“I wish I had time to stop and chat, but I’m in a hurry.”
“Where did the time go?”
“There simply aren’t enough hours in the day.”
“If only I’d gotten another hour of sleep.”
“Love to talk but I’ve gotta run…”
“I have to get to the bank…”
“I don’t have time to do that right now.”
Each of those statements contains an overt or covert complaint, portraying the speaker as a victim of time. It treats time as a scarce commodity, sending the message that time is “out there” and that there isn’t enough of it “in here.” Each statement is a miniwhimper of misery, a claim that time is the whip master and we’re its hapless galley slaves, rowing desperately to stay ahead of the lash. The moment you stop complaining about time, you free up the necessary energy to mount a similar campaign on the inner plane. You will need that energy, because it is one thing to stop complaining that you are the victim of time, but it is quite another to stop feeling that you’re its victim.
One particular phrase I’d like you to eliminate is this common one: I don’t have time to do that right now. Like many of us, you probably use it often. Based on what you’ve learned in this chapter, you can probably now see that it’s a lie. It’s a lie for two reasons: First, time is not something you have or don’t have. You’re the source of it, and you make as much of it as you want. Second, when you say, “I don’t have time to do that right now,” you’re telling a polite lie to avoid saying, “I don’t want to do that right now.” By placing the blame on time, you avoid confronting the blunt truth of the matter.
Imagine that you have an eight-year-old child who comes in while you’re working on something and says, “Will you play catch with me?” You reply, “I don’t have time to do that right now.” Imagine, though, that the child comes in and says, “I just stepped on a nail and my foot is bleeding. Can you help me?” You probably wouldn’t say, “I don’t have time to do that right now.” In actuality, you have exactly the same amount of time as when you used the excuse of lack of time to avoid playing catch. The truth of the matter is that you didn’t want to play catch and you do want to stop the bleeding. By using time as the culprit, you place yourself in the victim position once again. You did it to be polite. (By the way, I’m not advocating that you be blunt with anyone, especially eight-year-old children. I’m advocating that you stop using time or lack of time as an excuse. It’s just as polite to say to your child, “I want to finish what I’m working on before I play catch,” rather than claiming to be the victim of time.)
THE SENSATION OF TIME PRESSURE
Notice what time pressure feels like in your body. Think of it as another sensation like hunger. We usually register hunger as gnawing, unpleasant contractions in the middle of the front of our bodies. What does time pressure feel like in your body? What does being in a hurry feel like? What does the sluggish side of the time continuum—the sensation most people call “boredom”—feel like to you?
In me, the pressure of being in a hurry feels like pressure between my spine and my heart, pushing toward the front of my chest. Your sensation might be different, or it might be similar to mine. When I tune in to time pressure, I also feel neck tension and the sensation that I’m pushing slightly forward with my head. That’s me in a hurry. The other end of the continuum—boredom—feels like a deadened, shadowy darkness in the front of my chest, running from my collarbone down to my navel. As I tune in to those sensations right this moment, I realize that I much prefer being in a hurry to being bored. If I had to pick one, there’d be no choice. It occurs to me that I’ve organized much of my life to avoid the possibility of being bored.
As I tune in to the “being in a hurry” feeling in my body, I feel the surge of another awareness. I realize it’s not being in a hurry that is the real source of the feeling; it’s the feeling of creative ferment happening inside me. I love the slightly chaotic inner feeling of having a bunch of interesting things to find out, of asking big questions and waiting for answers to appear, of not quite having figured out things I’m passionately interested in. That’s when I feel most alive, and I like having that feeling of aliveness all the time.
As a result, I can remember only one instance of being bored in the past thirty years. My instance of boredom came about because I decided to retire when I was fifty. I saw myself going on leisurely beach strolls with my wife, writing the occasional haiku, living off book royalties, and tugging thoughtfully at the beard I had always intended to grow. My wife vividly remembers my retirement, too, because she still talks about it as the longest three weeks of her life. I turned out to be an utter failure at retirement. I took plenty of leisurely beach strolls with Kathlyn, and I think I even wrote a haiku or two. One day in the third week of my retirement, I was out on a beach walk when an unexpected thought crept into my mind: I’m bored.
It wasn’t that I missed being in a hurry; I just realized that my very nature is saturated with an urge to be creating something all the time, and preferably three or four things at the same time. That’s when I feel most alive. So, I said farewell to retirement and have been happily in ferment ever since.
After seeing the powerful results of my “no complaints about time” diet, I started inviting my clients to put themselves on it. They harvested remarkable results, too.
Here are some of the benefits they told me about:
“We found ourselves getting more things done without feeling rushed.”
“We ended the workday feeling less fatigue.”
“We suddenly had time to carry out leisurely conversations that we would have cut short in times past.”
One of my clients, an executive in a talent agency, gave a particularly good example of the changes he experienced:
I would compare it to changing from using my elbows to drive a car to realizing I could use my hands. Suddenly a lot of frantic activity seemed no longer necessary. Before I took responsibility for the amount of time I had at my disposal, I felt I was in an ongoing wrestling match with time. I saw time as a big, threatening pressure that was always about to overwhelm me. When I learned the real truth—that I’m the source of both the time and the pressure—it was like a huge weight lifted off me.
That’s exactly what it feels like.
AN INVITATION
At this point it would be traditional for me to say something like “Take plenty of time to master these principles.” However, since you are the source of time, we will amend that to “Make plenty of time to master these principles.”
The original insight—that we are the source of time, that time is not a pressure from outside, that we can make as much as we need—takes only a split second to comprehend. However, it takes a lot of practice to integrate that insight into the practicalities of our lives. The main thing it takes is keen attention. Be on the lookout constantly for complaints about time that come out of your mouth or go through your mind. As you spot them and eliminate them one by one, you will grow steadily less busy while getting a great deal more done.
Now I’ll step aside and let you take charge. I’ve told you everything I know about Einstein Time, and you have everything you need to know to implement it. Let the good times roll.
SEVEN
Solving the Relationship Problem
Transcending the Upper Limits of Love and Appreciation
As you know by now, the essential move we all need to master is learning to handle more positive energy, success, and love. Instead of focusing on the past, we need to increase our tolerance for things going well in our lives now. If we don’t learn how to do this, we suffer in every area of our lives. One area that suffers spectacularly is our relationships. As we bump into our Upper Limit Problems, relationships are one of the key areas that suffer greatly. In fact, the greater success you achieve, the bumpier your relationships tend to be. I’ll explain why and show you how to avoid this last pervasive barrier.
John Cuber an
d Peggy Harroff conducted one of the few in-depth studies ever done on the relationships of successful people. The authors found that 80 percent of the 437 successful people they studied had unsatisfying marriages and long-term relationships. Only about 20 percent of the couples had relationships the authors called vital. The other 80 percent had three main styles of unsatisfying relationships:
In devitalized relationships, the partners remained together in spite of having fallen out of love with each other years ago. They had been “going through the motions,” sometimes for decades. The relationships often looked OK from the outside, but there was little or no passion between the individuals.
In passive-congenial relationships, the partners had never been passionate about each other in the first place. Their relationship was based more on affectionate friendship; they were much like business partners. Their expectations were low, so they were seldom disappointed with each other. Because of the low expectations, they didn’t fight much and so remained together in a state of ho-hum harmony.
In conflict-habituated relationships, the partners had created a lifestyle based around constant conflict. Whether engaged in low-level bickering or heated conflict, they remained in long-term combat interrupted by periods of truce. They seemed almost to thrive on conflict, which provided them with an adrenaline-infused state of ongoing arousal.
I felt a wave of despair when I first saw these findings. If these highly successful people had such dismal relationships, was there any hope for the rest of us? It’s been twenty years since I first saw this study, and with those years has come considerable experience working with people and their relationships. I don’t think the overall statistics are any different now than when Cuber and Harroff first published their results. In other words, I think the majority of successful people still have dismal relationships. Now, though, I know a lot more about how they got that way. More important, I know a lot more about how they can avoid falling into the traps that many successful people get stuck in. I feel a great deal more hope now than I did twenty years ago. The reason is that I’ve seen many successful people transform their relationships—whether devitalized, conflict-habituated, or passive-congenial—into vital unions.
There are two main reasons that successful people have dismal relationships: (1) simply because they’re successful; and (2) because they don’t know how the Upper Limit Problem works. The very fact of being successful makes it more likely that the relationship will be troubled, because both partners have to deal with the Upper Limit Problem to a more intense degree. Let me give you an example.
I worked with a famous couple that would definitely fit the conflict-habituated category. To safeguard their privacy, I’ll call them Jim and Jane. Things had been going quite well in their relationship during the first five years, but a sudden upsurge of success tripped their Upper Limit switch. Suddenly they were on the covers of magazines, and ultimately they even attracted ugly badges of success such as paparazzi and stalkers. By the time they got to me, they had been bickering and arguing for nearly two years straight.
Recall that one of the biggest drivers of the Upper Limit Problem is a false belief that says, “I’m fundamentally flawed and don’t deserve success.” This false belief dominated their early lives, although neither of them recognized it until they gained an understanding of the Upper Limit Problem. When I explained to them how the ULP worked, and how old beliefs spring forth to pull us back down into the old familiar negative sense of ourselves, their famous faces actually paled in recognition.
Mine did, too, when it first dawned on me how much I was sabotaging my own efforts to get the love I so craved. Fortunately, I made some of these discoveries before I met Kathlyn in 1980, so I didn’t have to use our relationship as the laboratory for all of my early experiments. By the time I met her, I had seen the destructive power of my own barriers to giving and receiving love. Particularly, I had seen the power of projection, a subject that in my opinion should be in the curriculum of all elementary schools everywhere.
A vast amount of energy can be liberated in relationships by dropping the habit of projection. As mentioned, projection occurs when you attribute to others something that’s true for you inside yourself. For example, a man may complain to me that his wife is too passive. If he were to own the projection, he would say, “I have not learned to handle a relationship in which a woman is being powerful and equal, so I create relationships with women in which I require them to be passive.” A woman may complain that her partner dominates her and limits her full expression. If she were to own the projection, she would say, “I attract men who dominate and control me. I have not learned how to be my own boss and take up my full space in the world.”
Projection is the source of power struggles that eat up energy and intimacy in relationships. Power struggles are a war between two people to see whose version of reality will win out. Much of the energy in troubled relationships is drained through power struggles about who’s right, who’s wrong, and who’s the biggest victim. Relationships—healthy ones, that is—exist only between equals. When both people are not taking 100 percent responsibility, it is an entanglement, not a relationship. There is only one way to transform an entanglement into a relationship: both people must drop projection and see that they are 100 percent the creators of their reality. With the energy saved from banishing power struggles, much more can be co-created than the partners could have created on their own.
If both people in a relationship can understand the Upper Limit Problem, they can begin to adjust the thermostat upward so they can handle increasingly more positive energy. The thermostat can be adjusted upward in several ways. Just noticing how you limit love and positive energy solves much of the problem. Do you bring yourself down with food? Do you drink too much? Do you deflect compliments? Do you find yourself thinking of something else while making love? Do you get sick the day of an opportunity for intimacy in the relationship? Do you hold back on communicating instead of reaching out to people?
The Upper Limit Problem is magnified in successful couples, because each person is synergizing the other’s quest for a life in the Zone of Genius. At the same time, though, they are synergizing each other’s tendencies toward self-sabotage. Couples who wish to transcend these tendencies will benefit from making a mutual commitment to transcending Upper Limits and living with each other in the Zone of Genius. If both people are committed to getting there, the journey becomes much easier.
In any case, it’s a heroic task. The reason is twofold: because most of us have little experience observing healthy relationships; and because having healthy relationships is a new task in evolution. For the first couple of million years of human evolution, relationships were about survival, and communication was largely a matter of exchanging grunts. We’re newcomers to the idea of having our relationships be about fulfillment, heart-felt communications, and deep commitment to each other. Any of us who embark on a path of conscious growth must remember that we’re bringing with us millions of years of evolution. There is no quicker way to bring forth our inner Neanderthal than to get into a loving relationship. When we open up to more love and energy, we begin to flush old programming out of our system. Our energy thermostat is reset higher, and sometimes this sets off alarms in ourselves. Genuine contact with another person gets us high, and this trips the Upper Limit switch, making us want to come back down to a more familiar level.
There are several ways we limit positive energy in relationships. One is by starting arguments, out of fear of intimacy, at times when we could be exchanging intimacy. Another is by withholding significant communications. We get scared of being close, for example, and instead of telling the microscopic truth about it (“My belly felt tight and my skin contracted when I heard you say…”), we withdraw and swallow the communication. Another way we limit positive energy is by needing to control or dominate the other person (or needing to be controlled or dominated). If we always have to be right, for example, there is no room in
the relationship to be happy.
If you’re a successful person in a close relationship, you will likely find the following suggestions helpful.
Make sure you take plenty of time for yourself, in a space apart from your partner. It could even be in the next room, so long as the intention is to nurture the independent part of you. Human beings have twin drives of equal power: the urge to merge and the urge to be an autonomous person. For a relationship to thrive, both drives need to be celebrated.
A close relationship stirs up powerful transformative energies, and you need lots of rest time to integrate the rapid-fire stimulation that a relationship provides. If you can learn to take time off from the relationship consciously, you won’t need to do it unconsciously by starting arguments and engaging in other intimacy-destroying moves. Go on solo walks, take in a movie by yourself, spend an afternoon doing whatever the spirit moves you to do. These periods of battery-charging alone time give you the ability to master longer and longer periods of closeness when you’re in union with your beloved.
Put a priority on speaking the microscopic truth, especially about what is going on in your emotions. Get skilled at simple microscopic truths such as “I’m sad,” “I’m scared,” and “I feel angry.” Communicating about feelings, dreams, desires, and other inner experiences creates deep intimacy in relationships. None of us gets any training in how to communicate about these simple things, and our lack of training is very costly.
When emotions are in the air, as they often will be in close relationships, don’t try to talk yourself or your partner out of them. Eliminate phrases such as “Please don’t cry” and “There’s nothing to be angry about.” Feelings are to be felt, so encourage each other to go through complete cycles of emotions. If you’re sad, let yourself feel that way until you don’t feel sad anymore. Same thing with fear, anger, happiness, and other feelings. It’s the act of stifling and concealing feelings that causes problems in relationships.
The Big Leap Page 14