Craving, Acting or Being Successful

Craving, Acting or Being Successful

I was talking to a person who claimed to be trained in NLP last week and he was telling me about his cravings for success and how he would do anything to succeed. I found this interesting, the person clearly wasn’t succeeding in the way he wanted to, and as is often the case, a person’s linguistic constructs say a lot about how that person acts. In this article I will explore how we construct our world through language and how through changing discourse, we change our experience. I will also challenge the cause and effect myth, arguing that the mechanical metaphor for cause and effect is highly limiting when mapped to human experience. You can truly be the architect of an exciting future by recognising you are being successful in each step of the goal as opposed craving success or acting as if your are successful. It’s not about craving or acting, it’s about ‘being’.

When a person craves a cigarette, a drug, or a food type, the craving is never fully satisfied. The item they are craving will only ever give a short term fix and very soon the craving will return. This is akin to running on a treadmill with no real goal, after miles and miles the treadmill doesn’t stop, and you are stuck. Now take these analogies to craving success and you will find that people who crave it don’t actualise it, they read about others’ success, they focus on short term ‘means’ goals and their motivational factors are externally orientated with attention on superficial factors such as the trimmings of success.

Success is best defined on your terms, and the motivation comes from within and not overly influenced by external factors. Success is not something you crave, it’s something you live. This all sounds very simple but if for example an individual has a series of broken relationships, is bankrupt financially and has poor health down to habits, it may me sound a little simplistic or condescending to say ‘live successfully’ and you will actualise what you want. However, I would counter, no matter how simplistic that sounds, the very attitude of living successfully can turn a person’s life around.

In NLP we have saying ‘act as if’, I prefer the statement ‘just be’. According to discursive psychologists, our reality is socially constructed through language and with language being so flexible and dynamic there are no fixed meanings. Discursive psychologists present a strong argument against the cognitive psychological perspective, stating that what was once considered as cognitive categorisations are actually linguistic constructs. Taking the discursive perspective which fits with NLP, the verb ‘to be’ creates a far more powerful construct then the verb ‘to act’. When acting you could feel like you are faking, when you are ‘being’ you are connecting with congruence and removing yourself from the weak and ineffective construct of acting or craving something.

Lao Tzu is quoted as saying “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step”.  You could argue that every step is of equal importance or you could take the view the first and last step, being the ones that begin and end the journey, are more important than the others. The point is the first, the intermediate and last steps are all part of a correlation which constitutes success. With each step you are being successful, you are not craving, you are not acting you are being. So when you set the direction, the outcome, the goal and the minute you congruently do something concrete to actualise the goal, which is followed up by another concrete action, you have set the ball rolling and you are being successful. It is important along the journey, to use your sensory awareness to keep track of your where you are and respond appropriately to the ongoing feedback you receive from the world around you.
I have heard people in NLP map Newtonian physics to human experience. Let’s see how this works (or doesn’t work when mapped onto human experience)  If we take the impulse momentum theorem; ‘in a collision, an object experiences a force for a given amount of time that results in its mass undergoing a change in velocity (i.e., that results in a momentum change). There are four physical quantities mentioned in the above statement – force, time, mass, and velocity change. This is all well and good for inanimate objects, kicking a ball etc but the theory of cause effect is pretty useless when applied to dynamic systems and biological systems. The successes and failures in your life are not rooted to any specific cause in your life, but occur due to the correlation between multiple experiences and feedback and feed forward loops within your internal system (self) and realtionships you have formed with the external factors in the world. If you bust the cause effect myth in your life, you only ever need to look back again at historic events in your life to learn from them as opposed to ‘creating’ causal relationships that do not exist..

I like to use a metaphor ‘be the architect of your future’.  The good news is, you have always been the architect of your future, as an adult you have choice over how you respond to any event and what you create as result. You have total influence over the relationships you choose, the career you choose and how much wealth you choose to create for yourself.  A lot of people may baulk at the statements above, and if you are one of them you are buying into the cause effect myth and thus constructing your world without choice. However if you have broken free from the limitations of cause and effect and recognise your world is a social construct, you can construct it anyway you like and enjoy the results. Just imagine, no more cravings, no more acting, just being!  Remember the journey starts with just one step, so be successful today and take that step on a very special journey.