Supercoach - Michael Neill [16]
It’s hardly surprising at this point that the desire for safety might arise. And feeling safe and well is a wonderful thing. But that initial experience of danger is so profound that it can continue to be triggered throughout our lives, and we begin to crave “security”— the knowledge that not only are we safe now, but that we’ll always be safe. Whenever we feel unsafe, we seek to control our environment and particularly the people around us in order to return to safety. Now, some of these people will allow us to “control” them through the intensity of our feelings, especially if through our anger or sadness or fear, we’re able to stimulate their own insecurity and desire to be safe. But sooner or later we come to the realization that we can’t control everyone.
However, even if we can’t control people, we soon work out that we can still stay safe around them.
How?
Well, it turns out that if people approve of what we’re doing, they won’t hurt us (most of the time). So we learn to be “nice” and to do as we’re told so that “they” approve of us and we get to stay safe—at least for as long as they keep approving of us.
In doing so, we begin to develop a persona—an act—that will fool all those scary giants out there into believing that we’re actually the way they want us to be. The problem comes when we forget that it’s just an act—when we start to believe that we actually are who we’ve been pretending to be.
As a friend of mine once put it, we’re like diamonds who have spent so much time applying layer upon layer of nail polish to appear beautiful to the world that we begin to believe we must be covered in horse crap.
Most coaching—certainly at Level I and Level II—is focused on finding better ways to apply the nail polish. Most therapy is spent digging through the horse crap. But the “supercoach approach” is to look inside and discover the diamond within.
The Source of Well-being
People often live as though their experience of life takes place on a continuum ranging from misery to joy.
The game of life then becomes about figuring out how to spend more time at the happy end of the continuum and less time at the miserable end.
At one level of consciousness, this path toward greater happiness seems to be marked by having the right stuff—plenty of money, a good job, a great relationship, and a nice home. But we also recognize that there are any number of people who have all those things but are still pretty miserable inside themselves. So we begin to look more deeply and see that it’s not our stuff but our actions that make us happy or unhappy. Do the right thing and you feel good about yourself; do the wrong thing and your conscience will haunt you until the end of time.
The problem with this is that most of us have noticed that as often as not, good things happen to bad people, and bad things happen to good people. And although we may think that “doing the right thing” should be its own reward, life viewed from this level doesn’t seem remotely fair.
It’s thoughts like this that lead many people in a more internal direction in their pursuit of happiness and well-being, and we quickly see that, as we discussed in Session One, it’s not what happens but what we think about what happens that determines our experience. So we begin experimenting with things like affirmations and positive thinking, sure that if we could just control the flow of thoughts through our own brains, we’d have the key to lifelong happiness.
Alot of people get stuck at this level of understanding because of one simple, innocent mistake—they attribute their inability to think only positive thoughts to a lack of skill or effort on their part instead of recognizing that the theory itself is based on an incorrect premise: the idea that you can actually control which thoughts come into