The Achievement Habit (19 page)

In the Stanford d.school we attempt to bring students through a series of experiences that change their self-image so that they think of themselves as being more creative. We call this boosting their
creative confidence
.
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Michael Jensen, Werner Erhard, and their associates use a similar concept in leadership training; they call it “changing the context.” Others call these types of changes “reframing” or “changing frameworks.” Whatever it is called, the psychological milieu in which we operate is important because it acts as a hidden arbitrator in how we approach many aspects of our lives. The Your Turn exercises in this chapter are designed to assist in exploring and expanding the bounds of your self-image.

One way to look at your self-image is to make a list of your attributes. This can be done by again answering the question “Who am I?” In order to gain deeper insight, however, this time you will look at who you are in a way that contrasts the “being” part of your self-image to the parts involving your possessions and your activities. As suggested in the “Use Your Brain” section at the end of chapter 1, each question should be repeated for at least five or ten minutes. If you have someone available to work with, you can take turns where one person repeatedly asks the same question and the other person answers. Of course, if there are two people, the questions need to be rephrased: “Who are you?”

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Who am I in terms of what I have?

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Who am I in terms of what I do?

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Who am I in terms of my being?

This exercise gives you a chance to stop the daily chatter in your head and to look separately at what you have, what you do, and who you are. It gives you an opportunity to dig deep and see how your life is stacking up compared to your self-image. It can give you a midcourse correction or reaffirm that you are sailing in the desired direction.

People often confuse who they are with their possessions, their achievements, or their jobs. The parsing of the question into three parts thus helps them to gain clarity. Every time I do this exercise, I am reminded it is more subtle than it first appears. For example, in terms of what I have, I could say a wife, two sons, a professorship, a house, friends, students and former students, several bicycles, a newly completed book manuscript, and hundreds of research papers. In terms of what I do I might
come up with husbanding, parenting, teaching and research, household tasks, socializing, mentoring and relating, cycling, driving, writing, and publishing. The two lists are more or less identical.

None of this informs who I am in terms of my being. Or does it?

Much depends on how I relate to these things. Teaching, for example, is for some people a thing they
have
; the teaching job is their proudest possession. I remember how astounded I was when I accompanied one of my professors to pick up his dry cleaning and the clerk addressed him as “doctor” and later also as “professor.” This was at some mom-and-pop establishment in Flushing, New York, ten miles—and light-years—away from Columbia University. This is common in Europe, yet it seemed comically out of place in the context of a working-class neighborhood in New York City. It actually reinforced my sense that the poor fellow was using his job to hide who he really was.

To some people, teaching is something they
do
. It is a job, pure and simple. That job is like any other job to them: they go to work, put in their time, and get paid; the job is purely instrumental. They work to have money to pay rent, feed their family, and subscribe to cable television.

Other people are born to teach. If they did not have teaching jobs they would still be teachers. It is their calling, an intimate part of their being. I remember reading in one of Henry Miller’s early books that he and all of his friends knew he was a writer even though, at the time, he was working as a messenger and had not yet published anything.

So, depending on how I hold it, teaching could be something I have, or something I do, or part of my very being. The same is true for many things in people’s lives. There is no right answer as
to what category something belongs in. It all depends on you. It is important, however, to know the difference, and not to confuse what you have or what you do with who you are. Knowing this increases your chances of forming a valid self-image.

Some people’s self-image totally identifies them with their origins. One such person is my good friend Bruno. More than most people’s, Bruno’s life is punctuated by adventures, which in turn are fueled by his rock-solid self-image of being a Neapolitan alpha male. This became clear to me many years ago during a conference in Linz, Austria. Several of us had gone to a disco after dinner. There were some local women sitting next to us, and Bruno asked one of them to dance. She declined, and Bruno could not believe it. He exclaimed loudly, “But I am Italian. I am from Naples!”

He did not give up but kept asking her to dance, and she steadfastly refused in spite of what he thought to be his impeccable credentials. Soon he switched tactics and started engaging her in conversation. I lost interest and did not follow along. When we left the disco, Bruno triumphantly showed me a piece of paper, saying, “She gave me her phone number.” Alas, the next day when he dialed the number, he was amazed to find it was not valid. He was sure there had been an error in transcription. He could not imagine what seemed obvious to the rest of us: that she had given him a made-up number to get rid of him. I am certain she made an error, though not the one Bruno thinks she made. Her error was in not writing down her actual number. Bruno is right—he’s a lot of fun!

A good tool to assist in looking at who we really are is called
guided fantasy
. We do this by closing our eyes and creating a fantasy experience in which we examine some surrogate entity such as a tree or a house. Then we give a detailed description of
what we have seen in our fantasy. Finally we repeat the description, this time in the voice of the surrogate object. In this way we gain access to images of ourselves that we generally hide or are not consciously aware of.

Guided fantasy is a good tool to assist you in examining who you really are. The script I use follows. You can record yourself reading it and then lie down on the floor or any flat surface and follow its instructions as you listen to the recording.

Please close your eyes. Become aware of your breath going in and out. Notice the air temperature. Notice your chest expanding and contracting.

Take your awareness from your chest to the right side of your body. Put your awareness on your right hip. Now move it down along the front of your leg to the front of your right knee. Now take your awareness down along your shin to your right ankle. Go across the top of your right foot to your smallest toe. Take your awareness across the toes on your right foot to the big toe, then up the inside of your right leg to your crotch and then to your belly. Take your awareness to your left hip. Now move it down along the front of your left leg to the front of your left knee. Now take your awareness down along your shin to your left ankle. Go across the top of your left foot to your smallest toe. Take your awareness across the toes on your left foot to the big toe, then up the inside of your left leg to your crotch and then to your belly.

Now take your awareness up your chest to your chin. Be aware of your breath going in and out. Notice the air temperature. Notice your chest expanding and contracting.

Now imagine you are going to take a journey. Imagine standing up and going to the airport. Imagine boarding a plane for a
short flight. Imagine getting off the plane and making your way to a bus. Take a short bus ride, and then imagine getting off the bus. Now, imagine a house in the distance, and walk toward that house. When you get to the house, explore the outside and then the inside, examining the details carefully.

(Ten-minute pause here.)

Get ready to leave the house and make your return trip.

First walk back to where you got off the bus. Imagine the bus returning, and take it back to the airport. Board a plane and fly back to your original airport. Then make your way back to this room.

Imagine that you lie down again. Become aware of your breathing, aware of your breath going in and out. Notice the air temperature. Notice your chest expanding and contracting. Be aware of the noises in the room. Slowly open your eyes and then get into a seated position.

After a few minutes, describe, in detail, the house you explored. You can do this to yourself or to another person or a group of people if available.

Next, describe that house again, and this time don’t speak for yourself. Speak for the house and its contents. Through you, the house and its contents are describing themselves in the first person. So if the original story contained the words “It was an old house with many things thrown about,” the new version would be “I am old and full of disorderly stuff.” You must stay in the role of inanimate objects talking in the first person.

Often what happens is quite revealing. In speaking for the house and its possessions, you are describing yourself. You have in fact projected many of your characteristics onto the house and its objects. This is an excellent way to look at yourself; because you do it so indirectly, it is nonthreatening. It produces
candid insights that might otherwise not be available from examination of one’s own self-image.

Another exercise that can have a strong mind-altering effect is using your awareness to get a new perspective on your problems and your life. To do this exercise, think of an issue in your life that you would be willing to be rid of. Start by asking yourself if you are really willing to be rid of it. Are you willing to have it vanish from your life right now? This is harder than we think. It turns out that we love to hang on to some of our issues. We use them to identify who we are, and to relate through them to our friends. For instance, some of us
like
to be seen as victims because people will show us sympathy.

Assuming you find something you are truly willing to be rid of, the rest is easy. It is simply a matter of being mindful about all the things you associate with this issue. Being mindful, in general, implies being aware of what you are doing and not being on automatic pilot as you go through your day. There is a bit more to it, however.

True mindfulness is seeing without judging. It is the equivalent of just being there and dispassionately observing what is going on and what we are doing. It is a state of being willing to just
be
with whatever is going on. To get to that state, it helps to pause for a moment, breathe, connect with your inner experience, and observe the world around you. Mindfulness can lead to insights and awareness.

In the 1970s I participated in a two-weekend workshop known as Erhard Seminar Training (usually abbreviated in lowercase
as est). On the second day the group was led through an exercise called the Truth Process. I found, to my surprise, that the exercise completely eliminated an annoying habit of speech that I had picked up years earlier. I was naturally impressed, and I incorporated the exercise into my teaching. The results have been very favorable. It is a good tool for getting rid of aspects of your self-image that stand in the way of developing your achievement habit.

Over time, my version of this exercise has changed. I do not run it with a written script, and each year it comes out of my mouth a bit differently. I do not think there is any critical exactness to it. The same ideas have been applied in many versions long before my first experience with the Truth Process.
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In this exercise you become mindful of as many things as possible associated with a specific issue. It will work best to lie down in a quiet place and close your eyes. If you are doing this in a group, someone can lead you through it. If not, you can record the instruction and lead yourself. Once you are settled, do a short meditation to relax yourself. A good way to do this is to become aware of your breath and notice the temperature of the air going in and coming out. Then, move your awareness slowly around your body. (The meditation script given above for guided fantasy works nicely.)

After the relaxation, think of an issue that you are willing to be rid of. The issue can have to do with a relationship in your personal or professional life, a mannerism you have, or a decision you are troubled about. It can be anything that has an impact on you on a personal level. It should not be something global like world peace or saving the planet, unless those are personal parts of a problem that you are actually dealing with.

Once you have an issue you are willing to have disappear
from your life, you can proceed to work through the steps in the next paragraphs. If at any time during this exercise you feel that you have rid yourself of whatever you wanted to be rid of, you can move directly to the last two steps in the exercise.

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First, in your mind’s eye, create an object that represents your issue—that is, give the issue an actual physical embodiment. Imagine this object being a few feet in front of you. With your eyes closed,
look
at this embodiment. Become mindful of its physical properties by doing an inventory using the following questions: How tall is it? How wide is it? How deep is it? What is its color? What is its texture? What is its temperature? Does it have an odor? What is its sound?

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Now recall the last time this issue occurred in your life. Then recall the previous time, and keep going back in time until you come as close as possible to the first time it occurred.

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When you are finished, again imagine that your issue’s physical embodiment is a few feet in front of you, and repeat the inventory of its physical properties. (Usually the object’s properties will have changed slightly.)