What Sabotages Success? The Hidden Threat of Complaints, Gossip, and Rackets
Our environment, whether at home, at work, or socially, should be a space where we can thrive and prosper freely. It should be a place that embraces us, fosters enjoyment, and empowers the full development of our communication skills and potential.
But can we all become accountable for great results in our personal and professional lives while developing, and appreciating each other? Let’s explore some helpful distinctions in matters of generating success and accomplishment.
I. I’m trapped in the same filters
While we often think of ourselves as open-minded and objective, our approach to ourselves, our circumstances, and others is frequently filtered and obscured by pre-existing perspectives and ideas. Our upbringing, values, religious beliefs, past experiences, and cultural conditioning are powerful influencers that can reduce our capacity for growth.
In this article, we identify those filters for what they are — an all-pervasive influence that profoundly colors our relationships with people and circumstances, including ourselves.
Awareness of these filters and recognition of the striking limits they impose allow us the freedom to see them for what they are and eventually shift them. As a result, people, situations, and our approach to business and life can alter dramatically.
II. The Hidden Power of Context
In all human endeavors, context rules our lives and their contents. The hidden contexts from which we live determine what we see and what we don’t see; what we consider and what we fail to notice; what we can do, and what seems beyond our reach. All behavior — all ways of being and acting — are correlated to the contexts from which we live our lives.
Typically, context is understood as “the circumstances” that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea and in terms of which it can be fully understood. However, context possesses a different mythology, unknown to many.
Context, from this new viewpoint, is not merely a circumstance. Like water is to the fish, it is the medium that makes life possible. Fish, like humans, are often unaware of their context, yet everything they do is a function of their environment: water.
By viewing beliefs, perspectives, and perceptions as the medium for human beings, we can see how changing our perspective can create a new world with different results.
Your results and projects, communication with others, writings, actions, and speaking are content. For a religious person, GOD is context. Humans, prayers, churches, synagogues, etc., then, are the content.
When undesired or destructive contexts become apparent and known, we can begin to see the unwitting process by which they were assembled and the degree to which they govern our everyday lives. This realization offers us, possibly for the first time, a choice about who we are and who we can be, separate from these contexts. There is a newfound freedom and ability to take action that was previously unavailable — even familiar actions can produce a whole new level of effectiveness.
III. The Vicious Cycle
Humans tend to confuse “what happened” with the “story” we tell ourselves and others about what happened. This collapse occurs so quickly that it becomes hard to separate the two, and we think of them as the same. Over time, the story we tell ourselves becomes the reality we believe is true. We fail to realize that we are confusing what happened with the opinions and judgments we or others have about it. This confusion then limits what is possible in our lives, robbing us of much of our joy, self-expression, confidence, and effectiveness.
When we can separate what happened from our story or interpretation of what happened, we discover that much of what we considered already determined, given, and fixed may not be that way at all.
Situations that may have been challenging become fluid and open to change. We find ourselves no longer limited by a finite set of options and able to achieve what we want with new ease, commitment, and enjoyment.
IV. Rackets: The Payoff and the Cost In Rackets.
A Racket is an unproductive way of being or acting that includes a complaint that something shouldn’t be the way it is. Often, we don’t notice that while our complaints may seem justified, even legitimate, there is a certain payoff — some advantage or benefit we are receiving that reinforces this cycle of behavior. Typically, the payoff is being right and avoiding accountability and responsibility. Another popular payoff is looking good, exaggerating our worth, or pretending everything is fine when it is not.
At the same time, this way of being has steep costs, almost 100% of the time, in our vitality, confidence, affinity, self-expression, or sense of fulfillment.
By recognizing this pattern, its costs, and how we have been keeping the pattern in place, we have the choice to interrupt the cycle and discover new ways of interacting that lead to new levels of happiness, satisfaction, and fulfillment in areas that are most important to us.
Payoffs & Costs examples
Payoffs: Being right / making others wrong
- Costs: Health/peace of mind
Payoffs: Dominate/avoid others’ domination
- Cost: Satisfaction
Payoffs: Justify / Invalidate others
- Cost: Fulfillment
Payoffs: Win/make others lose
- Costs: Love/affinity/relationship
Payoffs: Look good / make others look bad
- Cost: Vitality / Self-expression
The above traps can be easily avoided. What it takes is being willing to put yourself on the line and create miraculous results. Here are some promises and commitments I recommend:
- Be yourself! Open, transparent, fearless, and present. Keep distinguishing communication as a function of living powerfully and creatively.
- Identify the key players and cast of characters at the HPD for a breakthrough future. Every play has a cast and every member of the cast knows his or her role.
- Results are a function of actions in the world, as well as constant integrity, focus, and consistency.
- Manage yourself by results and clear intentions, not feelings, stories, opinions, and moods about results.
- Keep your word no matter what. Become unreasonable in your pursuit of excellence and don’t settle for less. Always do what works for the team. Live at risk (creatively speaking) and continue challenging yourself.
- Clean up your integrity as you go. You will make mistakes. It’s part of the game! Acknowledge it and move on, no need to feel bad, it is a waste of time and talent. Great results are a function of clean actions and integrity, as in keeping your word on the promises you make.
- Operate from your true intentions and commitments. What are they for the future? There are conscious commitments and hidden commitments. Unconscious commitments are rackets, see above. They must be shifted or dropped.
- Play in the open! Go all out. Use all the resources around you to empower yourself, others, and your career path.
- Dwell in your talents and abilities not your lacks. Develop to the fullest. Become what inspires you to become. What are you capable of in the deepest recesses of your heart and guts?
Eric Stone
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Husband | Performance Coach | Visual Artist & Author |
Long-time Actor, Director & Voice-Over Artist. Wrote Challenge of the Actor & numerous articles on Self-Expression, Genius & Performance, Self-development & Awareness, Acting, Voice Power and Public Speaking.
Founder of Hollywood Actors Studio ~ Speakers & Artists International ~ Quantum Design Connection ~ Inventor of Aquadigigraphy
Book Author
In personal growth & development, great outcomes come from authentic shifts in perspective! These essays aim to catalyze awareness and empower creative thinking.
“If you ain’t the lead dog, the scenery never changes.”
