Brilliant by Nature

I worked this past weekend, and it was my favourite professional experiences for a long time. I was coaching a high achieving businessperson in North America over a 2? day ‘intensive’, with 16 coaches watching me in action. The coaches had their own development as their reason for being there. For the client, it was for their own life, both business and personal.

There was so much over the course of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday that I wish everyone would know about themselves. About their potential and their innate brilliance. I was struck, once again, as to what we think of ourselves is so compelling and way off the mark compared to how others see us, and how we really are.

“I want to be more bad-ass,” the client said in the first session. Given what I’d heard from her in that fist 30 minutes, she seemed totally ‘bad-ass’ to me already. Please note: the way ‘bad-ass’ was used here it is in its positive sense: a problem solver, someone who cuts through and makes a big difference.

She had achieved a lot, risen fast and high in a renowned global consultancy company. Had a terrific home life as a partner and mother to a loving husband and a wonderful baby daughter. So hearing her describe herself to me, in the way that she saw herself, was puzzling.

As we delved deeper, it became clear that what had been going on for her, is what has also been going on for me, for you, and for everyone else.

What we think of ourselves seems true.

For some of us, we have a lower opinion of ourselves, for some, it’s a higher opinion. I’m commonly asked by those with a lower opinion: how to get a higher opinion of themselves. How to swap one story we tell ourselves for another, more positive story. It’s a logical question, and one I’d delved into myself many times in the past. Logical, yet not helpful.  It might have short-term benefits, but the ‘story-of-me re-frame’ more often than not, makes us less effective.

In fact, every re-frame is the same: at best a temporary fix. At worst, it gives us more to think about. And no one ever did anything better with more on their mind.

There is something far more effective and permanent than a re-frame, truth.

The truth of how we, as human beings, operate. The truth of the stories we have about ourselves.

What we feel right now comes from what we think: right now.

What we think right now changes. Always has, always does, and always will.

Some of the thoughts we have keep coming back. And they keep going away.

Some of the thoughts we have look and feel more real on some days, less so on others.

It looks like external factors (other people, our job, our bank balance, our partner, the big meeting, our boss) make us feel what we feel.

Yet, it does not hold up to scrutiny. We don’t feel the same 100% of the time with those people and in those life circumstances. And we feel what we feel when those people aren’t even with us, or when those events aren’t happening at that moment.

The imagination of us as a species is one of our defining characteristics, it’s what’s made us so successful. Our imagination is so powerful, it is creating our emotions and our subjective reality 100% of the time. It’s how we can feel nervous before an event. It’s how we feel resentment for a comment someone made a minute ago or a month ago. It’s how we have a story of ourselves that looks more real on some days than others.

So, here’s the point: if the story we tell ourselves is coming only from what we think right now; and thought changes on its own, what’s the point in us working to change it?

And if the story we tell ourselves is a function of our human imagination (that only looks and feels real) it cannot be true.

So why spend time and effort in changing what is a temporary illusion?

Seeing and understanding it’s a temporary illusion sets us free.

Not free from having feelings we don’t like. But free from fixing something that doesn’t need fixing. Free from creating strategies to fix illusory problems.

Free to do, rather than managing our own psychology.

Putting our attention and focus ‘out there’ rather than sorting our head.

In the past 20 plus years of developing people in organisations, there has been nothing more powerful in bringing out the best in people than seeing the truth of how we are. And while I and everyone who has seen the truth of this all still get caught up, still get upset and get insecure from time to time; at some point, we remember. We are storytellers by nature. And we are brilliant by nature too. We just sometimes forget.