Criticism and blame are addictions. They are costly addictions, because they are the number-one destroyer of intimacy in close relationships.
A close relationship is a powerful light force, and like any strong light it casts a large shadow. When you stand in the light of a close relationship, you must learn to deal with the shadow.
There is the relationship between the two of you as real people, and there is the relationship between the two shadows. The shadow is the part of us we do not know about. It is the hidden repository of all our old feelings and patterns. You come into the relationship bringing a shadow with you, as does the other person. If you and the other person do not look into what these shadows contain, your relationship will be between two shadows instead of the two of you as real people.
Imagine squeezing a tennis ball in your hand, then releasing your grip and dropping the ball. A lot of people don’t realize that they can dismiss worry-thoughts just like that. One moment the thoughts have a grip on you; then you suddenly realize it’s you who have the grip on them. You release the grip, and the thoughts disappear. They come back again, and you release them again. With practice, they disappear and don’t come back, if you give your mind a more productive thing to do. The.
The productive thing to do is to look for the positive new emergence that’s trying to happen. In other words, when you find yourself worrying, know that there is something positive trying to break through.
Many of our fears are based on the workings of the ego, the part of us that’s focused on getting recognition and protecting us from social ostracism. In the Zone of Genius, your ego is unnecessary; living there is its own reward. In the Zone of Genius, you cease to care about recognition or ostracism. Once you make a commitment to inhabiting your full potential, your ego is suddenly faced with extinction.
Unfortunately, our thermostat setting usually gets programmed in early childhood, before we can think for ourselves. Once programmed, our Upper Limit thermostat setting holds us back from enjoying all the love, financial abundance, and creativity that’s rightfully ours. It keeps us in our Zone of Competence or at best our Zone of Excellence. It prevents us from living in the ultimate destination of the journey – our Zone of Genius.
Liberating and expressing your natural genius is your ultimate path to success and life satisfaction. Your Zone of Genius is the set of activities you are uniquely suited to do.
It’s new territory, and I’m learning to live in it. To do that, I need to overcome thousands of years of programming that adversity is a constant requirement of existence. We need to savor our success, first for seconds at a time, then for minutes that grow into months.
The fear of being fundamentally flawed brings with it a related fear. It’s the fear that if you did make a full commitment to living in your Zone of Genius, you might fail. It’s the belief that even your genius is flawed, and that if you expressed it in a big way, it wouldn’t be good enough. This belief tells you to play it safe and stay small. That way, if you fail, at least you fail small.
Suddenly I realized that it was my job to complete myself through my power of loving me.
Once you understand the one problem and how to solve it, you can do far more than increase your net financial worth: you can make quantum shifts in the amount of love you feel and the amount of creativity you express.
You’re where time comes from.
Once the race for the victim position is under way, each person must find some way to out-victim the other.
The key insight: each entity in a situation represents 100 percent. Each entity in a conflict has 100 percent of the responsibility for resolving the conflict.
Simply put, if you have some emotion within you that you don’t know how to manage, you seal that emotion away and start trying to manage other people’s versions of it.
The universe will teach us our lessons with the tickle of a feather or the whomp of a sledgehammer, depending on how open we are to learning the particular lesson. Getting stubborn and defensive invites the sledgehammer; getting open and curious invites the feather.
How am I getting in my own way?
Self-criticism and criticizing others are one and the same. In other words, self-blame is part of the same Upper Limit pattern as blaming someone else. Both criticizing yourself and criticizing others are highly addictive and very popular ways of busting up the flow of positive energy.
The art of getting beyond our Upper Limit Problem has a lot to do with creating space within us to feel and appreciate natural good feelings.
To get to that level of undefended openness to learning, we have to practice as diligently as a master skier or a master cellist.