I encourage you to make a careful study of your worry habits. I’ve seen a lot of lives change, including my own, when people drop their addiction to worry. And yes, worry is definitely an addiction. In fact, worrying is like playing a slot machine in a gambling casino. Occasionally the worrier will hit the jackpot and be rewarded for something that actually happens. If you worry long enough about the stock market crashing, you’ll eventually hit the jackpot, because from time to time it’s always going to crash.
Being a recovering worrywart myself, I know a lot about chronic worriers. I didn’t realize until I was nearly thirty that most of my worrying was about things I had absolutely no control over. Up until then I thought worrying was somehow helpful and useful. In fact, I believed that if everybody else wasn’t as worried as I was about the things I worried about, there was clearly something wrong with them. Gradually I came to see that I was just worrying for the sake of choking the flow of positive energy in myself. Worrying was one way I was Upper-Limiting myself.
Did you ever see the great Woody Allen movie Annie Hall? There’s an illuminating scene in it that shows how the Upper Limit Problem works in relationships. Woody is running frantically around the bedroom, wringing his hands and trying to get his wife interested in his latest conspiracy theory about the Kennedy assassination. She looks on with patient exasperation until finally his rant slows down enough for her to get a word in edgewise. She gently suggests that maybe these obsessions of his are simply ways of avoiding intimacy with her. There’s a long pause while he considers her point. The audience anticipates that he will mount an outraged denial. Finally he says, “You’re right.”
There is a lot of wisdom in that moment of inspired cinema. If you took a random look inside any person’s mind, chances are you’d find some worrying going on. If you suggest to the person that those worry-thoughts are simply ways to avoid feeling the flow of positive energy, chances are the person won’t say, “You’re right.” They’ll probably argue that their worrying is absolutely essential to the correct functioning of the universe and that if they stopped worrying the whole enterprise would collapse. I know, because I used to feel that way myself. I thought my twenty-four-hour-a-day stream of worry-thoughts was the correct response to life. It took me a long time to figure out that 99 percent of my worrying was completely unnecessary. It was very humbling to realize that my worries were there just to make me miserable. It was even more humbling to realize that I was the guy who had his finger firmly pressed on the misery button. It was wonderful, though, to discover that I also had the power to quit pressing the button.
Worry: What You Can Do Right Now
Now I make it a daily practice to spot my worry-thoughts. If you do that, you can use them as springboards into your Zone of Genius. I’d like to show you the tool I’ve developed. It’s a sequence of moves that will reliably get you out of the worry trap. Let me take you through the moves step-by-step and then follow with a real-life example.
I notice myself worrying about something.
I let go of the worry-thoughts, shifting my focus away from them.
I wonder: what positive new thing is trying to come into being?
I usually get a body feeling (not a thought or idea) of where that positive new thing is trying to come through.
I open my focus to feel that body feeling deeply.
I let myself feel it deeply for as long as I possibly can.
Later, I often get an idea of the positive thing that was trying to come through.
Here’s a walk-through of the process, using a real example.
I’m walking down the street of my town on a Saturday afternoon. I pass a jewelry store where my wife, Kathlyn, and I have bought beautiful pieces over the years. I glance in the window as I pass, admiring some of the items. About fifteen seconds later I notice some worry-thoughts about money. Specifically, the worry-thoughts are about whether we have enough money to help a gifted young member of our family go to the private music conservatory she wants to attend.
I notice the worry-thoughts and let them go, just dropping them in mid-thought without pursuing them.
I wonder what positive thing is trying to come through.
I feel a pleasant sensation in my throat.
As I walk along, I let myself feel it thoroughly, savoring the pleasant sensation.
A few minutes later, getting into my car, the insight occurs to me that seeing the jewelry in the window triggered a wave of guilt about the level of abundance my wife and I enjoy, compared with other members of our extended family. Seeing the jewelry also sparked a feeling inside me of how much I love and appreciate my wife, and how I wish there was some piece of jewelry that could really express the depth of those feelings. I sit in my car for a few moments before turning on the engine, letting myself enjoy the sweet feelings of how much I love and appreciate my wife, and how much I appreciate the prosperity we’ve created in our lives. I realize there’s no physical object like jewelry that could express those feelings. They exist in the nonmaterial world, in the feeling of flowing connection between us.
I pick up my phone and call Kathlyn. She’s out doing errands, too, and it turns out she’s about two blocks away from where I’m sitting in my car. I tell her the sequence I just experienced, from the glance in the window to the worry-thoughts to the delicious moment of letting myself feel the overflow of love and appreciation for her. I say, “Let’s make sure we take more time to celebrate what we have.”
She agrees and gives me a big virtual kiss. I say good-bye, start my car, and head home.
Let’s explore what happened here. First of all, I chose not to regard my worry-thoughts about money as being actually about money. That’s the attitude I want you to take toward your worry-thoughts in general. I want you to see them as Upper Limit symptoms, unless they are about something real that you can do something about right away. In my case, I was walking down a street on an errand run when I had the worry-thoughts about whether we had enough money to send the member of my extended family to music school. My mind quickly computed that those thoughts were not about something real. In reality I can easily afford to help my niece out. The real issue is not money. It’s whether I want to deal with the emotional dynamics that often accompany giving money to a family member. In addition, the worry-thoughts were not about something I needed to act on right away. Even if I wanted to provide the money, I was not likely to stop on the street and make a phone call to transfer funds. That was a second reason my mind computed that these worry-thoughts were more likely an Upper Limit Problem.
This computation only took a nanosecond. That’s what I’d like you to aim for, too. With practice you’ll get very nimble at noticing which thoughts are ones you should pay attention to and which ones you can dismiss. Speaking of dismissing, I’d like you to notice how I simply dropped the chain of thoughts about money. Imagine squeezing a tennis ball in your hand, then releasing your grip and dropping the ball. A lot of people don’t realize that they can dismiss worry-thoughts just like that. One moment the thoughts have a grip on you; then you suddenly realize it’s you who have the grip on them. You release the grip, and the thoughts disappear. They come back again, and you release them again. With practice, they disappear and don’t come back, if you give your mind a more productive thing to do. The productive thing to do is to look for the positive new emergence that’s trying to happen. In other words, when you find yourself worrying, know that there is something positive trying to break through. Your worry-thoughts, particularly if you find yourself recycling the same ones over and over, are a flag waving at you from your Zone of Genius. Something is trying to get your attention. Look beyond the worry-thoughts, and you will often find a new direction that’s being laid out for you.
When I’m operating in my Zone of Genius, I am doing what I love to do and I’m enjoying what I have. My worry-thoughts about money were simply a sign. The sign said it’s time for me to expand my capacity to revel in the joy of having created
abundance and love. To my knowledge, that combination is something new in my family lineage. It’s new territory, and I’m learning to live in it. To do that, I need to overcome thousands of years of programming that adversity is a constant requirement of existence. We need to savor our success, first for seconds at a time, then for minutes that grow into months.
It’s a heroic task. Science tells us that it took a very long time for our fish ancestors to evolve the necessary equipment to turn those initial flops on dry land into walks. Now we’re in a stage of evolution in which we’re doing the inner equivalent of those early fish flops: we’re learning to let ourselves enjoy love, abundance, and other forms of positive energy without sabotaging ourselves. Patience is called for, along with a good pat on the back for ourselves when we have moments of savoring our good fortune.
Criticism and Blame
I mentioned earlier that most worry-thoughts have absolutely nothing to do with reality. That’s true for criticism, too. In other words, when we criticize something, it usually doesn’t have anything to do with the thing we’re criticizing. When we blame someone or something, we’re doing it because we’ve hit our Upper Limit and are trying to retard the flow of positive energy.
When this fact first dawned on me, I had trouble accepting it. I had spent years perfecting my criticize-and-blame mechanism. When I was in the act of criticizing or blaming, I was completely convinced that the other person had done something that needed criticizing. Criticizing and blaming are like being in a hypnotic trance. When we’re in the trance, we really believe that the other person has done wrong. You’ve probably seen the kind of stage hypnotism where the hypnotist gets the subject to believe he’s a dog or a chicken. The subject barks on command or struts about the stage flapping imaginary wings. The audience roars with delight, probably because we recognize that we spend a good bit of our own lives in a trance.
Criticism and blame are addictions. They are costly addictions, because they are the number-one destroyer of intimacy in close relationships. When people give the reasons for breaking up with someone, the most common one goes something like this: “I got tired of the constant criticism and blame.” With that in mind, it becomes doubly important to regard criticism and blame as addictions.
If you want to find out if your Upper Limit behavior is an addiction, here’s a quick experiment: Try to stop it for a day and see what happens. If it’s not an addiction, you’ll be able to stop right away. If it’s an addiction, it will creep back into your behavior unconsciously, just as smokers who quit find a cigarette back in their hands without even realizing it.
Self-criticism and criticizing others are one and the same. In other words, self-blame is part of the same Upper Limit pattern as blaming someone else. Both criticizing yourself and criticizing others are highly addictive and very popular ways of busting up the flow of positive energy. Remember earlier when I said that worry is useful only if it concerns something real that you can do something about? Criticism works the same way. It is useful only if it’s directed at a specific thing and produces a useful result. For example, if I’m standing on your toe in an elevator, go ahead and criticize me. It’s useful, especially if it produces the result of liberating your toe from the tyranny of my shoe.
Chronic criticism and chronic blame are the behaviors we really need to eliminate. They are never about producing a result. I coached John, a top executive at Dell Computer, some years ago about a problem that was causing considerable stress in his work group. The problem was that he would sometimes explode in anger and blast off a stream of criticism at someone or the entire group. On some occasions John would even go so far as to beat on the table with his fist and turn beet red in the face. This behavior wasn’t so much a problem for him as it was for the others. Ten seconds after the explosion, he would forget about it. “Don’t pay any attention to it,” he’d say. “I don’t mean anything by it, and I never hold grudges.” Unfortunately, the recipients of his wrath were not blessed with the “just forget about it” mechanism. Some of them would still be smarting from his explosions days or even weeks later.
Why was this pattern an Upper Limit behavior? When I worked it through with John, we discovered that these blow-ups often followed on the heels of some good news. For example, one of his executives would do something noteworthy. My client would start to feel a positive flow of energy and would have the urge to give the person a compliment. Then his Upper Limit would kick in, and he would start thinking of ways the person had disappointed him in the past. The disappointment would curdle quickly into anger, and a blowup would ensue. When I asked around among the executives, none of them could ever remember John giving them a compliment.
John made a commitment to ending the pattern of anger explosions. We went to work on breaking up the problematic sequence. I had him role-play giving a compliment to one of the executives, using myself as the stand-in. When he opened his mouth to give the compliment, John started coughing furiously. I invited him to pause and tune in to the feelings that were behind the coughing. He reported that it reminded him of his father, fifty years before, giving him compliments that were really criticisms, such as “You’re finally getting the grades you should have been getting all along.” John told me he ultimately learned to cringe anytime his father said something positive to him, because he knew it was going to have a backhand slap concealed in it. “I never knew when the ax was going to fall,” he said.
I gently pointed out that he was perpetuating the same pattern with his executives. Many of them had told me that they often avoided going to him with important issues because they never knew when one of his blow-ups was going to happen. John slumped back in his chair when this insight sank in. He sat there for a moment, seemingly stunned, and then said, “I want to fix that.” As soon as he left the meeting with me, John called his executives together and told them what he’d just learned. I chose not to participate in the meeting, lest it seem that I was masterminding his revelations. Later I heard from my client and the executives that it had been one of the most powerful moments of their business careers. The executives were particularly moved to see a powerful person they admired be so genuine with them.
My assignment to you: become a keen observer of critical statements that come out of your mouth or fly through your mind. Begin to sort them into two piles: Pile One contains all the criticisms about real things you plan to do something about (“Hey, you’re standing on my toe. Get off!”); Pile Two contains all the others. I predict you’ll make the humbling but liberating discovery, as I did, that Pile Two towers over the paltry stack in Pile One.
Deflecting
Many of us crimp the flow of positive energy by avoiding it altogether. The mechanism we use is what I call deflection; it’s so common we almost take it for granted in human life. Think of how many times you’ve heard conversations like the following example of deflection:
JOE: You did a great job on that presentation.
JACK: Nah, I ran out of time and had to leave out some of the best stuff.
JOE: Still, I noticed that people were really paying attention.
JACK: I’m glad they weren’t paying too close attention, because they would have seen more places I messed up.
Deflection keeps the positive energy from landing, being received, and being acknowledged. Notice how simple and gracious it would be if Jack handled the moment in a different way: by receiving and acknowledging the positive energy instead of deflecting it:
JOE: You did a great job on that presentation.
JACK: Thanks. I appreciate you for saying that. I’m glad it came across well, because I felt bad about running out of time and leaving out some of the best stuff.
Here, Jack received the appreciation instead of flicking it off. He acknowledged Joe for the expression of positive energy, adding his own reservations about the presentation only after he let the appreciation land on him.
When we shut out positive energy through deflection, we keep ourselves safel
y in our Zone of Competence or Zone of Excellence. Deflection keeps us from challenging ourselves, preventing us from expanding our capacity for experiencing positive energy.
If you want to study deflection up close, spend a little time on a golf course. Golfers seem particularly skilled at deflecting positive energy. (By the way, lest anyone think I’m a golf whiz, I’m a seventeen handicapper who employs perseverance and enthusiasm to overcome a remarkable lack of natural athletic skill.)
A while back the CEO of a Fortune 500 company was visiting me to get some coaching in handling a board-room relationship issue. Ed was an avid golfer, and since my home office is right next to one of the best golf courses on the West Coast, our afternoon coaching session spilled over into a late-afternoon round. As fate would have it, we were paired with two attorneys, whom I’ll call Al and Bob, up from Beverly Hills for a day of golf. My client and I had been working on his Upper Limit Problem all day long, and I could not have asked for a better example of deflection than our two golf-mates provided. Throughout the round they engaged in one deflection after another. Here are a few examples:
ME: Nice shot, Al.
AL: Nah, I didn’t make full contact.
ED (my client): Beautiful putt, Bob!
BOB: It’s about time I got one in. My putting has been horrible all day.
ME: Wow, great approach shot, Bob! (He’d just hit his pitching wedge from a hundred yards out to land three feet from the hole.)
BOB: Yeah, well, I got lucky that time. Even a blind squirrel gets an acorn now and then.
On and on it went. They were both excellent golfers, but to hear their dialogue, you would have thought they were the worst of hackers. It was a perfect addition to my coaching day with Ed, because we got to study deflection with a couple of masters. By the time the round was over, my client had seen so many deflections that I doubt he ever uttered another one in his life.
The Big Leap Page 6