“Pretty good,” she said. “But he’s kind of a frugal person. He doesn’t need a huge income.”
“Let me ask you a question,” I said. “What gave you the idea you should take investment advice from him?”
There was a long silence. Finally she said “Oh, my God.”
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“I just realized that I love him so much it never occurred to me that he was flawed.”
I asked her to reconsider the judgment that he was “flawed.” I told her: “He’s not necessarily flawed. You’re the savvy businessperson who chose to take investment advice from a software designer.”
In the ensuing silence I could almost hear Lois’s teeth grinding. Finally she said, “Damn you, you’re right. And do you know how many times in my life I’ve said that?”
I hazarded a guess: “Never?” Again she uttered the magic phrase: “You’re right. Zero. I can’t remember ever admitting somebody else was right.”
I suggested that it might be a useful skill to learn if she wanted to have a happy marriage. I told her that I had found it a great addition to my own communication repertoire. On the occasions when I said, “You’re right” in my own marriage, I noticed that Kathlyn responded as if she were hearing the sweet sounds of a Mozart concerto.
Lois and her husband came in for a session together. It turned out that he not only loved her very much but was also very intimidated by her. To make up for his perceived inadequacy, he wanted to impress her in her own area of expertise. This muddled intention had caused him to present the stock tip he’d heard as if it were a sure thing. Like many muddled intentions, it produced the opposite effect.
Toward the end of the session I asked a question that can shine a light on an Upper Limit Problem: “Lois, why do you think this money incident happened at this particular time in your life?”
Long silence. Finally she said, “I think I got happier than I ever imagined I could be. Then some part of me reared up and grabbed me—some part of me that didn’t think I deserved it. I created this drama with Larry to find something wrong with him, to give me an excuse to end the relationship. All because I think I don’t deserve to be this happy.”
“So,” I said, “let’s make a new deal between you and the universe right now. Are you willing to be wealthy in both money and love?” She took a deep breath and said, “Yes!”
I complimented her on her insight and her willingness to make a new commitment to feeling fulfilled in both financial and romantic terms.
Lois offers a beautiful example of how to handle the Upper Limit Problem. She came right up to the brink of sabotaging a good relationship, but she caught herself in time. She was even able to use the incident as a time of deepening her connection with her husband. Six months into a close relationship is about when the big issues begin to surface. At that point, most of us don’t say, “Oh, I’m about six months into this wonderful relationship. It’s about time for my big issues to come up and cause me to sabotage the relationship.” Instead, most of us go to the opposite extreme: we herald this time of deepening by seeing a fault or flaw in the other person, then studying it so microscopically that it expands into a vast new field of scientific inquiry.
Here’s a new way: when the big stuff comes up, ask your partner if she or he is willing to join you as an equal partner on a learning journey. If the answer is yes, you join together in a relationship of true possibility. If she or he is more committed to being right than to actual, real intimacy, the answer will be something other than yes. Then you must move on, and be quick about it.
Now, though, let’s return to the central issue: how the Upper Limit Problem works, and how to eliminate its negative effects on us.
TRIGGERING THE UPPER LIMIT PROBLEM
The false foundation under the Upper Limit Problem is a set of four hidden barriers based on fear and false belief. Every person I’ve worked with has uncovered at least one of the barriers, and sometimes two or three. I’ve never met anybody who had all four. The Four Hidden Barriers all have something in common: although they seem true and real, they are based on beliefs about ourselves that are neither true nor real. The fact that we unconsciously take them as true and real is the barrier holding us back. We take them as true and real until we shine awareness on them. Then the barriers dissolve, and we are free. That moment is profound. It feels wonderful; we remember it forever. It is the occasion of our ultimate liberation. Although I have myself experienced that joyful moment and have witnessed it hundreds of times, I am still deeply moved every time it occurs.
Begin by considering the possibility that you have at least one hidden barrier that is keeping you from being completely successful. Please know that you’re far from alone. I had more than one. Even if you’re already very successful, you have at least one barrier that holds you back. When you encounter the barrier, your Upper Limit Problem is triggered. The form it takes depends on which fears and false beliefs you picked up in your early life. As we explore those fears and false beliefs now, tune in to discover which ones resonate with your experience.
Four fears and four related false beliefs hold the Upper Limit Problem in place. The fears are based on specific long-ago situations you will probably recognize when I show them to you. The beliefs based on those fears are false and cause you to have a misunderstanding about who you actually are. These fears and false beliefs cause us to live our lives out of a success-limiting mantra that says:
I cannot expand to my full potential because ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________.
In relationships, your Upper Limit mantra says:
I cannot enjoy abundant love and relationship harmony because ___________________________________________.
In financial wealth, your Upper Limit mantra says:
I cannot expand to my full wealth potential because _____ ____________________________________________________.
When you remove those false beliefs, you feel a new freedom to invent a life based on your natural genius. I now want to describe the fears and false beliefs, with the intention of assisting you in dissolving and dismantling them.
Hidden Barrier no. 1: Feeling Fundamentally Flawed
A feeling that I’m fundamentally flawed in some way. That’s how one of my clients, Carl, described the barrier of feeling fundamentally flawed, and we can use his phrase as a definitive example of the most pervasive of the Hidden Barriers. Let’s dismantle it piece by piece, so you can see how it got a grip on Carl. Find out if his story resonates with your own. His Upper Limit mantra went like this:
I cannot expand to my full creative genius because something is fundamentally wrong with me.
If you have a deep, old feeling that there’s something wrong, bad, or flawed about you, you will find yourself grappling with that issue every time you break through to greater love and financial abundance. When you surpass your Upper Limit thermostat setting, a little voice admonishes you from deep within your mind: you should not be this happy (or rich or creative) because you are fundamentally flawed. This thought creates cognitive dissonance, the mind rattle that occurs when you try to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time: Given that I am fundamentally flawed (or wrong or bad), how can I possibly be this happy, rich, and creative? The cognitive dissonance must be resolved in one of two ways: by returning to your previous thermostat setting; or by letting go of the old, limiting belief, which allows you to stabilize at the new, higher level.
The best way is to shine the light of awareness on the thought that you are fundamentally flawed and label it as what it is: an Upper Limit bug. I use bug in two senses here. It’s like a computer bug, because it’s a false line in your code that causes a breakdown in your operating efficiency. It’s like a bug in the mosquito sense, too, because it bites you when you are going to higher levels of love, abundance, and creativity. You start slapping at the bug and bring yourself back down to your prev
ious level.
The other way to stop the cognitive dissonance is to pull back from your success and not challenge the false belief. This move brings you back down into a zone you’re familiar with. The bug wins, and you lose.
In Carl’s case it was easy to see where he picked up his bug, the feeling of being fundamentally flawed. He had started out his life as the first child of a powerful executive who would go on to run two different Fortune 500 companies. When my client was just out of diapers, though, his parents split up and got into an epic battle over money, a conflict that went on for years. His father remarried and started another family, so Carl’s early life was spent shuttling back and forth between these hostile forces. Later, in a moment of alcohol-induced candor, his father confessed to Carl that he could never look at him without simultaneously feeling hatred for Carl’s mother. The father had convicted Carl of a crime Carl couldn’t understand or name. All he knew was that his father looked at him differently than his younger half brother. Carl unconsciously convicted himself of the crime, too. Years later he would tell me, “I figured if he looked at me that way, I must have done something wrong, but I could never get anybody to tell me exactly what I’d done.”
This next point is crucial: The invisible crime for which Carl was serving time had absolutely nothing to do with Carl. The father would have felt the same way about any child who occupied that role. You can see, though, how Carl (and the rest of us who have been in similar situations) would take it personally. After all, he was the one receiving the looks of misplaced hatred from his father. At two years of age (or five or fifteen), Carl had no way of knowing that the look was directed primarily at his mother. He had no way of knowing that he was completely innocent of the crime of which he’d been convicted.
The fear of being fundamentally flawed brings with it a related fear. It’s the fear that if you did make a full commitment to living in your Zone of Genius, you might fail. It’s the belief that even your genius is flawed, and that if you expressed it in a big way, it wouldn’t be good enough. This belief tells you to play it safe and stay small. That way, if you fail, at least you fail small.
Hidden Barrier no. 2: Disloyalty and Abandonment
When we are stuck behind the barrier of disloyalty and abandonment, our unconscious mantra goes like this:
I cannot expand to my full success because it would cause me to end up all alone, be disloyal to my roots, and leave behind people from my past.
If you’re wondering what kind of person might have a barrier like this, I can tell you: my kind of person, for one. This barrier caused me much consternation earlier in my life, and even now it still flickers through my mind from time to time. I’ll tell you more about my story in a moment, but for now, focus on whether this barrier has shown up in your life. Here are two questions that can help you discover if you, too, have this barrier:
Did I break the family’s spoken or unspoken rules to get where I am?
Even though I am successful, did I fail to meet the expectations my parents had of me?
If you answered yes to either of these questions, you’re likely to feel guilty later as you expand into more and more success. You’re likely to feel, at a deep and unconscious level, that your quest for a life of your own and success on your own terms has come at the cost of leaving behind your roots and being disloyal to those who loved you. The guilt you feel makes you put on the brakes, holding yourself back from ultimate success and keeping you from enjoying the success you already have. You follow breakthroughs of success with bouts of self-punishment.
Here’s a vivid example of Hidden Barrier no. 2 in action:
I counseled a newlywed couple just after they’d had a memorable encounter with this barrier. Robert had just finished his medical residency; Dee was an administrator at the university where Robert had received his MD. Their backgrounds couldn’t have been more different. Robert was from an “old money” family in New England, whereas Dee had been raised in a hippie enclave near Santa Cruz by a single mom. Robert’s family didn’t approve of Dee because she was five years older than Robert and didn’t come from aristocratic stock. They probably would have disapproved even more had they known that Dee’s mother also made her living by growing exotic herbs, some of which are illegal to possess. Nevertheless, Robert and Dee were deeply in love, and preliminary plans were made for a fancy wedding at the estate of Robert’s family. On the insistence of Robert’s family, the wedding was not to take place until after Robert got his first job as a physician.
In a mood of euphoria the day Robert completed his residency, they made a snap decision to do things their own way. They drove to Reno and got married in a wedding chapel. Without pausing even for lunch, they turned the car around and headed toward Santa Cruz. Dee’s mother, Dorothy, was delighted when they called her with the news, and promised to arrange a big party that night to celebrate the wedding. Robert and Dee decided to postpone calling his family to tell them the good news.
As they navigated the winding dirt road toward Dorothy’s cabin, Robert and Dee had an impulse to pull the car into the woods for a pre-party cuddle. They spread a blanket in the woods and fell to celebrating their first married lovemaking adventure. In the heat of passion, they rolled off the blanket into a bed of poison oak. Poison oak can take twenty-four hours to produce symptoms, so they didn’t realize they were a ticking time bomb of red and itchy rash. They proceeded to the party, where Dorothy and her friends provided a raucous welcome to the newlyweds. After dancing and singing into the wee hours, they collapsed into bed, only to awaken the next morning with a double-barreled dose of misery: not only were they hung over; they were aflame with rash and itch. They spent the next few days in and out of ice-cube baths, imbibing pain relievers and slathering on lotion. Robert, up until then a teetotaler, even took comfort in some of Dorothy’s exotic herbal preparations.
When they came in to talk to me a few weeks later, they were trying to make sense of this experience, but the sense they were making of it was not making them happy. Dee, looking through the cosmic-colored lenses of her upbringing, wondered if the experience was a sign from the universe that they shouldn’t be together at all. Robert’s view was purely self-critical. “I’ve treated cases of poison oak,” he said. “Why the hell didn’t I notice what we were rolling around in?” As I listened to their story I saw a flashing neon sign that read Barrier no. 2, and when I explained to them how it worked, I could see relief flooding into their faces.
Beyond giving them insight into why they had punished themselves so visibly and painfully, I also prescribed a radical treatment and offered them the equipment to carry it out on the spot. I handed them my telephone and invited them to call Robert’s parents, who still hadn’t been informed that their beloved son had wandered off the straight and narrow. They embraced this idea about as enthusiastically as a wild horse being offered a saddle for the first time. Therapists are prepared for such moments, though, and I convinced them that the longer they waited, the more difficult it would become.
Behind every communication problem is a sweaty ten-minute conversation you don’t want to have. However, the moment you work up the courage to have it, you collect an instant reward in relief as well as open up a flow of communication that will allow you to resolve the situation. I listened as Robert and Dee broke the news and spoke their hearts to Robert’s parents. After the first few minutes of uproar back and forth, the conversation turned harmonious and ended up with an invitation to have a big reception in New England rather than a wedding.
Hidden Barrier no. 3: Believing That More Success Brings a Bigger Burden
An old belief that you’re a burden can hold you back from expanding to your full capacity for success and enjoyment. If this belief has a grip on you, your Upper Limit mantra goes like this:
I can’t expand to my highest potential because I’d be an even bigger burden than I am now.
Early on in our exploration I mentioned that it’s common for people to have m
ore than one hidden barrier. In my work on myself, I found that two of the barriers held the biggest challenge for me. In the last section I shared my challenges with overcoming the disloyalty and abandonment barrier. Now I want to tell you about the burden barrier, my second major challenge. Check to see if elements of my story resonate with you.
The moment I made my appearance in the world, I was greeted with two big mixed messages: you’re a burden; and you’re a celebration. I was a burden to my mother, but a cause for celebration to my grandparents. The reason I was a burden was that my father had died a few weeks after my conception, leaving my mother with three hundred dollars, my older brother to raise, and, unbeknownst to anyone, me in the womb. Mom had no job and would have had a struggle supporting herself and my six-year-old brother. The unexpected appearance of a new baby was more than the poor widow could handle, and she went into a depression for about a year after I was born. Fortunately, my grandparents were next door, both vital sixty-somethings, and they were beyond ecstatic about having a baby boy around. They had raised four daughters and were more than ready for a boy. I became the boy they’d always wanted, and there was never a day throughout my childhood that I didn’t feel their love and caring attention. Having them next door was a godsend, even after my mother recovered and I began to spend more time at her house.
This background is a perfect setup for an Upper Limit Problem later in life. Starting out my life as a combination of burden and celebration caused me to repeat this combination often in adult life. I would have a big positive breakthrough, then immediately start feeling I was a burden on the world. Sometimes the world would pick up on my feeling and present immediate proof that I was indeed a burden.
I recall a painful moment, when I was in my late twenties, at a family gathering with my mother and brother. My first published book had just come out, and I’d brought a copy of it along for each of them. They were sitting at a table chatting when I proudly presented their books. Each of them looked at it, turned it this way and that, then put it aside without opening it or saying a word of congratulations. Then they resumed their conversation as if nothing had happened. I remember standing there dumbfounded. I didn’t know about the Upper Limit Problem at the time, so it didn’t occur to me that this event was part of a pattern set in motion long before I took my first breath. It took me years to understand what a burden upon them my existence must have been. I can’t imagine the struggles they went through trying to cope with my unexpected appearance in their world. It’s not surprising they would convict me of the crime of being a burden, so it’s not surprising they would consider a book written by me as a burden upon their world. If their perception of me was that I’m a burden, they would naturally see anything I produced as a further burden. What’s surprising is the extent to which I had convicted myself of that crime, even though I was innocent of the original imagined transgression.
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