IT’S AN INSIDE-OUT PROCESS

I noted in the post last week that the process for designing and living your own high quality life is an inside-out process. It is not something to be added to you as if you were deficient, it is something that arises from within, that develops within, and that then manifests itself externally. Take the world-wide lock-down, for example. We’re still locked-down here in Colorado as we have been for the past 11 months. Everyday when I get up, all around me are all sorts of constraints— some make sense, many more do not. Yet while there are so many external constraints preventing all sorts of freedoms— I myself am not locked down, I am free and will continue to live free.

I’m free because I choose my actions, my talk, my thoughts, and my emotions. No one is “making” me feel anything, whatever I feel is my response and response-ability. It is my response that I create using my thoughts and that I express verbally and behaviorally. My freedom is an inside-out freedom. It is not dependent on whatever “prison” I may physically be in— whatever constraints and limitations to my freedom.

Freedom, like a thousand other central human experiences, is an inside-out phenomena. If I’m not free on the inside, no amount of external physical freedom will help. But if I am internally free, then that inner freedom will enable me to live a high quality life. So it is with thinking and emoting. If you are free in your thinking-and-emoting, then it is because you have developed your capacities. You are capable of thinking regardless of the intellectual environment that you live in. You have cultivated your thinking skills— and most of all, your executive thinking skills. Thinking is definitely an inside-out phenomenon and experience.

So also with emoting. Awareness of your thinking about yourself, others, environment, or any particular subject enables you to be aware of how you generate your emotions. And from emotional-awareness comes all of the other inherent skills that comprise emotional intelligence: emotional tracking, emotional registering, emotional management, emotional relating. Here’s another set of inside-out competencies. With them you know how to detect your emotions, be aware of them, register them, and regulate them. Yes, external things can still trigger them, yet even when they do, you know your emotions are your responses. They are within your power.

Obviously, your speech and behavior are inside-out processes and because they are, so is everything that you and I do with our linguistic and behavioral powers— selling, persuasion, resilience, decision-making, humor hypnotic trance, leading, managing, parenting, coaching, training, etc.

What does all of these mean? Several highly significant things. First, to succeed on the outside, first take care of the inside. Success comes to those who first win the “inner game.” When you

win the inner game, the outer game is a cinch. But if you focus only on the “outer game,” as many salespeople do, as many managers do, as many leaders do, etc., then the chance of success reduces by probably 90% or more.

90% or more! Those are not good odds! So as we often say, if you don’t have your head on right— you won’t get very far. You will more than likely mess things up. That’s why in Neuro- Semantic NLP, we focus first and foremost on the inner game, the meta-game. To that end I wrote several books on that theme: Games Business Experts Play, Games Great Lovers Play, Games for Mastering Fear, Games Fit and Slim People Play. This also explains the name that we trademarked for our brand of coaching, Meta-Coaching.

Nor is any of this new. More than a century ago, Napoleon Hill wrote Think and Grow Rich. The idea of the best things human being inside-out has been around for a long time. We can even go back two thousand years to the time of Christ and there also is the theme, first the heart, then the mouth. “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. A good man out of the good treasure of the heart brings forth good things...” (Matthew 12;34-35).

The principle is easy to understand and hard to apply. It is so much easier to focus on the outside. The outside, after all, seems so much more available and present. It seems to be at your beck and call. The inside is more difficult to get to due to all of the ego-defenses, self-blindness, and cognitive biases. Yet if you want high quality living, it begins with the trip inside and the development inside.