Supercoach - Michael Neill [36]
All was well until one beautiful summer’s day when the king began sweating in his heavy royal garb. “What freedom and power the sun has,” he thought. “It can float through the sky and call forth water from a king. That is what I would truly like to be.”
As the thought appeared in his mind, the angel appeared to grant it.
Now the king had become the sun, and he reveled in his freedom and power as he floated high above the earth. But after a time, a cloud appeared and blocked the land from his view. When he watched the lightning burst forth from the cloud and heard the roar of the thunder, he knew that he was witnessing true freedom and power. Before he even realized what was happening, the angel had transformed him into a cloud.
What fun it was to pour rain forth upon the land! Wherever the man-cloud went, forests were washed away, and puddles became oceans in his wake. But no matter how hard he tried, there was one huge mountain made of stone that stood immovable and unaffected by his rain.
“Surely that is the ultimate power,” he thought. “To stand tall in the face of any circumstance—that is true freedom and power.”
In an instant, the angel had made it so, and the man could feel the incredible power of being an immovable object in the midst of any storm. Yet even as he was delighting in his immense strength and resilience, he could see a small man chipping away at his base with a pick and a chisel and a hammer.
“That man is even more powerful than I,” he thought. “See how he is able to take stone away from me with just a few blows of his mighty tools. That is the kind of freedom and power I have always longed for.”
The angel appeared and once again spoke the words “You are what you have said.”
And with those words, the older but wiser stonecutter continued on his journey.
A Simple Model of Emotions
Imagine this scenario:
You’ve had a really terrible day. You’re tired and hungry and are torn between thinking about a problem that came up just before you left the office and the argument you know is looming with your partner about what happened last night.
Suddenly, a small child comes up to you and just looks at you.
How do you respond? What do you do?
Now shake that thought right out of your head and imagine this:
You’ve had a really wonderful day. Work went well, and you’re on the verge of a breakthrough with one of your most important clients. Soon you’ll be meeting up with the love of your life for a romantic candlelit dinner and more.
Suddenly, a small child comes up to you and just looks at you.
How do you respond? What do you do?
While most people have completely different reactions to the child in each scenario, what really fascinates me is how nearly everyone who participates in this “thought experiment” is able to think themselves into a higher or lower mood in a matter of seconds.
The reason for this is because you’re using the same skills an actor uses to create emotion and every one of us uses to create our emotional experience of life: the power of imagination and thought.
Here’s our fifth secret, the secret of emotional well-being:
Every emotion you experience is a direct response
to a thought, not to the world around you.
The more clearly you see that your emotions are always reactions to your thoughts, not to the world, the easier it is to simply feel them and let them go. And the gift of that insight is that you stop needing to change the world in order to change the way you feel.
There’s No Such Thing as a “Bad Day”
“We should be graceful with our low
moods and grateful for our high ones.”
— Richard Carlson
In Beth Henley’s award-winning comedy Crimes of the Heart, three women reunite at their old family home to deal with the troubles in their lives, ranging from their mother’s suicide to the youngest daughter’s attempted murder of her wealthy fiancé. In the end, they draw the conclusion that both the suicide and the attempted murder stemmed from the women in question having “a really, really bad day.”
When