CHAPTER 1
THE SECRET LIFE
If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.
âFRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
We all live three lives: public, private, and secret. The secret life is where your heart is, where your real motives areâthe ultimate desires of your life. It is also the source of primary greatness. If you have the courage to explore your secret life, you can honestly question your deepest motivations. Are you prepared to rescript those motivationsâto realign your life to the core principles of true success?
The secret life is the key to primary greatness.
In New York City, I attended the Broadway play The Secret Garden. The play was particularly poignant for me, because my mother had just died.
The Tony Awardâwinning musical is the story of a young girl whose mother and father die of cholera in India as the play begins. She is sent to live with her uncle in a large British manor. The old house is filled with romantic spirits. As the restless girl explores the grounds of the estate, she discovers the entrance to the magical secret garden, a place where anything is possible.
When she first enters the garden, she finds that it appears to be dead, much like her cousin, a bedridden boy, and her uncle, still haunted by memories of his lovely wife who died giving birth to the boy. In harmony with natural laws and principles, the girl faithfully plants seeds and brings new life to the garden. As the roots are warmed and the garden cultivated, she brings about a dramatic transformation of her entire family culture within one season.
In my many years of teaching and training, I have seen several such transformations brought about by proactive people who live by principles of greatness in their secret, private, and public lives.
When I returned home the next day to speak at my motherâs funeral, I referred to The Secret Garden, because for me and many others, my motherâs home was a secret garden where we could escape and be nurtured by positive affirmation. In her eyes, all about us was good, and all that was good was possible.
Our Three Lives
In our public life, we are seen and heard by colleagues, associates, and others within our circle. In our private life, we interact more intimately with spouses, family members, and close friends. The secret life is part of the other two.
The secret life is the mainspring that motivates the other two lives. Many people never visit the secret life. Their public and private lives are essentially scripted by whom and what precedes and surrounds them or by the pressures of the environment. Thus, they never exercise that unique endowment of self-awarenessâthe key to the secret lifeâwhere you can stand apart from yourself and observe yourself.
Courage is required to explore your secret life because you must first withdraw from the social mirrorâthe reflection of ourselves that society feeds back to us but may have little to do with our inner selves. We get used to the view of ourselves in the social mirror. And we may opt to avoid self-examination and idle away our time in a vacuum of reverie and rationalization. In that frame of mind, we have little sense of identity, safety, or security.
The secret life is where your heart is, where your real motives areâthe ultimate desires of your life.
Examine Your Motives
The most critical junctures in my life take place when I visit my secret life and ask, âWhat do I think? What do I believe is right? What should my motives be?â These are times when I deeply visit my secret life and choose my motives. âWait a minute,â I say to myself. âItâs my life. I can choose how to use my time and energy. I can choose whether to get up in the morning and exercise. I can choose to get angry or not. I can choose whether I want to make reconciliation with this person or not. I can choose my own motives.â
One of the exciting fruits of the secret life is the ability to consciously choose your own motives. Until you choose your own motives, you really canât choose to live your own life. Everything flows out of motives and motivationâthey are the root of our deepest desires. The question is, which motives will we put first in our lives?
When I face a frustrating or perplexing situation, I enter into my secret life. Thatâs where I face myself and ask, âWill I live by correct principles, or will I surrender to the demands of secondary greatness?â
As I learn to be proactive in exploring the secret life, I tap into self-awareness, imagination, conscience, and into the exercise of free will to choose my motives.
For example, when thinking about your career, you might ask, âNow, what is my real motive?â N. Eldon Tanner, former Speaker of the Alberta Legislative Assembly and former Cabinet member, once said, âWhenever I had a big career decision, I had to visit my heart and ask, âAm I totally prepared to put first things firstâand in this position, will I keep my priorities straight?â â He said, âIâd have to struggle with that question until it was settled.â Once he had made that decision, he would look at the assignment and ask, âIf it would build the causes most dear to me, I will go and serve there.â He became well respected throughout his country.
Until you choose your own motives, you really canât choose to live your own life. Everything flows out of motives and motivationâthey are the root of our deepest desires.
I met with this great man once when I was serving on a search committee for a new university president. When I entered his office, he left his desk and came around, sat next to me, and said, âWhat do you want me to understand?â He listened to me with much intensity and sincerity, then said, âI want you to know how much I respect you.â It deeply impressed me.
People who regularly explore their secret life and examine their motives are better able to see into the heart of others, practice empathy, empower them, and affirm their worth and identity.
A healthy secret life will benefit your private and public lives in many ways. For example, when Iâm preparing to give a speech, I read aloud a favorite discourse that is inspiring to me because it helps me clarify my motive. I lose all desire to impress. My only desire is to serve. And when I go to a public setting with that motive, I have great confidence and inner peace. I feel more love for the people and feel much more authentic myself.
Executives I have consulted with tell me, âThis is the first time in many, many years that Iâve done any soul searching. Iâve seen myself as if for the first time, and Iâve resolved that my life is going to be different. Iâm going to try to be true to what I really believe.â Over the years, many people have written me to say, âYour principles have made the difference. Iâd never really thought about some of them before, but I resonate with them.â Thatâs because these principles reside in their secret lives.
And yet, most of us spend our busy days privately doing our thing, never pausing long enough to enter the secret life, the secret garden, where we can create masterpieces, discover great truths, and enhance every aspect of our public and private lives.
A healthy secret life is the key to primary greatness.
Self-Affirmation
A key to having a healthy secret life is self-affirmation. Among the most important bits of communication are messages of affirmation you give yourself and others.
A good self-affirmation has five characteristics:
âș Itâs personal, meaning it is written in the first person.
âș Itâs positive rather than negative, meaning that it affirms what is good and right.
âș Itâs present tense, meaning you are doing it now or have the potential for doing it.
âș Itâs visual, meaning you can see it clearly in your mindâs eye.
âș Itâs emotional, meaning you have strong feelings attached to it.
The following two examples of affirmation will serve to illustrate these five principles.
OVERREACTION. Suppose a parent who overreacts to spilled milk decides he has the potential for improvement. Thus, he resolves to respond with wisdom, love, firmness, fairness, patience, and self-control in stressful situations. He then writes his resolve in the form of an affirmation:
âHow deeply satisfying (emotional) it is to me (personal) to respond (present tense) under conditions of fatigue, stress, pressure, or disappointment (visual conditions) with self-control, wisdom, firmness, patience, and love (positive).â
PROCRASTINATION. Suppose an individual desires to improve in the area of procrastination. Because she compulsively puts things off and manages by crisis, she selects as her desired behavior to be on top of things, to be current and value-driven. Her affirmation becomes: âHow satisfying and exhilarating it is to be in charge of myself, guiding my own destiny, by taking time to plan, to work my plan, and to delegate to others.â
Power of Self-Affirmation
Norman Cousins, author of Anatomy of an Illness and Human Options, showed the world how the power of affirmation enables us to release within us our frequently untapped emotional strengths.
Within a week of returning home from a trip abroad, Cousins found himself almost unable to move his neck, arms, hands, fingers, and legs. Soon hospitalized, he was diagnosed as suffering from a serious disease of the connective tissues. His doctor told him, âYour chance for full recovery is one in five hundred.â
At first, Cousins allowed his doctor and the hospital to do their thing. Medication was administeredâoften in excess. Tests were performedâboth routinely and redundantly. All these medical procedures, plus his doctorâs unfavorable diagnosis, gave Cousins a great deal to think about. âIt seemed clear to me,â he later wrote, âthat if I were to be that one in five hundred, I had better be something more than a passive observer.â
Familiar with research detailing the negative effects of negative emotions on body chemistry, he asked: âWouldnât positive emotions produce positive effects? Is it possible that love, hope, faith, laughter, confidence, and the will to live have therapeutic value?â
Reasoning that if the negative is true, then the positive must also be true, Cousins soon formulated a plan for the pursuit of affirmative emotions. His plan drew upon medical resources, supportive professionals, laughter, and the love of his family. He then walked out of the hospital, secured a room in a hotel, hired his own nurse, and watched Marx Brothers movies and television comedies. Ten minutes of a deep belly laugh, he found, provided him with two or three hours of pain-free sleepâthe first in months. He discovered that the mind is a walking apothecary, a carry-it-with-you drugstore.
Week by week, Norman Cousins gained strength. Year by year, his mobility improved. And in spite of speculation by some that his efforts had nothing to do with his recovery, that he would have recovered had he done nothing or that he was simply the beneficiary of an experiment in self-administered placebos, Cousins believed that his experience was, and is, proof of the power of the will to live and the power of imagination to release and unleash enormous powers innate in us.
Three Helpful Practices
I have found the following three practices to be very helpful in the process of self-affirmation.
1. USE RELAXATION TECHNIQUES TO PLANT AFFIRMATIONS. Affirmations canât achieve effective results in the rush of everyday living. The mind and the body must slow down. By learning to relax, we can learn to slow down. When we are in a deeply relaxed state, our brain waves become very slow; they are then highly suggestible. Through visual and emotional affirmations, we can plant ideas and images deep within us. The challenge, of course, is to learn to relax.
There are many techniques for relaxing. One of the best is to consciously tense your muscle groups and then relax them. The theory behind this technique is that if you can tense a muscle, then logically you should be able to relax it. Another technique is to mentally relax so that you see yourself as limp as a rag doll. Or you visualize all of your muscles becoming limp and long. You see yourself in your mindâs eye becoming heavy from your feet up through your legs, your torso, and your arms, to your neck, your back, and your face.
During the twilight periodsâupon arising and just before retiringâthe brain waves are much slower. This becomes a prime programming opportunity, because the subconscious mind is more receptive than at any other time of day. I have used the principle of relaxation as it applies to affirmations with my own children and have seen dramatic resul...