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When Being Right Softens, Clarity Appears

As the year closes and New Year's Eve approaches, a quieter question often emerges beneath the noise of resolutions and celebrations. It's not about achieving more or becoming better—it's more fundamental than that.

The question is this: Do I need to be right, or do I need to see more clearly?

This isn't a call to abandon conviction or doubt your judgement. Rather, it's an invitation to examine what drives our need for certainty, and whether that need is serving us—or simply protecting us from something we haven't yet acknowledged.

The Sacred Numbers: 6, 8, and 9

Six: The Caretaker
Care, responsibility, and the deep desire to protect what truly matters. Six holds the fort, maintains stability, and ensures nothing precious is lost.
Nine: The Sage
Perspective, completion, and the wisdom that comes from viewing the whole picture. Nine understands endings as necessary clearings for new beginnings.
Eight: The Integrator
Alignment, integration, and shared authority. Eight doesn’t choose sides—it expands the field so both truths can coexist and strengthen one another.

Across traditions and throughout history, these energies point towards maturity rather than ambition. They speak not of striving, but of settling into a deeper understanding of how life moves and what wisdom truly means.

The Protector Within: An IFS Perspective

From an Internal Family Systems (IFS) lens, the need to be right is rarely about ego or stubbornness. More often, it's a protector speaking—an internal part doing what it believes is necessary to keep you safe.

"If I hold this position, things won’t fall apart."

That's the voice of Six doing its job. Six protects through certainty, through maintaining boundaries, through the conviction that some things are worth defending at all costs. This isn't wrong—it's adaptive. It's how we've learnt to navigate complexity and uncertainty.

Understanding this changes everything. When we recognise that our rigidity comes from protection rather than pride, we can approach it with curiosity instead of judgement. We can ask: What is this part trying to protect me from?

The answer to that question opens pathways that battling our own resistance never could.

When Opposing Views Are Both Right

The Perspective of Six
Maintain what works. Protect against chaos. Hold the line because without boundaries, everything dissolves.
The Perspective of Nine
Release what’s complete. Trust the natural cycle. Let go because holding on prevents new growth.

Often, Six and Nine appear as opposing views—and from each perspective, both are entirely right. Six sees the necessity of preservation; Nine sees the necessity of release. Both are valid. Both are true.

The tension doesn't arise from disagreement. It emerges when we treat perspective as a competition, when we believe that for one view to be correct, the other must be wrong.

This either-or thinking creates paralysis. We become stuck between holding on and letting go, between protecting and trusting, between what we know and what we sense is emerging.

The Power of Eight: Shared Perspective

This is precisely where Eight becomes essential. Eight doesn't ask who's right—it asks a fundamentally different question:

What becomes visible when perspective is shared and expanded?

Eight operates from a place of integration. It recognises that opposing forces aren't enemies—they're complementary aspects of a larger truth. When we move into the energy of Eight, something remarkable happens:

Care Releases Control
Six’s protective impulse no longer needs to grip so tightly. Care can remain whilst rigidity softens.
Completion Loses Threat
Nine’s letting go no longer feels like loss or failure. Endings become natural transitions.
Opposition Reveals Unity
What seemed like conflicting views reveals itself as a stronger, more nuanced shared truth.

Eight doesn't dissolve the tension—it transforms it into creative energy. The pull between opposing forces becomes generative rather than destructive.

New Year’s Eve: A Threshold Moment

As we stand on New Year's Eve, we occupy a liminal space—neither fully in the year ending nor quite in the year beginning. It's a threshold, and thresholds have always been places of power and reflection.

This particular threshold offers us a profound opportunity to examine what we're carrying forward and what we're ready to release. Not through forceful resolution or ambitious goal-setting, but through gentle, honest inquiry.

What seeds are you planting now?
The intentions we set today become the attention we give tomorrow. What deserves your focus in 2026?
Is this a problem or an opportunity?
What you’re carrying forward—is it something to fix, or something to see differently?

These aren't merely rhetorical questions. They're invitations to shift from solving to seeing, from forcing to allowing, from the exhausting work of being right to the liberating practice of becoming clear.

When Perspectives Pull in Different Directions

Perhaps you're holding a problem, an opportunity, or a goal right now. Perhaps it feels like two or more perspectives are pulling you in different directions. One part of you wants to move forwards; another insists on staying put. One voice champions change; another defends the familiar.

This isn't confusion—it's complexity. And complexity doesn't resolve through choosing sides or forcing a winner. It resolves through integration.

The Pull of Protection (Six)
"Stay here. It‘s safe. Don’t risk what you’ve built. Protect what matters."
The Pull of Release (Nine)
"Let go. It‘s time. What served you then doesn’t serve you now. Trust the transition."
The Pull of Integration (Eight)
"Both are true. Hold space for paradox. What becomes possible when you honour both voices?"

When care (Six) and completion (Nine) are held within shared perspective (Eight), the power of the viewpoint itself begins to shine. We're no longer at war with ourselves. We're in dialogue.

Unlock Possibilities, Create the Eight

The Heart of the Practice

This is the essence of Unlock Possibilities and the thinking behind Create the Eight.

It's not about fixing yourself or forcing outcomes. It's about expanding your capacity to hold multiple truths simultaneously, to recognise protection as wisdom rather than obstacle, and to allow clarity to emerge naturally when we stop insisting on being right.

When we create space for Eight—for integration, for shared authority, for the wisdom that transcends either-or thinking—we discover that our most challenging dilemmas often contain our greatest possibilities.

Being Right vs Seeing Clearly

Protection Through Care

Being right can protect us from
uncertainty and loss

Wisdom Through Release

Letting go creates space for
new understanding

Power Through Integration

Seeing clearly transforms how
we hold complexity

Being right can protect us. Seeing clearly can transform us.

There's nothing wrong with the protective impulse. It's kept us safe, helped us navigate difficult situations, and allowed us to maintain our sense of self in challenging circumstances. The question isn't whether to abandon it—it's whether we're willing to expand beyond it.

Clarity doesn't demand that we surrender our convictions. It invites us to hold them more lightly, to remain curious about what we might not yet see, and to trust that truth is large enough to contain apparent contradictions.

As 2026 approaches, what would it mean to choose clarity over certainty, integration over insistence, shared perspective over solitary rightness?

Your Invitation Forward

If this exploration resonates with you—if you're holding tensions that feel impossible to resolve, if you're sensing that being right might be costing you something more valuable than winning—I invite you to reach out.

The work of integration isn't solitary. Sometimes we need a guide, a companion, someone who can hold the space whilst we learn to see differently.

When care and completion are held within shared perspective, transformation becomes not only possible but inevitable.

This is the threshold. This is the moment. What you plant now—in intention and attention—will shape everything that follows.

The question isn't what resolution you'll make or what goal you'll chase. The question is: What becomes possible when you stop needing to be right and start choosing to see clearly?