The solution Dr. Smith’s unconscious mind came up with was laryngitis. Prevention and protection came to the rescue. His croaky voice prevented him from having to give the presentation and protected him from the embarrassment of being a phony. An illness with prominent, audible symptoms like laryngitis is a socially acceptable way of getting out of almost any activity.
Halfway through our conversation, the laryngitis disappeared and his voice returned to normal (although he didn’t notice it at first). Like a ringing telephone, many symptoms—even the most painful ones—stop annoying you when you get the message. He had a jaw-dropping moment of surprise when he finally realized he was speaking normally. It would probably make a better story if I told you he dashed into the dean’s office, blurted out his guilty truths, and proceeded with his presentation. What actually happened, though, was that he chose to keep his mouth shut and head back home to restore the celebratory mood with his wife.
The next time you find yourself with a stomachache, a throbbing head, or a stubbed toe, ask yourself if you might be Upper-Limiting. Sometimes a headache’s just a headache, but often if you look a little deeper you’ll find that it’s an expression of your Upper Limit Problem. Then, it’s a signal that you need to expand instead of contract. It’s telling you that it’s time to open up and embrace a new high-water mark of positive energy that’s trying to establish itself in you. Underneath the headache might be an insight that is as powerfully positive as the pain is negative. The surface pain is often caused by resisting the underlying positive message. Sometimes the positive message is a message we’re afraid to hear, such as “It’s time to quit my job and do something else.” I’ve sat with dozens of clients as they made this kind of discovery, realizing that they had unconsciously preferred dealing with the pain of the chronic headache or back pain rather than the fear and uncertainty of the underlying message. The bad news is that pain can last a long time if we’re unwilling to pay attention to the hidden message. The good news is that the fear and uncertainty last only as long as it takes us to hear the underlying positive message and begin to act on it.
INTEGRITY BREACH
Committing a breach of integrity is one of the quickest ways to bring yourself down after an excursion past your Upper Limit. The most popular integrity breaches are lies, broken agreements, and withheld truths. If you will begin to focus your keen awareness on those three behaviors, you can make huge strides in transcending your Upper Limit and establishing yourself in your Zone of Genius.
Begin by understanding integrity on the most practical level of daily reality. Many people think of integrity as a moral issue, and of course in part it is. However, there’s a much more fundamental way to think of integrity. If you think of integrity as a physics issue instead of a moral one, you’ll see that it belongs alongside unarguable forces such as gravity. Long before morality came into play, the original definition of integrity had to do with wholeness and completeness. To be in integrity meant you were whole and complete. To be out of integrity meant a breach in your wholeness had occurred; there was a gap in your completeness. Thinking of integrity as a physics issue gives you a much more practical tool than regarding it simply as a moral issue. Morality is about good and bad, right and wrong—all of which are highly arguable. Physics is about did and didn’t, not is and isn’t. Let me give an example of how a physics approach to integrity can be valuable in daily life.
Think of communication between people as a flow of energy. Think of your communication with your own inner depths in the same way. A breach of integrity stops the flow of energy, just as a pebble jammed in a garden hose stops the flow of water. Let’s say you and I meet on the street. “How’re you doing?” you ask. “Fine,” I say. You notice, though, that I look anything but fine. You notice that my mouth is downturned in a slight grimace and that a vertical worry-furrow is etched in my brow. Now you have a choice. You can do the “polite” thing and overlook what you see. Or you can make mention of what you noticed by going to a deeper level of communication: “Are you really fine? You look worried about something.” (By the way, I recommend that you break the surface like this only with people you care about. I don’t think it’s worth your while to go to this deeper level with the pizza delivery guy or the meter maid.)
If you decide to break through the surface politeness by calling attention to my worried brow, you keep the flow of communication going between us. If you don’t, the flow stops. Here’s why. The flow of communication includes your awareness of my furrowed brow. If you choose not to mention this awareness, the flow gets blocked. Pressure builds up as the flow looks for how to make a detour around the blockage. It’s a pebble in the hose. I’m not saying it’s a bad pebble; that would be the moral approach to the problem. It’s just a force to be reckoned with. It’s a gap in the completeness of the communication between us.
Consider the moment Bill Clinton uttered those magic words “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” I happened to be watching that moment on television, and I groaned when he said it. My wife and I (both of whom had voted for him) turned to look at each other with raised eyebrows, because we knew immediately that he was lying. How did we know that? Go watch the moment yourself (it’s on YouTube.com and other such sites), and you’ll see what tipped us off. When he speaks those words, he makes a little head jiggle and sideways cut with his eyes. I’d seen the same little expression dozens of times in therapy sessions with juvenile delinquents and others when they were trying to lie. In poker terms it’s a “tell.” In body-language research, it’s a clue to deception. To us, it was flashing neon sign that said a lot more than “I actually did have sex with that woman.” It was also saying, “I’m a naughty little boy who’ll keep acting out until I get caught.”
People of Clinton’s personality type are compelled to keep testing the limits. They’re unconsciously trying to find out whether they can outsmart everybody else, and they keep escalating until they discover the situation where they can’t. Why? When one of John F. Kennedy’s friends asked him why he would risk getting caught and compromising national security by sneaking lovers into the White House, he said, “I can’t help it.” “I can’t help it” is not an attractive quality to have in a president, but the general public never had to come face-to-face with it as we did with Clinton. Kennedy served a shorter time in office and enjoyed a less inquisitive press corps used to keeping mum about such things.
Clinton’s saga is pure Upper Limit Problem. Elected president twice, he was riding a wave of high approval ratings and a booming economy with, of all things, a budget surplus in the offing. A tiny voice somewhere in him whispered, “Things can’t possibly be this good.” His Upper Limit switch tripped, and history had its way with him.
Like most people, I think that lying is morally wrong, but for a moment just think of Clinton’s fib as a physics issue. The lie jammed a pebble in the garden hose. The flow was impeded; it took fifty million dollars and a year of everybody’s time to dislodge the pebble. As more details emerged, the war between the pebble and the flow got bigger and bigger until the inevitable happened. The DNA on Lewinsky’s famous blue dress finally got him. (Note to future presidents who are tempted to tell whopper lies: the flow always wins. For irrefutable evidence, have a look at the Grand Canyon.)
Now let’s shift the focus to the practical realities of daily life. Most of us will not encounter Upper Limit Problems that require DNA analysis, impeachment, and other Clinton-sized phenomena. So, where are we likely to find our integrity breaches? The first place to look is in the subtle ways we lie to ourselves in order to conceal feelings we do not want to accept consciously. Let me give you an example. I worked with Sarah and Jonah, a married couple who shared the leadership of a family business that had grown rapidly to forty million dollars in annual revenues. In our first session they traded complaints about various things; the one that had “really got his goat,” he said, was when she accused him of sexual flirtations with two of the employee
s. He had hotly denied having sexual feelings for either of the women, and the issue had quickly escalated into the same squabble that had been going on for months. One of the hazards of family businesses is that squabbles spread through the nonfamily employees faster than the family usually realizes. The couple had finally decided to come see me when a key employee took them aside one day and said, “I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but can you please fix it as soon as possible? It’s driving the rest of us nuts.”
I called a time-out and asked Sarah and Jonah when this cycle of arguing had first come up. Their answer confirmed my suspicion that it was an Upper Limit Problem: the squabble had erupted on the heels of their best-ever quarterly earnings report. They had not noticed that their squabble had broken out right after a celebration. An Upper Limit Problem puts people into an altered state of consciousness. We “go unconscious” in the sense of losing touch with our rational faculties. We don’t see the bigger picture.
I asked Sarah and Jonah a specific question designed to wake them up from the trance of their argument:
Would you be willing to consider that your conflict is not about what you think it’s about?
Early in my work on transcending my own Upper Limit, I made a key discovery: if I could consider, even for a moment, that I was not upset for the reason I thought I was, I could break out of the trance I was in. Then, I could begin to see what the real issues were. When awakened from a trance, though, many of us come to with a startled Huh? That’s how my clients responded, so I gave them a quick explanation of how the Upper Limit Problem works.
Sarah and Jonah got the concept quickly, but like recent occupants of a trance, they didn’t see how it might apply to them. I offered them the possibility that they were having trouble accepting the higher level of success and abundance, and that their arguments were not about sexual flirtation or any of the other things they were squabbling about. Perhaps those subjects needed to be addressed, I said, but not until they got the bigger picture into focus. The bigger picture was the tendency to sabotage their good feelings because they were not accustomed to receiving the higher level of abundance and success. I suggested that through squandering their energy on criticism and the sexual flirtation issue, they were keeping themselves trapped in their Zone of Excellence. Sarah and Jonah greeted my interpretation skeptically but were curious enough to stick with me a little longer.
As we explored together, Sarah gave more details on how she was experiencing the situation. Right after the quarterly earnings report, she had suddenly found herself being extremely critical of herself as well as of Jonah. “Out of nowhere,” she said, “I would suddenly start making mental lists of all my shortcomings and Jonah’s, too. Then I couldn’t keep from starting to criticize Jonah out loud. Then, he would start in on me and we’d be off and running.”
What about those accusations of sexual flirtation, though? Where were they coming from? I knew from past experience that when you hide feelings inside yourself, you start seeing them in other people. This is especially true with sexual feelings. I wondered if Sarah had felt a sexual attraction to someone else, hidden those feelings away deep inside her, and suddenly started focusing on her husband’s sexual feelings. If so, she wouldn’t be the first (or the five millionth) person to do this. It’s called projection, and there are dozens of chapters in the psychology textbooks on how it works. Simply put, if you have some emotion within you that you don’t know how to manage, you seal that emotion away and start trying to manage other people’s versions of it. I decided to play the hunch.
Think back to before all this started. Did you have some sexual feelings of your own that you hid down inside you?
There was an electric feeling in the room. They both seemed stunned, with a deer-in-the-headlights look of wide-eyed astonishment on their faces. Then, Sarah broke the silence with an attack on the messenger. She shot me a hostile glance and sneered, “So you think this is all my fault?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “This is not about fault or blame or anything like that. It’s about helping you find out how things work in your relationship.” Jonah suddenly chimed in with an observation: “I’m remembering that party.” She rolled her eyes, as in “Here we go again.” I asked them to tell me about it, and suddenly the whole scene was illuminated.
They had attended a large party at the home of some friends. It so happened that Sarah’s very favorite wine was being freely poured, and in the course of the evening she’d had, in her words, “more than my share.” She had become engrossed in a conversation with a young man who had just finished his MBA at the local university. On the way home from the party she and Jonah got into a huge argument. It started when she made mention of the young man’s ease with communicating his feelings. Jonah’s difficulty with communicating about his emotions was a frequent subject in their arguments.
“Let’s return to that moment, and see if we can figure out what was really going on,” I said. I suggested that there was something completely innocent but very important about her interaction with the young man. I asked Sarah to tune in to her deepest feelings and look for anything she might be hiding from herself. It took only a few seconds for it to emerge. Tears came, and she said that her conversation with the young man had triggered a deep sadness in her. She despaired that she would never have the kind of easy flow of communication with Jonah that she felt with the young man. It also triggered gloomy midlife thoughts that she was forty-five and “over the hill,” and might not ever experience the kind of deep emotional intimacy she yearned for in her marriage.
When people communicate at the deepest level, as Sarah was doing, it inspires others to drop into that level themselves. Jonah listened with rapt attention, and when he spoke it was to say, in a hushed tone, “I never realized how much that meant to you. Whenever that subject came up, I just heard it as criticism.”
I summarized: “You felt attracted to the young man because you were connecting with him on the emotional level. You really want that kind of connection with Jonah, but you despair of ever getting it. If you don’t get that, you’re going to fail to accomplish one of your biggest life goals. That’s big stuff. No wonder you started accusing Jonah of being attracted to a couple of the young women on your staff.” She nodded in agreement. Jonah leaned forward and said, “To be fair, I’d have to say I am attracted to them, although I would never act on it. They both have a kind of easygoing quality to them. Sarah and I used to have that when we were younger. I miss that. Everything is always such a big deal now, because we always have to be thinking about money and the business and the consequences of every little thing.” When he said this I noticed a new quality of attention on Sarah’s face. This was exactly the kind of communication she was looking for from him. When he spoke to her from that deeper place in himself, he became the man she wanted to be married to, inviting her into the place where her dreams could be fulfilled.
Here’s something I’ve learned from many experiences of helping people resolve conflicts. Under the surface of most conflicts, you’ll find that the warring parties are actually feeling the same deeper emotions. Two people may be locked in an angry conflict for weeks. When they get beneath the roiled surface of the issue, however, they discover that the real issue is that they’re both sad about something they’ve both kept hidden. They’ve been so locked into proving each other wrong that they haven’t taken a moment to contact the true heart of the issue. Sarah and Jonah were a living example of this problem. Once I see people communicating about the deeper feelings, I know that it’s possible for the miracle of rebirth to occur in the relationship. Now they’re communicating as allies, not as enemies, and when people do that, real-life miracles are possible.
Over the next couple of sessions, we worked on getting all those deeper feelings up into the light. There was sadness, and there were a number of fears they shared. They were afraid their lives were slipping away from them, swallowed up by all the long hours spent on the business
, on entertaining clients, on designing and building their dream house, and on the other time demands of their big lives.
THE FIRST STEP TO WHOLENESS:
DISCOVERING YOUR STORY
Earlier in this chapter I mentioned that integrity is really about wholeness and completeness. An integrity breach occurs when we do something that separates us from the wholeness of ourselves or other people. To find these breaches and restore wholeness, we need to get good at asking questions like these:
Where do I feel out of integrity with myself?
What is keeping me from feeling complete and whole?
What important feelings am I not letting into my awareness?
Where in my life am I not telling the full truth?
Where in my life have I not kept my promises?
In my relationship with _____________________, what do I need to say or do to feel complete and whole?
Questions such as these will lift you out of the limiting story that you’ve been living in. Almost all of us have a story about why we don’t access our genius. When we are within that story, it is very difficult to know that it’s just a story. What makes those stories seem so real (hard to recognize as “just stories”) is that they were being told before we were born. We’re born into stories that keep us from accessing our genius. We grow up among those stories and become like fish that aren’t aware of the water they’re swimming in.
For example, in one family the story might be that genius leads to irresponsibility. There was old Uncle George, who left his wife and seven kids behind to go off seeking his genius in the wilds of Fiji. He was never heard from again, except in one tantalizing photo he sent of himself grinning like a loon in the company of a native dance troupe. In another family the story might be that genius leads to madness. There’s old Aunt Cecily who retreated to her room in 1927 to write poetry and for the next forty years could always be heard cackling and howling up there. In another family the story might be that genius leads to poverty and decrepitude. Cousin Freddie spent his life trying to perfect an engine that ran on club soda and was forced to support himself in his old age by becoming a paperboy. Those stories are passed down from one generation to the next, to protect members of the clan from straying too far outside the confines of their zones of incompetence, competence, and excellence.
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