Supercoach - Michael Neill [20]
The student was confused.
“But if you can’t make a difference with your ideas, why do you teach at all?”
The teacher smiled.
“Why does a bird sing?”
How to Get What You Want
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
— Peter Drucker
Let’s begin our time together in this session by taking a quick look at the three main ways people have learned to go for and get what they want . . .
1. Acquisition
The school of acquisition has been the dominant one in Western culture for many years, and its teachings can be summed up in a sentence:
If you want it, go and get it!
From the ancient Mongol hordes to the modern titans of business and industry, our society tends to reward and hold up as heroes those men and women who have gone after what they wanted with enthusiasm and passion. (If they happened to trample a few people on the way to the top . . . well, it’s unfortunate, of course, but those are just the casualties of war.)
In the acquisition model of the world, the stuff of life is out there somewhere, and your job is to go and get it. Acquisition-based thinkers often see life as a case of the “haves” versus the “have-nots,” and shift between the roles of hero and victim in a “dog eat dog” world.
On the plus side, graduates of the school of acquisition have helped create ancient and modern empires and contributed to tremendous advances in science, medicine, and business; on the down side, they have also contributed to a world culture where the strong tend to look down on the weak and wonder why they don’t just get off their lazy behinds, try harder, and “go and get it” for themselves.
2. Attraction
While the school of acquisition has been in full session for the past 2,500 years or so, the school of attraction has been quietly holding classes in hidden caves and New Thought churches, its teachings disseminated through secret texts, biblical parables, and New Age gurus.
The school of attraction teaches:
Like attracts like.
Thoughts become things.
and
You become what you think about.
These “secret” teachings and principles of attraction were often suppressed by the ruling elite, or so the story goes, because they placed the power within each individual, although the true source of that power is often attributed to God or a benevolent vibratory universe.
Many of the great men and women throughout history, from ancient religious icons to Renaissance men like Leonardo da Vinci and Sir Isaac Newton, are known to have studied the ancient texts of the school of attraction.
So now that this “secret” teaching is no longer a secret, why isn’t everybody living the life of their dreams?
A woman who wanted to hire me as her coach told me that she had been deeply inspired by what she had been reading about the law of attraction. She had already applied these teachings to attract a new job, a great apartment, and a boyfriend who, in her words, “actually seems to really like me.”
When I asked her what she hoped to get out of our work together, she was quiet for a few moments before somewhat shyly telling me, “I’m terrified that it will stop working, and I’ll go back to being miserable and alone.”
Here’s the problem with the law of attraction:
People are attempting to use the principles of
attraction as a new set of tools for acquisition.
Instead of actually shifting the basis of their approach to life to one of planting seeds of kindness, beauty, and love and reaping the harvest of a bountiful life, people are attempting to get a better parking space (or indeed a better car, boyfriend, or bank balance) by “thinking the right thoughts.”
The source of the problem lies in the reason people want the car, boyfriend, or bank balance in the first place—because they believe having what they want will “make” them happy. But a closer look at the teachings of the school of attraction reveals that it works the other way around: it is the energy of happiness that attracts