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How many of us tell lies? You know, the little white ones. “Oh Aunt Edna, you don’t look a day over 50. ” “Oh Aunt Bea, it looks like you lost some weight.” “Oh Uncle Harry, I love that tie you’re wearing, it makes you look so...” And on and on, but when do the little white lies become bigger. I don’t care, but if you tell the truth it is a better way to run your life I think. But who cares?
The hardest one is the one that counts: telling yourself the truth.
“Aha,” you say, “I always tell myself the truth.” Yeah, sure you do. We tell ourselves in the shower that today is the day I am going to lose some weight, and then lunch gets in the way. Today is the day I am going to quit smoking, and then a smoke break gets in the way with that smoking partner we have. Today is the day I am...and then what do we do?
We tell ourselves this and that, but do we do this and that? What happens when you tell yourself you are going to lose some weight and then don’t? What if one time you could tell yourself that you are going to quit smoking and then you did. That would be very powerful personally, don’t you think? When you tell yourself with one thought that you are going to be and do something and it happens, well sometimes it happens, and how does that make you feel? Great?
While that is not how it typically happens in your life, when you can say to yourself, “Self, this is what I am going to do” and then do it, it gives you personal power.
What it Takes To Make Change Happen
There is strength in being able to tell yourself one time that you are going to do something, and then actually doing it.
But for most of us, it takes repeatedly telling ourselves that we are going to do something before we can bring ourselves to action, if ever, and our present is that we are still the way we started and not the new way we want to be.
We tell ourselves, “I hate this job and I am going to quit,” and the next morning we get up and go to the job we hate.
We start to lose our personal power, because we don’t believe ourselves.
So we resolve to do, and we don’t.
We say we want to be a certain way and we have an idea of what we want, but we continue our same patterns, our same behaviors.
You see, we do want change but we don’t see ourselves as ready to make a change.
We want to choose something different, we want change, and then we don’t see ourselves as having the change agent to make it happen. So we go back to the job we hate and work another day.
I wish it were just as easy as saying to yourself, “Self, I am now going to do this and you do that.” We all know that it is a difficult thing, and if you don’t see yourself as the new thing you want, in a new job or whatever it is that you want, it doesn’t happen.
The only thing that we can change is today, right now. I don’t have to be typing this article, but if I don’t do it there will not be a newsletter for next week, and if there isn’t a newsletter for next week I can’t communicate to you. But I can change my present; I can think that I should be this or that. And what you think about today starts to be your future.
You think about losing weight, but you can’t stop eating, so you lose some respect for yourself. You say, damn I meant to do that, but this got in the way. We start to make excuses and rationalizations about why we didn’t change our behavior. We don’t see ourselves that way. We lose strength, because we can’t change. Well of course you can’t change, because you don’t see yourself as the future because you are stuck in the present.
My COO Victor Currie and I were walking down Beverly Drive here in Beverly Hills, and we were talking about a pen that cost $47,000 that went on sale in Las Vegas at the new Wynn hotel. Victor said he would never spend $47,000 on a pen since he just loses them, and anyone who spent $47,000 on a pen was crazy. I said that was his mental model and self-image talking, and someone wouldn’t have made the pen unless they thought there was a market.
Victor asked who would buy a 47,000 dollar pen, and then he looked at me and said, “Would you?” I said maybe, I never really thought about it, but until I saw the pen how would I know its value?
Victor pointed out how much could you do for the world with $47,000 instead of buying a pen. I said Victor, that is your model of the world and the values that you have. Not everyone has the same values, but we all want to put our values on everyone else, instead of realizing that what we really want is our personal power- and if we had all of our personal power, then we wouldn’t care if someone else had our exact same values or not.
So as we walked along he started to picture a different model, “Well maybe if I kept it at my desk, and could use it for signing $100 million deals, then I could see why someone would purchase a $47,000 pen.”
OK, what difference does it make whether someone buys a pen like that or not. Is it going to affect your life?
So our present becomes outside of us, instead of inside of us, and our personal power becomes how we can press the views that we have on other people, not what views we should be taking with ourselves. Trying to change someone else won’t help us change, but it feels better than trying to change ourselves- because changing ourselves is so hard, and telling someone what to believe, do or think is so easy.
Instead, take back your personal power and tell yourself the truth. If there is something that you want to change and don’t have the inner strength, don’t try to change it with a resolution. Start thinking about how your life would be if you looked like this, or that. See yourself differently instead of telling lies to yourself.
Try not telling others what they should think, but instead ask how broad you can think.
How can you avoid telling yourself lies? How can you work on being non-judgmental and open minded to give yourself options and opportunities in your future to see more?
How can you see your present as different? How do you define who you want to be, because what you think today is what you are going to be tomorrow.
How much personal power do you give away? Take it back...
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