By my thirties I began to wake up and realize that most of the guilt I felt was for crimes I hadn’t committed. I bet you’ll find the same thing. Of course, there are plenty of things I’ve done on my own that I feel guilty about. I imagine you can think of a few of those, too. However, I’ve found that if we remove the guilt of the crimes our parents and siblings convicted us of before we walked into kindergarten, we are liberated from the main issues that trigger the Upper Limit Problem.
Hidden Barrier no. 4: The Crime of Outshining
The unconscious mantra of the outshining barrier goes like this:
I must not expand to my full success, because if I did I would outshine _____________________ and make him or her look or feel bad.
This barrier is very common among gifted and talented children. They get a lot of their parents’ attention, but they also get a strong subliminal message along with it: don’t shine too much, or you’ll make others feel bad or look bad. The gifted child is often convicted of stealing attention from other members of the family. One unconscious solution gifted children devise is to turn down the volume on their genius so the others don’t feel threatened by it. The other solution is to continue to shine brightly but turn down the volume on their enjoyment of it. If they can appear to be suffering, they can get empathy and sympathy from others instead of jealousy.
Kenny Loggins is a role model for how to transcend this barrier and take the Big Leap. Kenny has been a friend and neighbor for many years, and I’ve gone out on tour with him several times to serve as an on-the-road coach for him and the band. A few years ago I also worked with Kenny and his old partner, Jim Messina, in preparation for a reunion tour. Loggins and Messina conquered the world of rock music at an early age, attaining fame, fortune, and critical acclaim in their early twenties. Turmoil and creative clashes eventually caused them to break up, and trouble followed them into their solo careers. Kenny found success as a solo artist, with a string of hits in the eighties, while Jim tried different avenues such as producing albums for other musicians. Even though Kenny was cranking out hits and winning Grammys, he didn’t let himself enjoy his success. When he would have a hit or win an award, he would do something in his personal life to sabotage the potential good feeling and celebration. He would get sick, or have an accident, or mess up a relationship; there was always something, and it was always just after a success of some sort. In working with Kenny extensively, and with Jim briefly, I discovered a classic example of Hidden Barrier no. 4.
Although they had never noticed it, they had a remarkable similarity in their backgrounds. They had grown up as gifted children trying to compete with a favored sibling for their parents’ attention. They also got hidden messages from their parents not to outshine the other sibling. When the talented duo formed their musical union in their late teens, this early programming worked to their advantage. They were brother figures together, out to conquer the world. They could both shine together. And shine they did, with one hit after another.
However, when the time came to go solo and follow their own musical paths, the old Upper Limit Problem came back with full force. Now they were both in the grip of the old fear not to outshine the other one. This fear caused one to stumble in search of a new direction and the other to dampen the enjoyment of his success with one unfortunate incident of self-sabotage after another.
Fortunately, they woke up in time. They were able to spot this old pattern and transcend it. Jim launched a new career teaching songwriting workshops. Kenny got the gift of a seeming performance disaster that had a life-changing gift of a metaphor hidden in it. He was nominated for a Grammy, and at the awards show, with most of the music industry in attendance, he took the stage to sing the big hit “I’m All Right.” Thunderous applause greeted the distinctive opening notes of the song, but in a masterpiece of irony, when Kenny started to sing the vocal, the microphone didn’t work. He saved the moment by jumping on a table and leading an a cappella version until the mike got fixed, but the irony gave him cause for reflection later: why had he “lost” his voice at the very peak of his career? The answer led to his Big Leap and the creation of a masterpiece. He realized that he didn’t want to create more of the same kind of staple pop hits that had made him rich and famous. Those were clearly in his Zone of Excellence, but clearly not in his Zone of Genius. Although he was proud of the pop hits he’d created, he felt that they still came out of that fear of outshining. Fortunately, he heeded the call of genius and went into a time of deep meditative inquiry about every aspect of his life. In that deep space he heard a new kind of music coming from within him, songs that touched on the environment, honesty in relationships, and other themes unusual in popular music. The album that emerged had a title appropriate to the role it played in his life: Leap of Faith. It was a massive hit both commercially and critically, and contained songs such as “Conviction of the Heart,” which became an anthem of the growing environmentalist movement. This in turn led Kenny to a performance moment that eclipsed any thrill of the past: singing “Conviction of the Heart” to five hundred thousand people at an Earth Day celebration in Washington, D.C.
One great thing about Upper Limit work is that it doesn’t take much time to spot where the problem is coming from. Once you see it, you’ve turned on a light in a long-dark room. There’s cleanup work that usually needs to be done, but with the light on, it’s not that hard.
A hex is often put on gifted and talented people early in life. The hex causes them to feel bad when they shine especially brightly. Why would parents hex children this way? An example will explain:
I worked with Joseph, a middle-aged executive who had been a piano prodigy as a child. He went on to modest success as a professional musician but then quit music completely because, without realizing it, he kept running up against Hidden Barrier no. 4. Specifically, each time Joseph had a breakthrough to more success, he would be gripped by guilt and end up feeling worse than before. Even after he quit music, the pattern followed him into his business career.
During our first session we were able to shine a light on the moment in his past when the barrier first got locked into place. Growing up, Joseph had been close to his only other sibling, a sister, who was also a gifted musician. She died of leukemia when she was eight years old, leaving him and his parents devastated. This loss caused him to throw himself even more passionately into his music.
As Joseph told his story, he uncovered a moment in his early teens when he felt the crippling guilt for the first time, the feeling that would so haunt him as an adult. For his birthday, his parents gave him his first grand piano. Prior to this, he had been able to practice on a grand piano only by traveling by bus across town to a music studio. Now he would be able to practice daily, rain or shine.
Joseph’s parents arranged to have the piano moved into the living room the night before his birthday, after he had gone to sleep. When he woke in the morning, his parents asked him to close his eyes as they escorted him into the living room. They led him to the piano and asked him to open his eyes. He was seized with joy and gratitude. He hugged his parents and, with tears streaming down his face, sat down at the keyboard. As his fingers were about to touch the keys for the first time, his mother said, “We would never have been able to afford this if your sister hadn’t died.” Instantly his joy became suffused with guilt and grief. A pattern was set in motion that would play out for the next forty years.
What would cause parents to say such a thing? Unconsciously, they must have wanted him always to remember his sister and be grateful for the too-brief years she had graced their family. Unconsciously, they must have felt deep grief that one child could shine brightly and the other would never do so. The pride they felt in my client would always be accompanied by their grief over the loss of their daughter. They were under the spell of this grief for life, and they unwittingly made sure Joseph would live under it, too.
Fortunately, Joseph was able to break free. He realized that the crime for which
he’d been convicted—being alive and thus outshining his sister for all time—was a crime that existed only in his parents’ imagination. Many of you may find an issue like this in your past. If so, you will need to ask yourself if you are afraid to go to your ultimate success because you’re afraid of outshining someone from long ago. Ask yourself if you’re afraid your success will steal attention from someone whom you’ve been led to believe needs it more.
GOING FORWARD
Now you’re equipped with the background knowledge you need for your Big Leap. You understand the basics of the Upper Limit Problem and where its root structure is buried. It’s time now to increase the velocity of your learning by going directly into the buzzing intricacy of your life experience. Your Upper Limit Problem lives in the moment-by-moment interactions you have with yourself and the people around you. There is only one way to get this data, and that is to focus your keen awareness on specific aspects of your daily life. In the next chapter I’ll show you exactly where to look to find those things. I predict you’ll be amazed at the elegant simplicity of the keys to liberation, and doubly amazed that they have been hiding in plain sight.
THREE
Getting Specific
How to Spot the Upper Limit Problem in Daily Life
Now I want to ask you to focus the power of your awareness on several specific actions. The purpose of this exercise is to notice how your particular version of the Upper Limit Problem operates. Once you see it in action, you’ll have a new navigational tool for your life. When I was learning to drive, I remember my instructor telling me that driving was more an art than a science. The key to the art, he said, was what he called “benign vigilance,” or, paying keen but relaxed attention to what your car and the other cars were doing in every moment. Your journey in the Zone of Genius is just like that. In learning to live in your Zone of Genius, you’ll benefit from making a lifelong pursuit out of spotting your Upper Limit behaviors. Make spotting them part of your daily ongoing maintenance procedures, just like brushing your teeth or adjusting the side mirrors of your car.
TYPICAL WAYS WE UPPER-LIMIT OURSELVES
Years ago a client of mine invented a new verb to describe his Upper Limit behavior. He said, “The other day I caught myself in the act of Upper-Limiting myself.” It caught on among participants in our seminars, because it puts the Upper Limit Problem in a practical context of something you’re doing. When you’re “Upper-Limiting,” you’re doing something that is crimping your flow of positive energy. Fortunately, there are not very many ways we Upper-Limit ourselves. Tune in to yourself as you read them, to discover which ones are familiar to you. I’ll start with the most common one: worry.
Worry
Worrying is usually a sign that we’re Upper-Limiting. It is usually not a sign that we’re thinking about something useful. The crucial sign that we’re worrying unnecessarily is when we’re worrying about something we have no control over. Worrying is useful only if it concerns a topic we can actually do something about, and if it leads to our taking positive action right away. All other worry is just Upper Limit noise, designed by our unconscious to keep us safely within our Zone of Excellence or Zone of Competence. Here’s how it works:
When things are going well for us, our Upper Limit mechanism kicks in and we suddenly start worrying about things going wrong in some way. We start justifying those worry-thoughts with more worry-thoughts, and soon we are busily manufacturing scenarios of things falling apart, coming un-glued, and devolving toward imminent doom.
When I first noticed this tendency in myself, I was amazed at how quickly I could go from a couple of insignificant worry-thoughts to a grandiose doom scenario of the end of civilization. If you notice your worry-thoughts—really study them carefully for a couple of days—you’ll find something that may surprise you: almost none of your worry-thoughts have anything to do with reality. Here’s what I mean. Let’s say you make a cup of coffee in the morning, put it in a to-go cup, and rush off to work. You’re speeding along, happily sipping your brew, when suddenly you worry that you may have left the kettle boiling on the stove. That’s a reality-based worry-thought. It’s worth worrying about, for two reasons: first, your house could burn down; and second, you can do something about it.
There’s a good way to know if a worry-thought is something you should pay attention to. Just ask yourself:
Is it a real possibility?
And…
Is there any action I can take right now to make a positive difference?
With the kettle, the answers are obviously “Yes” and “Yes.” It’s a real possibility, and there are positive actions you can take right now. You can go back and check to see if you turned the flame off. You can also call back to the house and have someone else check. However, even these kinds of reality-based worry-thoughts can be an Upper Limit symptom for some people. Some of us worry constantly about whether we’ve done something wrong or careless like leaving a kettle on. It’s a facet of our personality. I know quite a bit about that personality type, having had the opportunity to study an example from the inside for as long as I can remember. It’s not important whether you’re a born worrier or a newcomer to the habit. All you really need to know is this:
When things are going well, or when you’re feeling particularly good, you can always bring yourself down by manufacturing a stream of worry-thoughts. Once you’ve brought yourself down by worrying, it’s very tempting to inflict those worry-thoughts on others. If we’re in the grip of worrying while someone around us isn’t, we seem to have an almost uncontrollable urge to criticize that person until he or she jumps into the stream of negativity with us.
I once coached a billionaire who worried constantly about losing money. In reality, he could afford to lose a million dollars a day for at least five years and still have a billion left. His worry spilled over into his marriage, into the Upper Limit symptom we’ll look at in a moment: blame and criticism. He often bugged his wife because she bought the most expensive brand of toilet paper. She liked a particular kind, but he was always trying to convince her that cheaper alternatives were just as good. In a situation like that, it’s pretty clear that tissue’s not the real issue.
It took a bit of gentle pummeling on my part before he finally saw that his worry and criticism were just ways of disrupting the flow of positive energy in his life and in the relationship. Since he was a guy who lived by the numbers, I started by asking him to get out a calculator and figure the actual costs of the toilet paper. I said, “Imagine she went on a wild binge and started buying a hundred rolls every day! And imagine if she really went off the deep end and bought a hundred rolls a day for the next fifty years. How much would she have spent fifty years from now, when you’re both ninety years old?” He punched in numbers and came up with the cost of her lifelong extravaganza: $1.5 million. I then asked him to calculate what percentage of his net worth it amounted to. He didn’t even have to use the calculator for that part of the assignment. I don’t remember the exact number, but it was far less than 1 percent. I asked him how much his net worth varied from day to day due to ordinary stock-market fluctuations. He said that it would sometimes vary by as much as a hundred million dollars from hour to hour. I pointed out that even if his wife went on a superbinge and bought a thousand rolls a day, it still wouldn’t amount to a single day’s fluctuation. “Given that,” I said, “what’s the real reason you’re criticizing your wife?”
There’s a saying I’ve developed, based on many counseling sessions that revolved around money struggles: money arguments never have anything to do with money. Money arguments are always about something deeper, and it was certainly true in his case. We discovered that deep down he didn’t feel that he deserved to be wealthy and loved, too. He had grown up in a wealthy family, but according to him, his parents spent much of every day in a pitched battle with each other. Without realizing it, he was carrying on in his own marriage the family tradition of constant bickering. In his original fami
ly, the formula was “money equals arguing.” It didn’t matter if the amount was a hundred million dollars or a few bucks for good toilet paper; if there was money involved, there had to be an argument about it.
I gave him the assignment of going cold turkey with criticism and blame. I asked him to call a complete halt to criticizing his wife about money. To engage his competitive powers, I told him I highly doubted he could stop criticizing his wife about money for even one day. Jutting his jaw defiantly, he took up the challenge. When he and his wife came in for their next session, they both looked about ten years younger. They had even taken his assignment to a higher level, both of them deciding to eliminate criticism in general from their relationship. He told me that they had spent a delightful week “celebrating what we have rather than carping about what we don’t have.”
The Big Leap Page 5