| The
famous retailer J. C. Penney once said none of us need live a minute
longer as we are, because the Creator endowed us with the ability to
change ourselves. You
and I are the products of nature and nurture.
Nature is who you are, your entelechy, the seed within you. That part will never change; it will merely unfold.
Nurture is the term for what you experience and how your growth
is shaped by people and events. This part can change in many ways. In this article I’ll focus on nurture, on how you can guide
and groom and grow yourself in the ways that you want to grow. Nature
+ Nurture = Growth. Whatever
you lack in your essential nature can be augmented by acquiring the
resources and support to ill the gaps.
With that in mind, anything you want to achieve is probably
within your grasp. Somebody somewhere has the answers you need and the resources
you require for any goal you set. Part
of your strength lies in your background, the things you’ve known,
seen, done, heard, and experienced.
These are part of who you are.
Part
of your strength comes from the challenges you have accepted and
overcome. Part of your
strength comes from the coaching, support, encouragement, and strokes
you received from others. And
part of your strength still lies within others to whom you are
connected. Most
of us received advantages and disadvantages from our background. Review your early life and determine how it has affected your
life. What were the
advantages and disadvantages you were given:
genetic pluses and minuses, emotional support and guidance,
mentors, counselors, role models, learned attitudes, educational
opportunities, connections and contacts, and exposure to different
attitudes and cultures. Exercise:
If
you didn’t have your background you couldn’t be who you currently
are. What pluses have come from your negative experiences? By
linking stimulus and how you naturally respond you’ll discover some
old programs, some old response habits that may no longer be serving you
very well. In that case, make some new assumption; gather some new
beliefs that are more in line with your current desired life style. Managing
The Imprint Your Experiences Have Left On You You
are not the product of your background alone, but it does have an influence
on you. As Anthony Robbins
says, “Your past doesn’t equal your future.”
The happy news is that we can “manage” our background and
even change it intentionally. No,
we don’t erase what is there. We
simply add each new day’s experience to all our previous experiences
thereby changing the overall nature of our imprints. You
will always remember the significant events in your life.
But
the way you remember them and feel about them can be changed based on
how you choose to think about them. Exercise:
Make
a list of the influences that shaped you.
Note the people, events, experiences, feelings, and statements
that were impactful to you. Take some time and give serious thought.
Make the list as long as you like.
Good and bad. Important and trivial. If
it matters to you, it counts. Next,
look over your list and rank the strength of influence each person or
thing had on you. Note C
for moderate impact, B for significant impact and A Look
over the list. Notice the A
items. What would happen if
you changed the negative As into Cs?
You can you know. As
my friend W Mitchell says, “It’s not what happens to you that
counts. It’s how you
react to it.” He should
know. Despite
being horribly burned and greatly disfigured in one accident and
wheelchair bound by another, he is a cheerful, gracious, inspiring
professional Reframe
your experiences. Take the
worst items on your A, B and C lists and convert them into Ds; things
that have a minimal impact on you.
Easy for Actually,
you can change the past, or at least the way in which it influences you.
Sure, you’ll still have your emotional triggers or hot buttons
that set off an involuntary reaction in you.
But you can learn to manage these events by refocusing your
thoughts on what you want instead of what you fear or dislike.
You are not destined to become your Dad or Mom.
Nor are you Give
yourself credit for your successes.
Acknowledge how far you’ve come. Think of all the others who
never got as far as you. Recall
the obstacles Millions
of them can’t read. Millions
more can’t afford a book. And,
tragically, of all those who can read and buy a book, millions don’t
choose to. They
don’t take time to enrich their minds and try to enhance the world. So give yourself some credit for being on the right path.
Your
background is a storehouse of information from which to learn, not a
burden you must drag through each day.
Study your successes, learn from your failures.
Let your past stay in the past.
The future you see defines the person you’ll be. What
stimulates us to respond a certain way?
Everything we do is stimulated by some basic human need.
Everything we do comes down to a need that wants to be satisfied.
The need is then transformed into a behavior by our beliefs and
our assumptions. There are
four basic human needs: 1) survival and safety, 2) love and belonging,
3) significance and self respect, and 4) growth and becoming. The
best known research on this model was done by Dr. Abraham Maslow, a
psychologist and author who studied psychology with an emphasis on the
personality of the “self-actualized” person.
His book, Motivation and Personality, is a classic.
My model here is a simplified version of his concept. Everything
you do ultimately comes from one of those four levels of need. More
specifically, our behavior stems from the lowest level of
dissatisfaction. Think of it this way: Put each of those four levels on
a ladder with survival at the bottom and growth at the top.
As one need is met we progress to the next level.
For
instance, if you’ve just been told that you will be laid off from your
job in two weeks, you might respond by focusing all your concerns on
survival. That’s
natural. You’ll worry
about how to pay the rent or provide for the kid’s education.
Your need for safety might lead you to take the first offer of a
job so all those things the rent, the food, the education will remain
safe. Even
if you know the new job isn’t right for you, you’ll look to satisfy
your need to survive first, before any other considerations. Once you’re sure you’ll survive and be safe, you can
notice the need for belonging and love, the need to connect with other
people. You move up a rung
on the ladder. When
your need for love and belonging are not yet satisfied, all your
behavior will be focused on ensuring those needs are filled.
When the need for love and belonging is met, you feel the need to
make your mark in the world, to be significant.
The view from the third rung sure is different from the prior
two! Significance
and self-respect are esteem needs.
Maslow splits esteem into two categories.
One kind of esteem is the desire for achievement, for mastery and
competence, for confidence to face the world and for independence and
freedom. The
other side of esteem is the desire for reputation or prestige, status,
fame, recognition, attention, dignity or appreciation.
When you satisfy the need for esteem, you feel self-confident,
adequate, useful and necessary in the world.
At this level you may even be willing to risk safety or
relationships to attain your goals.
But not for long. Maslow
says that you will become restless and discontent until you do what you
were meant to do. In
Motivation and Personality he writes, “A musician must make music, a
builder must build, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to
be ultimately at peace with himself.
What a man can be, he must be.” How
do you express who you really are? Where are you on the ladder today? At different times in your life, you will be on different
rungs. Situations can take
us down a rung or two even while we strive to be on another. In an effort to achieve some goal in your career, you may all
of a sudden be threatened by a fire or disaster and be yanked back to
the safety and survival level in an instant.
The situations change constantly. The
more you know about your placement on the ladder, the more accurate your
assumptions and beliefs will be. To
expand your awareness and ultimately guide your behavior, start asking
yourself, Where did I get that idea, and do I want to keep it?
Is that idea serving me well?
Your beliefs don’t have to control you; you can learn to
control them. You can learn
from your own experience by expanding your self-awareness and studying
your background. Another
way to control your beliefs is to control your behavior first. Dale Carnegie said, “It’s easier to act yourself into
good thinking than it is to think yourself into good action.”
Just thinking about it won’t make it happen. |
