Supercoach - Michael Neill [44]
“Do you?” I responded. “What would happen if you didn’t?”
“If I didn’t go to work, I’d lose my job!”
Ignoring the likely fallacy of that statement, I continued, “So you choose to go to work because you want to keep your job?”
“Fair enough,” he said, although he didn’t look happy about it. “But I have to eat! If I don’t eat, I’ll die!”
“Okay,” I replied. “So you choose to eat because you want to live?”
The reality is, every single thing you do or don’t do is a choice. And while personally I’m a big fan of making choices that lead to things like money and food, nowadays in most cultures you don’t even have to make those choices to survive. If you never got up from where you’re sitting right now, someone would eventually come to check on you, if only to find out what that extraordinary smell was. And at that point, if you continued to choose not to move or feed yourself, some other people (usually dressed in white, with friendly smiles and a lot of upperbody strength) would come by and scoop you up and give you new clothes to wear and a lovely padded room to live in. They would even feed you more than enough to stay alive, although admittedly the quality of that life would be somewhat less than what you’re probably accustomed to.
So the corollary to our secret (“You don’t have to do anything”) is this:
Everything that you do (or don’t do) is a choice.
Given that, why would anyone ever choose to do anything they didn’t want to do?
Two reasons:
1. Because they think it’s necessary in order to get or maintain something that they want
2. In order to live up to an idea of how they’re supposed to be in the world
In other words, we do what we do (and don’t do what we don’t do) either because we want to, because we think it’s a prerequisite for getting something else that we want (in other words, because we “have” to), or because we think it will make us into the kind of person we’re supposed to be (i.e., because we “should”).
Why?
The question “Why?” gets a bad name in some coaching circles because when it’s asked about anything that happened in the past, the answer is invariably a story filled with confabulations that could usefully be edited down to the phrase “Because it seemed like a good idea at the time.” But when we ask the question in the present about what we’re planning for the future, we quickly get an insight into our motivation.
If we hear a lot of “need to,” “have to,” and “must,” we may have fallen into the trap of thinking there’s something we have to do to survive. If there are lots of justifications and rationalizations, we’re probably doing things because we think they will reinforce our self- image or help us become the kind of person we “should” be. But when the answer is some variation on “Because I want to,” chances are that we’re following our inner wisdom.
The more quickly you can recognize the difference, the easier it will be to recognize each activity as a choice and, if you want to, choose something different.
The Strangest Discipline in the World
When I ask my clients what they think is really holding them back from living the life of their dreams, the most frequent answer I get is: “A lack of discipline.”
When I ask them which disciplines specifically they feel they’re lacking in, they tend to come back to me with some variations on these common themes:
• Thinking positive
• Taking daily action
• Doing the hard thing first
• Staying focused
• Feeling the fear and doing it anyway
While any one of the above is a worthy discipline, the practice of which will unquestionably make a positive difference to your pursuit of success, I’ve found that the discipline that makes the biggest difference is the strangest-sounding one of them all:
Being disciplined enough to not do what you don’t
want to do, even if everyone around you (and that
voice inside your head) is telling you that you should.
Now at first glance this may seem like an “anti-discipline