I BELIEVE IN YOU

Today I want to share a recent thought provoking post from my favorite coach, Michael Neill, at www.geniuscatalyst.com. I am a member of his Solutions Cafe and subscribe to his daily tips and coaching.

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours. - Richard Bach

My friend and mentor Bill Cumming has lived what I consider to be an extraordinary life. After over fifteen years campaigning in the civil rights movement and creating a number of programs for individual and team empowerment (including the pilot for the program now known as ‘Upward Bound’), his life changed forever when his nine year old daughter Joy was raped just a few hundred yards from his Ohio home.

In that moment, Bill realized he was fully capable of the kind of violence he had spent so many years campaigning against, and his work turned in a new direction – what are the true causes of violence in our society and how can they be changed?

During the course of his research, he visited a prison in Somers, Connecticut and spent time with a group of murderers, rapists and other violent offenders who had been working with a man named Dr. Nick Groth for over a year. To Bill’s surprise, rather than blaming what they had done on their often horrific upbringings filled with abuse, violence and criminal neglect, each of these men took full responsibility for their lives. Towards the end of their time together, one man who had committed three rape/murders and held no possibility of parole took Bill to one side and expressed his heartfelt compassion and sorrow for what had happened to Joy.

In that moment, Bill realized that if he was capable of murder and a murderer was capable of that degree of compassion, the capacity for all things must live inside all of us. As he wrote
in the course manual for ‘What One Person Can Do’ (see the ‘Want to Learn More?’ section at the end of the tip to learn more):

“What I learned in this unusual laboratory is that it is possible, given two critical factors, for even the most violent people to develop meaningful, productive, contributory lives, even within the confines of a maximum security prison. The fact that this is so speaks volumes in terms of what we can do…

The critical factor…was getting these individuals to know that they are loved (i.e. cared about, valued) and that they are able to make choices…IF IT IS POSSIBLE IN THIS ENVIRONMENT, WITH THESE MEN, IT IS POSSIBLE AT EVERY MOMENT IN EVERY ENVIRONMENT WITH ANYONE.”

In private conversation, Bill has told me on numerous occasions that in nearly every instance he has seen where a person has turned their life around, there was the presence of at least one individual who loved (cared for, valued) them unconditionally and believed in them and in their capacity to choose – to make different choices and fundamentally change the direction, quality and character of their lives.

At first, I felt that Bill’s work was very important but not terribly relevant to my own life. After all, nothing that horrific has ever happened to me or the people I care about most. But I soon came to realize that the same critical factors were present any time I overcame a crisis in my own life.

My parents believed in my mental strength and capacity at a time where I was so messed up I thought they were the ones who were nuts for believing in me. Charlie Helfert and Dale Moffit, professors at Southern Methodist University believed in me enough to not only bring me in to their professional actor training program but to refuse to let me be pushed out even when some of their perhaps more ‘sensible’ colleagues were lobbying for my expulsion.

Their belief in me forced me to question my own sense of worthlessness. If they thought there was something inside me worth spending time on and salvaging, maybe there really was. In short, they believed in me long enough and consistently enough that I began to search inside myself for the strength they seemed to see so effortlessly inside me.

And since I found that strength and began to use it to create my own wonderful life, I have felt equally committed to believing in others – to making the choice to treat the people I come into contact with as though they too have the power within them to choose and to change. And miraculously, consistently, they prove me right – again and again and again.

So I’d like to conclude today’s tip not with an experiment, but with an invitation – the invitation to become ‘a believer’. A believer is someone who chooses to believe in the capacity inside each one of us to be more than we thought we were capable of – to fly higher and travel harder and arrive triumphantly, creating lives that make us (and often everyone around us) go ‘Wow!’

There’s no movement to join, no manifesto to sign – just a gentle reminder and open invitation to be the difference maker in someone else’s life and to be open to having that difference made in your own. Tell someone you believe in them. Mean it. Demonstrate it in the way you treat them. Then stand back and watch their life begin to blossom and bloom.

I began today’s tip with a quote from Richard Bach’s wonderful book ‘Illusions’ – “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.”

I’ll put it somewhat less poetically, but hopefully with equal strength:

“Argue for your possibilities, and sure enough, you will find so much more capacity and ability inside you than you have ever dreamed is possible.”

With love,

Michael

What are you grateful for today? Please share! If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

coded by nessus