Supercoach - Michael Neill [9]
What do you believe right now? Take a few moments to finish these “sentence starters” for yourself. You can do this in your head, but I strongly encourage you to jot down your answers in the space on the next page. That’s because they’re likely to have changed so radically by the time we’ve finished our time together that you won’t remember them later.
• Life is…
• I am…
• People are…
• Money is…
• The most important thing to know about happiness is…
Now, however you’ve finished those sentences —positive or negative, thought-through or impulsive, heartfelt or not—is simply an insight into how you currently see the world. Hopefully, you chose to answer honestly, knowing that no one but you need ever see your answers.
Look again at your answers. Do they feel “right” to you? Can you think of lots of evidence and examples to back them up?
The secret we’ll be exploring in this session underpins everything else we’ll be doing together, because it explains why we see what we see, hear what we hear, feel what we feel, and do what we do. It’s a secret that has been talked about in many eras and many traditions from around the world and is “secret” not because no one wants you to know it, but because it’s so difficult to talk about—like trying to explain the concept of water to a fish.
The secret is that we each live in our own separate reality. This isn’t some kind of an esoteric theory, but a physiological fact. Our brains filter information through the five senses, then make representations of that information inside our minds. We then experience these representations, first as thoughts and then as emotions. But as we represent the information in our minds, certain bits of the data are inevitably deleted, distorted, and generalized. And since we all delete, distort, and generalize that information slightly differently, we all have slightly (or sometimes completely) different perceptions of what is going on around us.
In other words, the way we think determines what we see, hear, and feel, regardless of what’s actually going on around us in the world. Or, to put it slightly differently, there’s what happens, and there’s what we think about what happens. And what makes this important is that the lion’s share of our decisions, feelings, and actions in life will be based on our thoughts, not the objective facts.
This is neither a new idea nor one associated with any particular field of study. In quantum physics, the uncertainty principle says that we can never study anything objectively because “the observer always influences the observed.” Psychologists talk about “the Pygmalion effect,” and linguists say, “The map is not the territory.” Shakespeare wrote that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” and the Bible says, “For as [a man] thinketh in his heart, so is he.”
Perhaps my favorite way of thinking about this secret comes from one of my early mentors, author and supercoach Serge Kahili King. He describes the principle of thought like this:
The world is what you think it is.
While at first glance this may seem like an innocuous idea, its implications are far-reaching. If the world is what you think it is, then life becomes one giant self-fulfilling prophecy. Your expectations create your experience, and if anything happens that confounds your expectations, you will most likely find a way of explaining it away or fitting it into your existing worldview. And any attempt you might make to “prove” your theories about the world objectively will never gain universal acceptance, because you’re creating that world through your thinking in one way, and other people are creating it through their thinking in another.
If this all seems much too heady for a book about having more happiness, ease, and success in your life, here’s a simple experiment to experience this phenomenon for yourself:
1. Get a piece of paper and a pen.
2. Now, take 30 seconds to look around you and