When Robert DeNiro acted in Raging Bull he channeled the boxer Jake LaMotta. He “became” that person. He studied him, he gained weight to look like him, and he so became him that it was as though he were LaMotta. If DeNiro can do it with a dead boxer, you can do it with yourself.
I remember being at a standstill in the mid 1980s. I was at a crossroads in my life and I had no idea what to do next in my career. And I just thought, When was I happiest? I thought back to a 12-step meeting I was in when I was talking to a large room full of people. And I thought, I’ve never been happier, less aware of time passing, more connected to the human race than at that moment. And that’s when I made my decision: Okay, I’m going to be a speaker. I’m doing seminars and giving talks. That’s it.
When I told Duane about this he said to me, “The reason your seminars have been so successful is you are yourself! Not who you think you ought to be. You don’t have to create some story about having been a war hero. The audience connects to you because you’ve had problems and you’ve figured out a way to let them go and you have no shame in telling about them. And that’s where a lot of your audience is. They connect to you and they align with that life of problems. If you told them you were a war hero and never made a mistake in your life, they would not align with you.”
Alignment is the key to channeling your higher self. Being yourself, you come into alignment. You understand what that means. Now you’re doing it. Now you’re listening to your emotions, listening to your feelings, listening to your body, listening to your breath, and listening to your fatigue.
When you do something you absolutely love, you can do it for hours without even getting tired. When you do something you can hardly stand, in a matter of minutes you’re exhausted, so you can see why aligning with what you love brings the energy and focus that spells success. Once you see this in yourself, you’ll see it in your people; once this principle kicks in for you, it will be your biggest gift to them.
You might be thinking, How do I know what I’m good at? All you have to do is listen and learn. Listen to the environment and other people. Pay attention, because they’re trying to tell you what you’re good at all the time! It’s in you, but there’s also feedback—the world is trying to tell you who you are. There are signals. It’s all a big mirror of your own soul. If you feel wonderful when you read a sentence in a book and somehow you get goose bumps, that’s the world trying to say, “That’s you!”
Steps to hands-off success in your life
Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:
1. Take a few breaks today to just be with yourself and listen to your inner voice. It can be for 30 seconds with your eyes closed and your breathing deep. Watch what happens when you do this.
2. Start thinking in terms of alignment and misalignment rather than right and wrong. Notice that “right” and “wrong” are violent judgments compared to the gentle nature of alignment and misalignment.
3. Use your negative feelings as a welcome alarm clock. Let them lead you back to the stressful thought in question. Use that thought to make the workplace better.
CHAPTER TEN
BECOMING AVAILABLE
Intuition is the clear conception of the whole at once.
—Johann Kaspar Lavater
If we are the old-school micromanagers, we’ve been in hiding. We’ve been unavailable. We have disguised who we are.
We’ve been hiding behind a disguise made up of our problems and the excuses for having those problems. We’ve been cloaked in a robe of alibis, hiding behind a disguise that says we consist of our unsolved problems, that who we are is a composition of our unsolved problems in life!
We’ve taken on this identity instead of our true potential, and because we’ve done that, we’ve made ourselves unavailable to the very freedom for which we yearn.
So it’s time to turn and go another way, to calmly choose another path to take. This path will make you available to yourself. It will make you available to the inherent wisdom contained in who you already are.
Old-school micromanagers try hard to learn how to succeed. They seek out teachers and success gurus. They want to think and grow rich. But it’s that very thinking that’s in the way.
They don’t realize that a better approach would be to stop thinking and grow rich.
Even Galileo knew that the answer was not in outside knowledge. He said, “You cannot teach a person anything. You can only help him discover it within himself.”
Galileo’s words are the heart and soul of hands-off management.