Supercoach - Michael Neill [18]
be, or have in order to be happy.
The reason why this understanding of the source of well-being is so significant is that so much of our energy and time is squandered in pursuing goals and projects and financial incentives and relationships that we believe will “make” us happy. And so much of the stress and strain we experience in our lives is brought on by our misguided attempt to make ourselves feel better by having, doing, or achieving the right things.
Simply put, what we attribute our good feelings to will determine what we do and where we go to get more of them:
• If I think my well- being comes from being around a particular person, I’ll do all sorts of things I wouldn’t otherwise do and put up with things I wouldn’t otherwise put up with in order to keep that person around.
• If I think my well-being comes from my work or my income, then I’ll overinvest in that job and even be willing to betray what I believe in to preserve or enhance it.
• If I think my well-being comes from a food or drug, I’ll do whatever it takes to get hold of that food or drug the next time I’m feeling in need of another “hit” of good feelings.
Because of the principle of the self-fulfilling prophecy, whatever I believe will continue to appear to be true. The world is what we think it is, and when we tell ourselves that any of these things will make us happier, they will— at least for a time.
But when you begin to understand that well-being is your nature, not a goal to be pursued, you’ll quickly realize that all you have to do to get it back is to turn your attention from the outside in.
Do You Really Need to Work on Your Self-Esteem?
Jeremy had joined a multilevel marketing company and hired me to help him boost his self-esteem. He’d heard a motivational speaker talking about the importance of self-image and self-worth in creating success and had decided that what was holding him back was his low opinion of himself.
In our first session together, I asked him how he knew that low self-esteem was what was holding him back. He looked shocked.
“Don’t you need high self-esteem to succeed?”
Having worked with some of the most successful people in Hollywood, the majority of whom had the self-esteem of a gnat, I knew that most of what people call “self”-esteem is actually based on how things appear to be going in their lives, and goes up and down on a daily basis.
I then told Jeremy the story of when my son Oliver, age six, was first learning to play baseball. A few weeks into the season, he came to me and said, “Daddy, I want to quit—I don’t want to play anymore.” When I asked him why he wanted to quit, he shocked me by saying, “Because I’m crap at baseball.”
Now, if I’d really thought that self-image and self-esteem were the keys to success, I would have given him the “Go get ’em, tiger” speech. I would have talked to him about how he needed to “believe to achieve” and “whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.”
But when he said to me, “I’m crap at baseball,” I said to him, “Yes, you are. But here’s the question: do you want to get good at it?”
Well, his little eyes lit up. It had never occurred to him that being good at baseball was something you could learn, not something you were born able to do. I said to him, “Here’s how we do it. Every day you’re gonna throw me 50 throws and I’m going to throw you 50, and we’re going to take 50 swings, and I guarantee within a month you’re going to be pretty good at this.”
And we did, and he was, and strangely enough, he started liking it a whole lot more as well.
The reason self-image is so important, or so the experts tell us, is that we’ll inevitably live up or down to our self-image—that is, we’ll become more and more like the person we think (or are afraid) we really are. So if someone believes or “sees themselves” as shy, they’ll tend to behave shyly; if they see themselves as confident, they’ll tend to behave in a more confident manner.
This leads to a host of Level I and Level II interventions. At Level I, we use our physiology to create