On "Success" and "Failure"

New Principles, Number 3

I received the following e-mail this past week and thought the question to be interesting. I hope you all know that I do read my e-mails, and respond reasonably quickly, either directly or here in Into the Centre. If you have a topic or issue you'd like to raise, go for it. Anyway, here's the relevant portion of the e-mail:

I enjoy receiving your articles every Monday; they raise the conscience and give me something to ponder over during the week. If you are looking for future topics, I'd be interested in what you might have to say about personal limitations and failure. How do we acknowledge and accept them in a positive manner? How do we act within our limits, yet reach beyond our grasp? There seems an inherent contradiction between "setting your mind on anything" and the real, universe-given limitations that we are born with. What does failure mean with respect to all of that? I thought I would mention it in case you keep a list of possible topics for future articles.

I find this question interesting, from several levels. What this initially led me to do was to go to the index pages on The Phoenix Centre's web site. I think I had something in mind, and ended up just reading titles of past articles and clicking on some. Here's a quote from the August 23, 1999 issue (god we've been around for a long time…)

Water Situations (this idea is taken from my book, Living Life in Growing Orbits. You can read the Water Situations section online) are examples in our life that fly in the face of what we believe to be true (Rock Beliefs). Just as in a contest between rock and water, water always wins, when we begin to understand that we are limited by our beliefs, not by outside forces, AND understand that the solution to the limitation is a change of belief, AND actually make that change, we escape the limit.

I know. It's not easy to admit that we choose each and every one of our behaviours. We choose what we think we can do, and emphatically we choose what we will not do. As I repeat often, we all work at this (all the time!!!) by digging out what we believe. As we allow ourselves to unearth and verbalize what we've been told by others, and as we verbalize what we've done with those rules, we get the opportunity to decide what is helpful, as opposed to what was helpful for someone else. …

Limiting behaviours are easy to find, as they are always protected under the rubric of "There's nothing I can do about that. It's just how I am, (or "it is.")" or, "It's my parent's fault. They made me the way I am." It's as if we believe we are compelled to do this thing, against our will. 

Water stories remind us that nothing is graven in stone. As we look at these stories we can then make the leap that anything that gets in our way originates in our own perception. Far from spending our lives, then, changing the whole world, we can look at changing our approach to the situation, and changing the rule(s) that got us messed up in the first place.

So, what does that have to do with the question, above? Well, I'd like to suggest to you that the question is all about how I choose to define the situations I confront. Several examples occur to me: I just started working with a 17-year-old who was abused. At the moment, see sees that event as pivotal and non-resolvable, as in, "Because of that, I'll never be able to trust anyone again." Because she has couched the experience and the past 5 years since the experience in the light of "never," she misses any exceptions, while always noticing that which supports her belief. My goal, then, in therapy, is to help her to change her definition of the abuse to "a situation I experienced and worked my way through." This means she'll have to drop having the abuse to blame for everything that doesn't work out in her life.

Because the West favours black and white thinking - favours putting judgements on everything, we tend, because we were taught to, to take the events of life and go (among other black and white comparisons), "success" or "failure." I'm not so sure that life is quite that clear cut.

I consider my relationship with Dar to be pretty much the most elegant relationship I see around me. As I've mentioned before, I say this having had 19 years of experience hanging out with Dar. It takes years for a relationship to mature, and the vast majority don't. On the other hand, my marriage to Dar is my third. Now, here's the question - were my first to marriages failures?

Of course not. Unless I choose to view them that way.

If you've read my booklets on relationships, you know the story of my other marriages. Prior to age 32 (when my second marriage ended,) I was dumber than a stump when it came to living life. My motivations were cloudy and I thought it was my god-given right to insist on my way in a relationship. Then, with my therapist Gloria Taylor's help, I "got it."

Out of my experience with my second wife, came " The List of 50." I became aware that I had, in the past, started a relationship pretty much with anyone cute I stumbled over. I'd meet someone and think, "Well, she's not whom I want, but I can change her." I suddenly realized that if I put energy into thinking about what I really wanted in a partner or a friend, I'd have a much better chance of finding them. This was the lesson of my second marriage.

Perhaps, then, in my world, the only "failure" I can think of is when I do not learn from the experience, and therefore am condemned to repeat it. On the other hand, who I am today is a direct result of all of my decisions and choices.

A second question, raised above, concerns limitations. In my article of October 18, 1999, I wrote:

This is what the authors of Language, Structure and Change are getting at. Note the idea of "expanding possibilities." They mention "alternatives that had no previous existence." They are suggesting, as am I, that far from there being limited choices in life, the limitations we find ourselves confronting are constructions, determined in advance by the stories we tell ourselves. Or, as the expression goes, "Argue for your limitations and they are yours."

We have the potential, in dialogue, to examine and re-examine the stories of our life. We can listen to what we tell ourselves, how we describe our situation, and we can begin to understand that, far from seeing our lives objectively, we see them "objectively," and find ourselves living self-fulfilling prophecies that are limiting and limited in the extreme.

Again, my thinking is that all limitations are self-imposed. And some things are beyond my control. We walk in tension between these ideas. The wise person is he or she that can narrow their focus while broadening their horizon, seeing, for themselves, both what is possible and what is worth the effort.

It is so, especially in the West, that we can have pretty much whatever we want. We've taken that to mean acquisition of things as a measure of worth. The "system" supports such thinking. Many of us choose not to "count coup" in this way. We choose to determine our "success" on the basis of personal satisfaction with a job well done.

So, let's say I want to be a "best selling author." Hmm. There's a difficulty in thinking that way. I can control the "author" part. The "best selling" is determined by the public. I would be better off setting my sights on being an "above average," then "excellent" writer. Having achieved the best I can achieve, given my skill set, I will either be, or not be, "best selling."

Take van Gogh. If memory serves, he sold 2 or 3 paintings in his life. Question. Did he "succeed" or "fail" as an artist? Hmm.

Let's say I want to be an NBA star. Hmm again. I'm 5'7" tall, 51 years of age and getting a bit creaky. My jump shot is off and I need a ladder to slam dunk. Not likely. On the other hand, Mugsy Bogues is 5'3" and is an NBA star. Hmm.

The question just raised is, do I want to be an NBA star bad enough to dedicate my entire being to it, and with the recognition that the odds are it won't happen?

The question is one of realistic expectations, coupled with success measured not on comparisons with others, but on comparisons with myself.

(to be continued, next week!)