Inside-Out
âThere is no real excellence in all this world which can be separated from right living.â
DAVID STARR JORDAN
In more than 25 years of working with people in business, university, and marriage and family settings, I have come in contact with many individuals who have achieved an incredible degree of outward success, but have found themselves struggling with an inner hunger, a deep need for personal congruency and effectiveness and for healthy, growing relationships with other people.
I suspect some of the problems they have shared with me may be familiar to you.
â˘Iâve set and met my career goals and Iâm having tremendous professional success. But itâs cost me my personal and family life. I donât know my wife and children anymore. Iâm not even sure I know myself and whatâs really important to me. Iâve had to ask myselfâis it worth it?
â˘Iâve started a new dietâfor the fifth time this year. I know Iâm overweight, and I really want to change. I read all the new information, I set goals, I get myself all psyched up with a positive mental attitude and tell myself I can do it. But I donât. After a few weeks, I fizzle. I just canât seem to keep a promise I make to myself.
â˘Iâve taken course after course on effective management training. I expect a lot out of my employees and I work hard to be friendly toward them and to treat them right. But I donât feel any loyalty from them. I think if I were home sick for a day, theyâd spend most of their time gabbing at the water fountain. Why canât I train them to be independent and responsibleâor find employees who can be?
â˘My teenage son is rebellious and on drugs. No matter what I try, he wonât listen to me. What can I do?
â˘Thereâs so much to do. And thereâs never enough time. I feel pressured and hassled all day, every day, seven days a week. Iâve attended time management seminars and Iâve tried half a dozen different planning systems. Theyâve helped some, but I still donât feel Iâm living the happy, productive, peaceful life I want to live.
â˘I want to teach my children the value of work. But to get them to do anything, I have to supervise every move⌠and put up with complaining every step of the way. Itâs so much easier to do it myself. Why canât children do their work cheerfully and without being reminded?
â˘Iâm busyâreally busy. But sometimes I wonder if what Iâm doing will make any difference in the long run. Iâd really like to think there was meaning in my life, that somehow things were different because I was here.
â˘I see my friends or relatives achieve some degree of success or receive some recognition, and I smile and congratulate them enthusiastically. But inside, Iâm eating my heart out. Why do I feel this way?
â˘I have a forceful personality. I know, in almost any interaction, I can control the outcome. Most of the time, I can even do it by influencing others to come up with the solution I want. I think through each situation and I really feel the ideas I come up with are usually the best for everyone. But I feel uneasy. I always wonder what other people really think of me and my ideas.
â˘My marriage has gone flat. We donât fight or anything; we just donât love each other anymore. Weâve gone to counseling; weâve tried a number of things, but we just canât seem to rekindle the feeling we used to have.
These are deep problems, painful problemsâproblems that quick fix approaches canât solve.
A few years ago, my wife Sandra and I were struggling with this kind of concern. One of our sons was having a very difficult time in school. He was doing poorly academically; he didnât even know how to follow the instructions on the tests, let alone do well on them. Socially he was immature, often embarrassing those closest to him. Athletically, he was small, skinny, and uncoordinatedâswinging his baseball bat, for example, almost before the ball was even pitched. Others would laugh at him.
Sandra and I were consumed with a desire to help him. We felt that if âsuccessâ were important in any area of life, it was supremely important in our role as parents. So we worked on our attitudes and behavior toward him and we tried to work on his. We attempted to psych him up using positive mental attitude techniques. âCome on, son! You can do it! We know you can. Put your hands a little higher on the bat and keep your eye on the ball. Donât swing till it gets close to you.â And if he did a little better, we would go to great lengths to reinforce him. âThatâs good, son, keep it up.â
When others laughed, we reprimanded them. âLeave him alone. Get off his back. Heâs just learning.â And our son would cry and insist that heâd never be any good and that he didnât like baseball anyway.
Nothing we did seemed to help, and we were really worried. We could see the effect this was having on his self-esteem. We tried to be encouraging and helpful and positive, but after repeated failure, we finally drew back and tried to look at the situation on a different level.
At this time in my professional role I was involved in leadership development work with various clients throughout the country. In that capacity I was preparing bimonthly programs on the subject of communication and perception for IBMâs Executive Development Program participants.
As I researched and prepared these presentations, I became particularly interested in how perceptions are formed, how they govern the way we see, and how the way we see governs how we behave. This led me to a study of expectancy theory and self-fulfilling prophecies or the âPygmalion effect,â and to a realization of how deeply imbedded our perceptions are. It taught me that we must look at the lens through which we see the world, as well as at the world we see, and that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world.
As Sandra and I talked about the concepts I was teaching at IBM and about our own situation, we began to realize that what we were doing to help our son was not in harmony with the way we really saw him. When we honestly examined our deepest feelings, we realized that our perception was that he was basically inadequate, somehow âbehind.â No matter how much we worked on our attitude and behavior, our efforts were ineffective because, despite our actions and our words, what we really communicated to him was, âYou arenât capable. You have to be protected.â
We began to realize that if we wanted to change the situation, we first had to change ourselves. And to change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.