definitions as there are people on the planet. At Down To Earth, when we say, “common sense,” what we mean is having an understanding of how the world that you live in works.
Implied is the notion that no two people live in the same “world.” All the people that live in the United States have the same government, but the people in Phoenix, AZ have a different governor than everyone in all the other states. All the people in Phoenix are exposed to the same weather, but the people who live on McDowell Road have different traffic than everyone else in the city. All the people on McDowell frequently have their street name spelled incorrectly, but the folks that live right by the joke shop have to deal with patrons that no one else on the street has to and no one but the guy who lives right in the middle of that block knows what it’s like to live with his wife and kids.
Because everyone is unique and lives in a unique world, there are very few universal rules to learn. Therefore, we can’t simply give people a set of instructions to follow to achieve common sense. Instead, we try to figure out what the rules are in our clients’ worlds and try to teach them to best live by those rules in order to succeed.
Sometimes our clients live in worlds that are very painful. Some of our clients are married to abusive alcoholics. Some work two jobs only to have all the money spent up by a gambling spouse. Some adult clients are still reliant on parents who resent the dependence. When we encounter clients who live in painful worlds, we do not try to convince them not to live in those worlds. There is some reason why they choose to do so. Or, perhaps they are a child who doesn’t yet have any control over his world. What we do instead is help a client discover what they would need to do in order to be successful in their own world. Often, they make the conclusion that it would be easier and more satisfying to reconstruct their world and if they make that choice, we can help them with that, too.
