Supercoach - Michael Neill [13]
for example, _____.”
Here’s an example:
Make-believe: “The more I am attracted to others, the more attractive I will be to them.”
• “I know this is true for me because I am always more attracted to people when they’re ‘lit from within’; for example, the way that girl looked so beautiful when she smiled at her boyfriend at the restaurant the other day.”
c. Act as if it’s true. Ask yourself: “If I knew [the new make-believe], what would I do to get what I wanted?”
For example:
• “If I knew that learning to sell would make me a more spiritual person, what would I do to become the top-performing salesperson at my company?”
• “If I knew that I was a great catch, what would I do to find the perfect person for me?”
4. When you’ve come up with a list of actions, choose at least one to take in the next 24 hours.
No Complaints
Since complaining is the opposite of creation, one task I often give my clients when we first start working together is to put them on a “complaint fast”—that is, I ask them to go a day or a week or a month deliberately not complaining (out loud!) about anything.
That’s not to say that if they order pizza for lunch and the waiter brings them a hamburger, they shouldn’t send it back. It just means that they don’t follow that up with a list of complaints to the waiter, their friends, the manager of the restaurant, and the editorial page of the local paper about what an awful place the world has become when decent hardworking folk can’t even get a slice of pizza without having to deal with gross incompetence and a possible case of criminal negligence!
To create a “complaint fast” for yourself, resolve to go one week without complaining. If you complain even once during that week (and you almost certainly will), begin again with day one.
It took me the better part of a year to complete the experiment for the first time myself, but the resulting change is incredibly worthwhile!
From Victim to Creator
Have you ever been in a stressful situation? Seen a powerful movie? Read a sad novel or an inspiring book?
I can guarantee that you haven’t, because each one of those qualities—stress, power, sadness, and inspiration— are actually inside you, not part of the event you’re attributing them to. You’re the one experiencing the stress, power, sadness, and inspiration; and in fact, biochemically speaking, you’re even the one creating them.
Why does this matter?
Because when you act as if your experience is created from
the outside in, you will experience yourself as a victim.
The minute you take responsibility for creating your
experience from the inside out, you reclaim your
position as the creator of your life.
Here’s an example from one of my clients, a property developer I’ll call Fred for the purposes of this illustration.
Fred was what I call a “successful victim.” He had all sorts of wonderful things in his life, but because he had no idea that he was creating his own experience, he lived in constant fear of everything being taken away from him. Although he made a lot of money by most people’s standards, he never felt that he had enough.
When I asked him to tell me some of his thoughts about money, he explained with great seriousness, “Making money is hard, managing money is stressful, and losing money would be terrifying.” His goal for our coaching was for me to help him make a lot more money so he wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore.
I shared the inside-out distinction with him and asked him to rephrase his statements, this time taking responsibility for his experience of money.
Here’s what he came up with:
• “I find it hard to make money.”
• “I find it stressful to manage money.”
• “I find the thought of losing money terrifying.”
Just for fun, I asked him to take it a step further and to truly think of himself as the creator of his experience. In addition, I pointed out that just as our thoughts are always changing, our experience of things is rarely constant, although we often describe it as if it were.
Here was his third iteration:
• “I often create