Nina and I just got back from a weekend away celebrating our 19th wedding anniversary and 21st year together, and for a bit of light reading I brought a long a copy of Greg Baer’s wonderful book Real Love in Marriage. In the book, Dr. Baer makes a distinction that I find incredibly useful – the distinction between “Real Love” and “Imitation Love”.

Real Love is unconditional – it is that place of profound connection with another human being that transcends circumstances and comes with no conditions, no judgments, and no expectations. In Dr. Baer’s words, it “is caring about the happiness of another person without any thought for what we might get for ourselves.” It is what we all crave, and many of us can remember even a single experience of loving or being loved unconditionally for the rest of our lives.

It may have been the first time you held your baby in your arms or looked deeply into your sweetheart’s eyes. You may remember being picked up by a parent after falling or comforted by a friend after a particularly crappy day. It may even have been a time where your cat jumped into your lap and began to purr; or your dog lovingly nuzzled you as if they somehow knew that you were hurting and needed a little something extra in that moment. Whatever your history, it is virtually impossible to forget an experience of Real Love, and many of us spend our lives trying to recreate the circumstances in which we first felt it.

By contrast, conditional or “Imitation Love” is dependent on your behavior and the circumstances you find yourself in. In the book, Dr. Baer describes it as “distinguished from Real Love by the presence of disappointment and anger.” It is a system of punishments and rewards, and is learned from an early age at the knees of our parents. Here’s how I described it in You Can Have What You Want:

“Mommy and Daddy love you very much. As long as you do what we want, we will continue to love you as much as we do; if you don’t, we will withhold our love (or at least our approval) until you do what we want, at which point we will give all (or at least some) of it back.”

This “loving as behavior modification” model works up to a point, but it never quite fills the space in our hearts that is designed to give and receive love unconditionally.

As Dr. Baer goes on to say:

“With Real Love, nothing else matters; without it, nothing else is enough.”

Here are the four forms of Imitation Love as laid out in the Real Love/Imitation Love model:

1. Praise

I once worked with a famous comedian who was having trouble grasping a concept we were discussing and was beginning to show his frustration. I jokingly said “I’m sorry – am I not giving you enough praise?” to which he responded in all seriousness “No, it’s not you – it’s like a black hole in here. There’s no possible way you could fill it.”

And this is the problem with praise – like any other “feel good” medication we might take to make ourselves feel better, the more of it we have, the more we need in order to continue to feel OK.

2. Power

Nina and I finished our getaway with a trip to the cinema to see “Ghosts of Boyfriends Past”, and despite some holes in the plot you could drive a truck through, I found it extremely enjoyable. At one point the newly reformed ladies man played by Matthew McConaughey points out that “In relationships, the person who cares the least has the most power – but the person who cares the most is almost always the happiest.” This is not the kind of over-care that has an almost desperate, needy, or suffocating quality – it is the simple, genuine care that comes naturally from a place of innate well-being and an attitude that places feeling and communicating love at least one step above the desire for your partner to pick up their socks.

As Dr. Baer points out, “If you doubt that you control your spouse, consider how you feel when he doesn’t do what you want. Your disappointment or anger indicate that you want to control his behavior – however unconscious your efforts may be.”

3. Pleasure

I first heard a variation on the “I don’t love him but the sex is great” reasoning behind staying in a toxic relationship from a client who also suffered from an eating disorder. Essentially, whenever she was feeling empty inside, she would seek to fill that feeling of emptiness out with sensual pleasures. But as I said to her once in the midst of a session, “There aren’t enough cookies in the world to make you feel loved and whole.” Another client insisted that his drug use was no different than the Native American peace pipe ceremonies until I pointed out that a) he wasn’t on a vision quest and b) he wasn’t experiencing any peace.

Personally, I’m a big fan of pleasure – it’s just that if you’re using it as a substitute for Real Love, you will never be able to get enough of it no matter how hard you try.

4. Safety

In the absence of Real Love, attempting to keep ourselves safe from the pain of loss or heartbreak can seem like a pretty good strategy. This can lead to a life where everything seems “fine”, which my friend John LaValle defined as “F*%#d up, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional”. As with each of the other forms of Imitation Love, the problem is not in being safe – it is in attempting to use safety as a substitute for real, unconditional love, acceptance, and happiness.

Let’s go back to Dr. Baer’s book for a closer look at the cost of trying to make do with Imitation Love:

“Insufficient Real Love creates an emptiness we cannot ignore, especially when we also don’t have enough Imitation Love to make us feel better temporarily. Our subsequent behavior is then often determined by our need to be loved and our fear of not being loved. Without Real Love, we do whatever it takes – Getting Behaviors – to fill our sense of emptiness with Imitation Love. To eliminate our fear, we use Protecting Behaviors. The Getting Behaviors include lying, attacking, acting like a victim and running. The Protecting Behaviors include lying, attacking, acting like a victim, and clinging.”

So how do you create a relationship that isn’t based on getting and protecting?

By allowing yourself to see your partner as they really are, and by allowing your partner to see you as you really are.

If that’s a frightening thought for you, take a few minutes to do today’s experiment adapted from John F. DeMartini’s book Count Your Blessings: The Healing Power of Gratitude and Love…

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TODAY’S EXPERIMENT:

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1. Write down the name of the person you would most like to share Real Love with.

2. List at least ten character traits you like and then at least ten character traits that you don’t like about that person. Continue with both lists until you can begin to see them as they really are – good and bad, positive and negative, sinner and saint. You will know that your perceptions are truly balanced when you begin to feel a sense of genuine love and gratitude for this person being in your life. You may even experience the presence of a tear (or tears) in your eyes as you make the shift from trying to love “the good” in them to loving them as they are.

3. Repeat the exercise with yourself as the person.

Have fun, learn heaps, and happy exploring!

A client complained to me recently that he needed to become more disciplined, as he was failing to hit his targets in several key areas of his business. Years ago when I was first starting out as a coach I might have taken his complaint seriously and worked with him on becoming “a more disciplined person”, even taking the time to explore his patterns of self-sabotage and encouraging him to ‘just try harder’ and ‘focus more’ on what he really wanted.

But it’s become more and more clear to me over the years that success is less a matter of becoming a different kind of person than of finding what already works well for us and doing more of it. In other words, what holds us back is not some flaw in our character, but rather a blind spot in our understanding. I call this “the Goldilocks principle” – the idea that there is always a way of doing anything that fits just right for you.

Do you think you’re too lazy to succeed? Consider the story of Marc Allen, the millionaire publisher behind such personal development classics as Creative Visualization and The Power of Now. I had to get special permission to interview him for my radio show at 11am one week as he normally won’t do anything remotely business related until after lunch, a habit he engendered long before he achieved his financial success.

Are you not tough enough to make it in the dog-eat-dog world of business? Then you might find it difficult to account for the multi-million dollar financial and socially conscious success of hippie-ice cream entrepreneurs Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who balance the demands of their conscience with the demands of running a successful company by creating an imaginary entity they call “the monster” that makes their difficult business decisions for them. As Ben reputedly told Jerry when economic realities made it necessary to let employees go, “the monster is hungry – the monster must eat!”

I told my client the story of a man who designed new buildings for college campuses. In his original designs, the man used to draw in not only the new building but also the routes of access – all the sidewalks to and from the parking lots and other buildings. But to his dismay, when he would visit the campuses months later, he could see that students (and even some teachers) were often ignoring the sidewalks and making their own pathways to the new buildings, ruining the grass and making for some awkward patterns of foot traffic.

Rather than complain about the disrespectful students and irresponsible teachers, the designer came up with an innovative idea. Instead of trying to create a pre-determined path for people to follow, he began designing and placing the buildings without putting in any sidewalks at all. Then, after the building has been in use for a while, his team comes in and builds the sidewalks where the footpaths have naturally evolved.

The point is, you can either try to adapt yourself to fit in to what you think of as the “right way to succeed”, or you can employ the Goldilocks principle and find a way to succeed that fits “just right” for you.

And as George Bernard Shaw famously said:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

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TODAY’S EXPERIMENT:

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1. Think about what has worked well for you in certain projects in the past. What is it about the way those projects have been structured that enabled them to work so well?

Examples:

• Steve’s Story:
  As an accountant, I am always able to get everything done by the tax deadlines by bringing in extra help for the big push. It’s also helpful to me to know that I’m going on holiday immediately afterwards so that no matter how hard I’m working, I can always see a clear finish line ahead of me.
• Chris’s Story:
  As a writer, having set times to write means I don’t have to think about it before or after. Because I always write at the same time every day, people know I’m not available at those times so they adapt their requests around my schedule.




• Alison’s Story:
  As a mom, I find the family trips that work best are the ones where I have told the kids (and my husband) what to pack so many times that they complain to me that I must think they’re all idiots. I don’t think they’re idiots – and I notice with interest that when I don’t do that, they always forget things and complain about them later!

2. Now, think about a project you have coming up. How could you apply the “Goldilocks principle” to that project? That is, what system or structure could you put into place that will work beautifully for you, even if no one else would ever think to do it that way?

• For Steve:
  I’ve been trying to get my house all organized and Zen ever since the kids left home, but to no avail. This June, I’m going to actually throw a “House Clearing” party over one weekend – 30 friends, outside catering, and even live music on the Saturday night. We’re going to spend the first 8 hours or so emptying the house of everything, and then we’re only going to put the stuff I really want to keep back in. I’ve got two charity vans arriving at 8am Monday morning, so I can see the finish line. Anything not back in the house by then will be given to charity!




• For Chris:
  For years now, I’ve been telling myself I should take more holidays, but I’ve always been too scared that I’d miss out on work. Starting this year, I’m taking August completely off and going travelling, no matter what. I know that once people realize I’m not available during that time, they’ll find a way to keep any projects that are perfect for me until September!




• For Alison:
  I run a home-based business and it’s always bothered me that people let me down by saying they’ll do something and then not doing it. I’m going to repeat every agreement so many times that my business partners complain to me that I must think they’re idiots. Not only will that make it much more likely that they’ll do what they said they would, I’ll know that if they don’t it’s because it’s time to get new business partners!

Have fun, learn heaps, and find a way to apply this tip to your life that fits just right for you

A quick note from Michael:

To coincide with the publication of Supercoach, I’ve decided to feature the work of some of the coaches I talk about in the book. In each case, I’ll share what I consider to be some of the most transformative elements of their work. I will also do my best to make clear what is their material and what is my interpretation and experience of that material. Any misrepresentation is mine and mine alone…

If you missed parts one through three, you can read them here!

I first heard about Bill Cumming’s What One Person Can Do 12 week program about eight years ago. Although my coaching and training business was theoretically going well, I was suffering a personal crisis at the lack of long-term impact I felt I was making in the world. I began to consider doing something else with my time and with my life.

When someone told me there was a course I could do that would enable me to discover within me something that would enable me to have “the impact of a Mother Theresa or Nelson Mandela” while learning to “put an end to violence in the world”, I was profoundly skeptical. But at some level, I was also profoundly intrigued. When they told me the next course started in just a few days, I scrambled to get the last place available.

Each week, I would turn up for a phone call with 4 other people and Bill would listen to our stories and share wisdom and insights from his life and work, a career that has spanned four decades and involved work in the civil rights movement, health care, school system, and prison system. And each week, despite Bill’s almost annoying humility, I felt less and less worthwhile as I compared my limited accomplishments to his (in my eyes) extraordinary ones. At one point I joked to a friend that for me, the course should be renamed “What One Person Hasn’t Done” and that perhaps I should redo my website with the slogan “helping middle-class white people live happy, healthy lives”.

And yet, something in me knew to keep showing up each week – that there was something being said that I wasn’t yet hearing and something present that I could sense but not yet see or articulate. When the twelve week course finished I came back to do an advanced course, then a trainer’s training, and finally when there were no courses left to do I hired Bill to be my personal coach and worked with him one on one for another couple of years.

There is no way I can express fully what I have learned from my time working with Bill, but here is the essence of what has really transformed my life as I have expressed it in my writing over the past few years:

Recognizing the inherent worthiness of every human being on the planet (including me and you)

I have long been fascinated by the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr., a man as instrumental in the success of the civil rights movement in the US as Mahatma Ghandi was in gaining the independence of India from the British Empire.

In studying the lives of these two men, there are two things which stand out for me as worthy of contemplation. The first is that both were decidedly human, imperfect, and fallible, (something which I personally find deeply comforting as it suggests perfection may not be a prerequisite for making a positive difference in the world :-). The second is that both demonstrated in their words and actions a deep and abiding respect for all people, regardless of color, creed, religion, or standing in life.

Now, “respect” is not a word I have given particular thought to over the years. In fact, if you asked me what associations I had with the word before studying the lives of these inspirational men, I would have said (in this order):

a. A song by Aretha Franklin

b. Something you’re supposed to give to people older than you (like your parents) and get from people younger than you (like your children) but often don’t!

Yet when I began to look into it, I discovered that there are essentially two schools of thought in our society when it comes to respect:

1. Respect is a Commodity to be Earned

In this ‘school’, any time you “do the right thing”, honor your word, and fulfill your promises, you earn respect; any time you do the “wrong” thing, break your word, or fail to follow through on your promises, you lose respect.

Despite the pervasiveness of this idea in our culture, we can easily feel its shortcomings when we consider how difficult it is to live up to its challenge. Have you ever failed to follow through on a promise? Ever told a lie? Ever done the “wrong” thing (even if it was unintentional)?

For many of us, trying to live up to the ideal of earned respect has the opposite of its intended effect. Rather than raising us up to the heights of virtue, self-love, and self-esteem, it often drives us to give up on self-improvement altogether and put our attention on simpler matters, like choosing what to wear and what to watch on TV this week.

2. Respect is a Basic Human Right

In the Jennifer Lopez movie Maid in Manhattan, she plays a maid who leads a double life as a society beauty. The very same people she serves as a maid fail to recognize her in her other guise because they’ve never really looked at her when she serves them.

But serving them is what she does, not who she is – as Bob Hoskins’ butler points out, “being of service is not the same as being subservient” – i.e. seeing yourself as less than the people you serve in any way, shape, or form.

In fact, seeing other people as ‘just like us’ acknowledges an inner knowing that we all share but rarely speak of – that black or white, rich or poor, positive or negative, we’re all going to die one day and there’s nothing any of us can do about it!

Therefore in this ‘school’, you are worthy of my respect because you too are alive and doing the best you can to make it through – no more and no less.

The dictionary definition of respect is as follows:

Main Entry: [1]re·spect Pronunciation: ri-’spekt Function: noun 1 : an act of giving particular attention 2 a : high or special regard b : the quality or state of being esteemed

So to respect someone it to pay ‘particular’ attention to them, and/or to hold them in high or special regard. And if someone is worthy of my respect, it means they are worthy of both my attention and of my esteem.

This does not mean I have to like them (phew!), nor does it mean I have to want in any way to emulate them (double phew!). What it does mean is that I need to stop deleting them from my universe.

I can demonstrate my respect for you by noticing you – by acknowledging your existence. By learning your name. By looking you in the eye (or by knowing if in your culture that is deemed inappropriate). By taking the time (where possible) to get to know you, to learn about you – your history, your family, your loves, your pain.

What I’ve come to realize since I began studying it is that respect is actually a form of love. What makes it a particularly potent one is that it causes the love to be made tangible.

The week I really got that my life was valuable not because of what I had or hadn’t done with it but simply because ALL life is valuable I wrote this story, which I later included in You Can Have What You Want:

In her final year of school, a rabbit from the wrong side of the tracks got a new teacher who told her that he loved her no matter what and that he knew she had the power to choose whatever kind of life she wanted for herself. She challenged the teacher again and again, but no matter how ‘bad’ she tried to be, the teacher balanced appropriate discipline with genuine heartfelt loving kindness. Whenever she was upset, he challenged her to look at her part in creating and nurturing the upset, and he encouraged her to take care of herself on a daily basis by doing those things that she loved, like hopping, running, and reading inspirational literature. (The Velveteen Rabbit was one of her favorites.) Eventually, the rabbit learned to trust herself more and to worry less about what other people thought she should be doing with her life. But even though she was popular with the other animals (after all, her daily running and jumping had made her the star of the track team), there was a part of her that still knew she was horribly inadequate and she felt the loving teacher was wasting his time on a worthless ball of fluff like her. No matter how fast she ran, she still cringed inwardly when she saw the birds who flew with such grace and the fish who swam like, well, fish. Then one day, the unthinkable happened. She stepped on a thistle and hurt her lucky foot; she could no longer run. What little value she felt she had in the world had been taken away by one tiny thorn. The rabbit cried and cried until she was empty, and it was then that she heard a new yet oddly familiar voice inside her mind – still, small and as clear as a bell. It whispered, ‘Your value is not in your speed.’ From that moment on, the voice stayed with her wherever she went. As she watched the birds fly high above the playing fields, the voice whispered, ‘Their value is not in their wings.’ When she saw the fish swimming laps in the pool, the voice said, ‘Their value is not in their ability to swim.’ When the rich old badger who helped to support the school came by, the voice said, ‘His value is not in his wealth.’ And the rabbit could see that it was true – the birds’ value was not in their flight, her teacher’s value was not in his teaching, and her value was not in her speed, or in her ability to hop, or even in the way she could twitch her nose and make everybody laugh. And that thought made her laugh and laugh until once again she was empty, and the voice spoke again inside her mind. ‘Now,’ the voice said, ‘we can begin …’

Have fun, learn heaps, and as Bill would say, “Make yourself a wonderful week!”

Today’s tip is adapted and excerpted from my newest book, Supercoach. Check out the PS at the end of this tip for an exciting announcement!

What do you believe right now? Take a few moments to finish these ‘sentence starters’ for yourself. You can do this in your head, but I strongly encourage you to jot down your answers somewhere you can find them after you’ve finished the book. That’s because they are likely to have changed so radically by the time we’ve finished our time together you won’t remember them later:

Life is…

I am…

People are…

Money is…

The most important thing to know about happiness is…

Now, however you’ve finished those sentences – positive or negative, thought through or impulsive, heartfelt or not – is simply an insight into how you currently see the world. Hopefully, you chose to answer honestly, knowing that no one but you need ever see your answers.

Look again at your answers. Do they feel ‘right’ to you? Can you think of lots of evidence and examples to back them up?

The secret we will be exploring in this session underpins everything else we will be doing together, because it explains why we see what we see, hear what we hear, feel what we feel and do what we do. It’s a secret that has been talked about in many times and in many traditions from around the world and is ‘secret’ not because no one wants you to know it but because it’s so difficult to talk about – like trying to explain the concept of water to a fish.

The secret is that we each live in our own separate reality. This is not some kind of an esoteric theory, but a physiological fact. Our brains filter information through the five senses then make representations of that information inside our minds. We then experience these representations, first as thoughts and then as emotions. But as we re-present the information in our mind, certain bits of the data are inevitably deleted, distorted and generalized. And since we all delete, distort and generalize that information slightly differently, we all have slightly (or sometimes completely) different perceptions of what is going on around us.

In other words, the way we think determines what we see, hear and feel, regardless of what is actually going on around us in the world. Or, to put it slightly differently, there’s what happens and there’s what we think about what happens. And what makes this important is that the lion’s share of our decisions, feelings and actions in life will be based on our thoughts, not the objective facts.

This is neither a new idea nor one associated with any one particular field of study. In quantum physics, the uncertainty principle says that we can never study anything objectively because ‘the observer always influences the observed’. Psychologists talk about ‘the Pygmalion effect’ and linguists say, ‘The map is not the territory.’ Shakespeare wrote, ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,’ and in the Christian Bible, Jesus says, ‘As you think, so shall you become.’

Perhaps my favourite way of thinking about this secret comes from one of my early mentors, author and supercoach Serge Kahili King. He describes the principle of thought like this:

The world is what you think it is.

While at first glance this may seem an innocuous idea, its implications are far-reaching. If the world is what you think it is, then life becomes one giant self-fulfilling prophecy. Your expectations create your experience, and if anything happens that confounds your expectations, you will most likely find a way of explaining it away or fitting it into your existing worldview. And any attempt you might make to ‘prove’ your theories about the world objectively will never gain universal acceptance, because you’re creating that world through your thinking in one way and other people are creating it through their thinking in another way.

If this all seems much too heady for a book about having more happiness, ease and success in your life, here’s a simple experiment to experience this phenomenon for yourself:

1. Get a piece of paper and a pen (or make notes in the book).
2. Now, take 30 seconds to look around you and make a list of everything you can see that’s green. (Do this before you move on to step three.)
3. When you have completed your list, put down your pen. As soon as you finish reading this sentence, close your eyes and make a list of everything around you that’s brown.

Now, if you actually took the minute or so it takes to do this experiment, you will have had a direct experience of the effect of what you hold in your mind on what you experience in the world. If you’re still a bit befuddled, all you need to remember is this:

You will always tend to see whatever it is you are looking for.

Everything you will be learning in our time together is based on the fact that you are creating your experience of everything in your life through the way that you think about it. If you’re having a wonderful experience, well done – you’re creating that experience from the raw material of your life. If you’re having a horrible experience, well, well done – you’re creating that, and it can begin to change at any moment. Because once you really begin to understand how your thoughts create your ‘reality’, you will no longer be a victim of the process.

With Love,
Michael

PS – The American edition of Supercoach finally has a release date confirmed and will be available in the US from March, 2010! If you’re in the US and would like to order the book in the meantime, you can get it direct from the UK today for a total cost (including shipping) of approximately $20 via this link.