Facilitating my agenda

I've been noticing how helpful I find it when people help me by facilitating my working through my own agenda. Too often what I experience instead is how frustrating it can be when, although someone is obviously trying to be of help to me, I mostly just feel imposed upon by their agenda. Sometimes the other person's agenda is just about what happens to be going on in the other person's head, but other times it is about imposing their worldview as to how things are or should be in their opinion. I can find the latter especially frustrating.

I've given this a fair amount of thought in terms of when I'm talking with people, because I feel like the easiest way for me to think through things is by talking. I've even devised a format for people to take turns having others help them work through their own agendas:

http://meaningfulaction.org/ScriptForHoldingTheSpaceSessions.pdf

A different area in which I hadn't given this much thought is with getting help with organizing all my papers. This came up the other day when a friend of mine was telling me about how he now has people to help him with organizing that he works well with. He was telling me a story about how he was able to explain to his significant other how he would like to be helped by using an analogy of what if it was him helping her, when I realized that what it boiled down to for me was how helpful it was to him that he was able to get her to facilitate his organizing agenda.

This has made it clearer for me what the common denominator has been in what helps me in many different areas where people are trying to help me: writing, organizing, moving, talking through things, deciding what to do with myself, etc. When people are helping me explore the thoughts I want to explore, make progress on the things I'm eager to do, and stay focused on what I think is important, it makes a world of difference.