Unlimited: How to Build an Exceptional Life (10 page)

WORKING IT OUT

WRITE IT DOWN

Your first exercise is to write down all the attributes that upset you about the person you are trying to forgive. It could be greed, selfishness, cruelty—you name it. Fire away
.

KNOW YOUR HISTORY

Next, begin looking into this person’s background. Examine how, where, when, and why these qualities might have developed in them. The greatest sociopaths of our time, from Hitler to Saddam
,
had horrific childhoods that molded them into the monsters they became. I’m not suggesting the person who hurt you is a genocidal maniac; I’m simply saying that behavior, good or bad, extreme or subtle, has an origin. You can argue nature-versus-nurture all day long, but the bottom line is that a person’s dormant ability to do harm will most often stay dormant unless catalyzing life events trigger it. So get your detective cap on, and research the background of your “offender.”

But suppose you don’t have access to background information on this person. Let’s say it’s a boss, a teacher, or a new beau, and you don’t think they would be open to a line of questioning (joking—sort of), and short of hiring a private investigator, you probably won’t know much about why they are the way they are. In this situation, your best bet is to look at the present state of their lives and relationships to see if there is a behavior pattern of poor treatment of others besides you
.

For example, a friend of mine was dating this guy who was austere and shut down. She was convinced that if she could be pretty enough, smart enough, and funny enough, she could open him up and make him warm and considerate. We didn’t know anything about his childhood, so we could look at only who he was today. We analyzed his professional relationships and his other personal relationships. We realized that he was austere and shut down with
everyone
in his life, not just my friend. He had a young son from a previous marriage who was struggling to connect with him. He was not close to his mother and often spoke of her negatively, in a belittling manner. While he was razor sharp in his profession and terribly successful, the line of work he had chosen required one to be “nonemotional” and fastidious. By analyzing his emotional dynamic in multiple areas of his life, my friend realized that his lack of emotion had nothing to do with her and everything to do with him. He was cold with everyone. Knowing that it wasn’t her shortcomings that made him distant gave my friend peace of mind
.

It’s your turn
.

Take a look at the present circumstance of the person who hurt your feelings. Do they hurt others in the same way? Is the crappy teacher crappy with other students? Other female students? Other male students? Has the cold boyfriend been cold with other women? Is the nasty boss an ass to other employees? Is there a pattern in their upsetting behavior? Again, the point is to understand the other person and their issues so you don’t internalize them and make them your own. (
Chapter 6
is about understanding WHY you allowed yourself to fall into this pattern with an abusive person to begin with and how to change it so it doesn’t keep happening in your future.)

DON’T TAKE IT PERSONALLY

Now that you understand the person who hurt you, and hopefully why they hurt you, you can cast off their issues and not take them on as your own. This is a huge step forward
.

From understanding you must start to build compassion, as only through compassion can you find forgiveness. The literal meaning of
compassion
is concern and empathy for the sufferings or misfortunes of others. So that is what you are going to do
.

I want you to imagine yourself as the person who hurt you. See yourself walking in their shoes, living their life, feeling their feelings. This will allow you to recognize that the person who harmed you is more than just the person who harmed you. They are a full-fledged human being with feelings of their own, and their actions that harmed you came from their own confusion, hurt, and powerlessness
.

This exercise allows you to feel sadness for their misfortunes and to see your offender not as evil but as misguided and lost. With this empathy, you’re more inclined to find forgiveness and stop feeling angry and resentful
.

FORGIVING THE UNFORGIVABLE

It is hard and painful to learn to forgive, but the only way out of the fire is through it; no matter what was done to you, no matter
how terrible, you need to do this work to reclaim your power and your life
.

There are varying degrees of forgiveness. Forgiving your dad for not showing up at your soccer games is a whole different animal from forgiving a rapist or a child molester. I know. I’m not saying that I would be able to forgive a rapist, but I will put a question to you: what other option have you got?

You can let yourself become consumed with anger and desire for revenge and eventually become a monster. You can internalize those feelings and become a permanent victim of life. Or you can let go, learn from the experience, and move on, wiser and stronger, with empathy and compassion that will improve your life and touch the hearts of many others. The hard truth remains the same: the only way to move forward is through forgiveness
.

The wisdom you’ll gain from understanding and forgiving brings new responsibility—the responsibility to acknowledge the poor choices you have made and to choose differently. Choose
life
. Which leads us, conveniently, to our next topic: taking responsibility
.

WHO’S THE BOSS?
BEING ACCOUNTABLE

Okay, so you have achieved awareness of the issues that lead you to sabotage yourself in the same repetitive, self-destructive ways. You’ve identified the roots of these issues and cast off the shackles of self-loathing through understanding and forgiveness. Now it’s time to take the final empowering step: evaluating the choices you’ve made in response to your hardships and asking yourself how they’ve brought about your current status. Stop blaming anyone or anything for your situation or your problems. When you blame others, you are essentially saying that you are powerless over your own life, which, I’m sorry, is bullshit. You are not a victim of life but a participant in it, and you have to accept
full responsibility for your life—the good, the bad, and yes, the ugly—in order to regain control.

Responsibility isn’t about blame. There’s a big difference between blaming yourself and taking responsibility for your choices, your mistakes, and your present reality. Blame is useless and serves only as a way for you to beat yourself up and wallow in negative feelings. Taking responsibility is about empowerment, acknowledging your capability to change things, and moving on from your current situation to something better.

You may be thinking,
But life really has dealt me a bad hand. It’s really not my fault that my life sucks
. Just hold on a second. I’m not saying taking responsibility means controlling
all
the things life throws at you—none of us can do that. And there
are
times when we are victimized. Allowing yourself to accept that reality frees you to release any guilt or shame you might be carrying for tragedies and hardships that befell you in the past.

There comes a time in adulthood, however, when you need to take responsibility for how you allow these tragedies to affect you and for how they form you. You can control your
reactions
to life’s less-than-perfect moments to affect an outcome that is favorable to you. This goes for situations, circumstances, people, and things.

Something horrible may have happened to you, but you
always
have a choice in how you respond to it. You have the “Why does bad stuff always happen to me? I’m never going to find happiness” option, and the “This sucks but I’m going to learn and evolve from it, examine what role I played in it, and ultimately it will help me become the person I’m supposed to be” option. Guess which one you’re going to choose from now on?

Once you become conscious of and take responsibility for how your choices have led you to where you are right now, you can bring a new consciousness to the choices you make going forward. You can choose life, love, and happiness over anger, pain, and sadness. Just as important, you can choose power, focus, and success over helplessness, self-obstruction, and failure. It’s up to you whether
you let that bad relationship keep you single forever. It’s up to you whether to let someone’s criticism damage your self-esteem and keep you from piping up with an idea you believe in. It’s up to you whether you sit home and worry about being out of work, or whether you take proactive steps to find a new job, or even a new career path, and change your situation. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

What Choice Did She Have?

Shay is a girl I had the amazing good fortune to work with recently. She grew up on the streets, literally. Her mother was a heroin addict who shot up in front of her all the time. She would lock Shay in a closet while she turned tricks to support her habit. Sooner or later Shay landed in the foster care system and was in and out of one home after another, completely powerless over where she ended up or who took care of her. By the time I met her, in her late twenties, she weighed 476 pounds. Her past had crushed her to the point that she was literally committing slow suicide by eating herself into an early grave.

Now, there is no question here—Shay was a victim. Growing up, she was subjected to just about the worst that any child can experience. Her sick mother exposed her to horrible dangers and couldn’t give her the basic love and care that every child deserves and needs. She was the victim of an archaic and bureaucratic foster care system. As a kid, she had no power to control or change her situation. She was
definitely
a victim of circumstances, and her life was pure hell.

But even someone like Shay, who is haunted by a childhood full of pain and fear, now, as an adult, has to
recognize her role in getting to where she is now. She has to accept that it was
her choice
to use food to abuse herself the way she was abused as a child. Are her actions understandable? Hell, yes. But can we change them through awareness, forgiveness, and self-empowerment? HELL, YES.

See, the flip side of realizing that you’ve made bad choices is understanding your power to make
good
choices. By taking responsibility for letting herself reach 476 pounds, Shay has been able to get herself down to 250 pounds. She finally understands that she has the power now. She has the choice to become a permanent victim of her horrendous childhood, living out those patterns of abuse and neglect until she kills herself, or to open her heart to the process of grieving, move through all that pain, and gain strength from forgiving those old wounds. She can move on and build her life on her own terms.

No one could possibly leave a past like that totally behind; it’s just not that simple. But by taking responsibility for her current situation, Shay is able to see she has the choice to build something positive now, even on such a painful foundation. She has lost more than 200 pounds and is healthy, living happily in California with her husband and thriving at working with children, a job she loves.

THE PERFECT STORM

For a friend of mine, a lack of awareness, forgiveness, or responsibility created a perfect storm of detrimental outcomes that eventually forced him into bankruptcy.

I ran into this friend recently and asked him how he was doing. He told me he’d had a hard year. He was financially wiped out. He’d
gotten a DUI. His dog needed an enormously expensive surgery. His car had been repossessed. All these financial hardships had destroyed his credit, and he had had to declare bankruptcy. Now he couldn’t get a loan for a new car, and he was having trouble renting an apartment. Even worse, he was on the rocks—
again
—with his girlfriend. My friend was feeling very sorry for himself, but let’s look at how he alone was responsible for his situation.

First off, the DUI: he shouldn’t have been drinking and driving! Had he not made that bad choice, he would not have had to spend thousands of dollars in legal fees and court costs. That said, it certainly could have been worse—he could have killed himself or an innocent person. As for his dog’s surgery, there is such a thing as pet insurance, and it’s cheap! Maybe $150 a year. Had he been responsible and planned ahead by buying the insurance, the dog’s surgery would have been covered. The car that was repossessed was way out of his price range, but he had decided to buy it anyway instead of doing his homework and buying a car he could afford. As a result, his income took a big hit. And last, the girlfriend situation was avoidable. This was a girl he had been on and off with for months. He was playing out the same abusive dynamic that he had had with his mother. Had he chosen to do the deeper work on himself, he probably wouldn’t have returned to an unhealthy relationship that always left him in the lurch—especially when he was going through a tough time in other areas of his life.