The Five Levels of (BDSM) Leadership

[Tojo]

I dunno about this level business- this is a relationship between two people, not a corporate management rating system.

Herein lays the problem: I assumed that because I had been a level five vanilla husband, I surely must automatically be a level five Top, Dom and Master, Right? Guess what I figured out--It don't work that way!

Now that bit I agree with- being a Dom is a whole different kettle of fish. However, wanting to be a good Dom is a darn good first step.

[Mr.FixIt]

I dunno about this level business- this is a relationship between two people, not a corporate management rating system.

Tojo, I've seen you around the threads, and I have a considerable amount of respect for the way in which you conduct yourself here--and I agree with most of what I've seen from you.

Please allow me to clarify. I am extremely successful in my current occupation, and I have been ever since my military service. I have always been dominant in every aspect of my life other than in my personal relationships, and I contribute my success to my natural dominance. But it's like I have always hung up my dominant hat when I get home from work, and I can't help but make the correlation between my dominance and success at work and my weaknesses and failures due to my submission at home.

Covey's concept of levels of leadership have helped me to understand more clearly how I am personally doing at work, and helped me to personally define my future courses of action to improve my own performance, and further helped me to have personal clarity in how I can improve the performance of those who report to me. Covey's concept is not a means of defining a "corporate management rating system", but rather, is a means of determining personal evaluation and consequently determining a means of personal improvement. No corporate management official is counseling me on what level of leadership I am on, It's an entirely introspective concept. If it works for me in my occupational leadership, why couldn't this introspective system work just as well at home? I just need to stop hanging up my Dom hat at the door when I get home and apply the lessons that I have learned through my personal successes and failures to this present matter!!!!! This is a problem that has plagued me since my first marriage, and is a problem that I have resolved to concur.

"History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is." ~ R. G. Collingwood

[Tojo]

Anyone who agrees with everything I say needs to start looking for a good therapist IMO!

Poor choice of words, my "corporate management rating system"

My point is simply that a relationship is about feelings, not knowing things.

I've spent many years studying human behaviour, & how people relate to each other- it fascinates the heck out of me. I've had people talk to me about their marriages before I kissed my first girl.

One of the things that comes up time & time again, is that people tend to think too much, & feel too little.

A D/s relationship to me is more intense than a marriage. One of my favourite tools is to just stop & let her notice how she's feeling. That's primarily what D/s is to me- a meeting of the souls on a higher plane than otherwise obtainable. It's not about 'doing' but feeling.

There's no right or wrong in this, there's no rules- but for me personally, I believe that thinking gets in the way of feeling.

I say forget everything, think of nothing, & just be with your sub. Really be with her like you've never been with anyone. See what happens, & start with a clean slate.