Another fear is the fear of success. What is the fear of success? It is the fear that you are going to get what you want.
And now you feel that you don’t deserve the success that you are achieving and you fear that you will now have to continue your success, worrying if you will really be able to do it.
Now you have added responsibilities and people think of you as successful, people think of you as someone that “has it.” What if they find out we are just imposters?! And oh my God, what happens if someone finds out who we really are. What if someone finds out our secrets and then our secrets are exposed and people see that we are not worthy. We are afraid of being just ordinary people like them.
Do you feel that you deserve success? Or are you functioning below your capacity. Are we sometimes sabotaging ourselves and are we going all the way to make sure that we never reach the goals that we want? It is anti-goal time- we know what we want and we make sure that we sabotage every goal that we want so we don’t have to be successful in life.
Experience, it seems, can be a cruel teacher. What about the parents and teachers who unwittingly say something that they don’t really mean, and then that sticks with us and we feel that we are not worthy.
How about those same parents and teachers that say unkind things that they do mean, and then that sticks with us forever.
I know we are supposed to get over it as we grow older, but we don’t. My sister would say, “Buck up.”
But it is not that easy. We have been living with this image that someone else has given us. And we have burned this image of ourselves deep into our subconscious mind. Someone who we have decided has power and knowledge, and knows the all-persuasive answer, has told us that we are this or that.
And then we tell ourselves over and over again that “this person who was someone in authority said this about me and it must be true”. So if something was said that wasn’t complementary we show this picture to our subconscious mind in living color and think that if they said that about us, then it must be true.
Our experience, including what other people say that we believe could be true, decides what mental models of the world we have; how we see the world in our eyes, and how we decide what is real or not, what is true, and what is not.
What we gather from all of our senses and how we feel about the world around us determines what we believe in our self-image, and how our self-talk is generated. Experience is not just limited to our outside view of our senses, but also how we feel inside. That is also going to generate our self-talk, and is going to generate our self-image and determine our self-esteem.
Vince Lombardi, the famous Green Bay Packers coach for whom the Superbowl trophy is named, was quoted as saying “Winning isn’t everything, it is the only thing.” Coach Lombardi was also quoted as saying, “I wish I had never said it. What I meant was that winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing worth striving for. Or winning isn’t everything, but making the effort to win is.”
According to David Maraniss, who wrote the book “When Pride Still Mattered,” the coach’s philosophy was very fixed and there was no winning at any cost for the coach. There was no cheating, no interest in winning the wrong way, without heart, brains or sportsmanship. There was no dirty play, and there were no cheap shots.
Yet in many of my experiences growing up in the sales profession, more than one sales manager quoted Vince Lombardi as saying, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” more than once. This phrase has certainly been taken out of context and has been applied with no heart or love, forgiveness, or understanding.
Yet the coach once started a locker room speech by asking, “What is the meaning of love?” The coach went on to say that anybody can love something that is beautiful or smart, but you will never know love until you can love something that isn’t beautiful, isn’t bright, isn’t glamorous. It takes a special person to love something unattractive, someone unknown. That is the test of love. Everybody can love someone’s strengths and somebody’s good looks. But can you accept someone for his or her inability?
What happens when someone cheats to win, and nobody finds out about it? Is that winning? Major league sports have been plagued with people on steroids and other ways that cheat the system and invalidate the past records and scores.
They would pump up sales and cheat people to do this record-breaking. They would cry, “Win at all costs.” Great men have done it. But have great men really won at all costs? I don’t think in the end they have won.
So experience teaches us the good and the bad, the truths and the falsehoods of our experience, right from wrong?
Yes, and no. Because if our experience is that of wrongdoing framed in a picture that says it is right, then we can’t follow a path that may be right for us because we don’t know what that path is.
And you say “What do you mean I don’t know the truth? Of course I do.” You lie to yourself.
I feel I must beg to differ. If you don’t know what is right or wrong, up or down, then how do you distinguish your truth?
Suicide bombers take innocent lives, and they say they are correct in doing that. Their religious belief accepts this as an action that is good for their God. They are at the highest level when taking their own lives and the lives of others that may be children and have no idea of life, or of the good and the bad, as in their minds they are the innocents.
How about people who prey on the young or the old and swindle their money or take away their lives. The swindlers live off of the people that are innocent.
There is injustice in the world, and that may take a while to overcome. The truth may change slowly for civilization, or we may never get to where it is we want to be. I don’t know. No one knows the final outcome of the human race and what the final truth will be until we get there and find out if good does finally triumph over evil.
Experience gives us a marker that we use to move our actions forward as well as our thoughts on how we move forward in our thinking of what the truth and what our lives should be. Success Philosopher or suicide bomber? I pick Success Philosopher.
Experience determines what our mental model of the world is going to be- our intimate experiences and our experiences of the world as we see and hear it in our own world.
In Plato’s cave we are all tied down to the back of the cave, and we see only the shadows in front of us. To us the shadows are real, because we know nothing else. One day one of us is freed, and he sticks his head out of the cave and sees a bright and beautiful world. He is so excited; his mental model has changed and he sees the world differently, so he goes back to the cave to try to explain this to all that are still in there.
The people around you are not trusting. They have seen the shadows all of their lives, and they are comfortable with the lives that they have. They know no other.
Why change now? This is what we have always known, and we are comfortable with the world as it is now.
And change they don’t, and so the lone person leaves the cave, and starts a new life, and finds another tribe of people that live out in this new nature that he has discovered. He finds a mate and has a family in this new environment, and as his family grows, they want to know about who they come from.
So the man takes his family back to the cave and they see their relatives, and the relatives don’t want anything to do with the people from “outside”.
In sadness they leave the cave and go on to live in a beautiful world, with light and sun, trees and flowers, love and warmth.
They live in a world that is not as predictable as the cave, but they feel the life course through their veins.
The two worlds are different, and will never be reconciled, and they exist together.
Experience allows us to select what we want to know, and we create beliefs and shape actions based on our experience.
Experience can teach us much, or it can keep us from doing, being, understanding our life and opportunities, developing understanding of ourselves. It can stop us from gaining or enjoying much in life.
What does experience teach us, and what we are willing to accept and explore?
Experience also may teach us things that evolve in our life. Bloodletting was a practice used by doctors for several centuries. They would take leaches and put them on the body to suck the bad blood out. Now this was done by the most educated in society- the doctors of medicine, the ones that could read and write and who dominated the society of their time.
In 1899, Mr. Charles Duell, the commissioner of the US Office of Patents, declared that everything that could be invented has been invented. We need to close this office down and save the taxpayers some money. Mr. Duell, I appreciate the fact that you want to save me money as a taxpayer, but you couldn’t have been more wrong.
Experience gives us the next building block for our future.
Experience can help us understand, and comprehend facts that will give us meanings to interpret, or even reinterpret our truths and realizations of what is good for us. For example, I don’t think anyone in the medical field today would be practicing bloodletting, and I am not sure a patient today would let them practice that on their body.
Through experience we develop and have growth over time, and we can unfold a plan to grow wisdom, develop personal qualities in ourselves, and discover unexpected potential to evolve to a more perfect life condition. We can do this as we gain education, which is discovering and acquiring knowledge, skill, and competence over our minds and bodies.
In our experience we can gain the good or the bad thoughts that will dominate our future. Only by examining our experience can we grow to a more perfect state. Is it easy, but will you get it right? Do you just use other people’s experiences and transfer that to yourself? Or will you examine your experiences and continue to have different experiences so that when you leave this world you will have stepped out of the cave and will have experienced the light outside?
You are unique in your own experience, and you can certainly use others’ experience to guide you, but you want to examine with your own mind if it is true and works for you.
It is like modeling yourself after somebody else. You can take some of a mentor’s experience and use that experience to help you move forward in your life, but to just model yourself after somebody else without making your experience and knowledge work for you makes you a clone, instead of having an adventure of your own.
I have heard people say, “I wish I could be just like so and so.” Why would you like to be just like so and so? Do you see them as being successful in something that you would like to do? And I must share with you that the people that make it big are thinking about how they can make something different from previous experience, how they can add value, how they can create a new adventure in life, and not just copy an old experience. What are you doing with your experience? Are you using it to move you forward and explore new options, or are you using your experience to stay in your place?
What does experience teach us? That we need to move forward in our experiences and understand that if we have unique experiences in our life, that is the adventure that we can have.
Our experience teaches us some things, but next how we use our imagination in combination will push us forward to have more of what we want in life.
