THE CALL FOR GREATNESS

It’s a bold word. It is a word so bold in fact that requires a lot of courage to use it. That’s because it is not a word for the faint of heart. What is that word? Greatness. It is also a self-actualization word.

• Do you believe you have greatness within you?

• Would you like to believe that?

• If you did believe that there is greatness within you, what difference would that make in how you live your life?

• What greatness do you suspect that there is within you to be developed and released?

Jim Collins wrote Good to Great and issued a warning in the first sentence of the first chapter. Here is the warning: “The enemy of great is good.” Now while his focus in that book was on good companies becoming great companies, the principle holds true also for individuals. What he meant by “greatness” he specified in the conditions that had to be met— ROI, finances, sustainability, leadership, retention, engagement, etc. To move from good to great requires setting a higher and bigger and more audacious vision for ourselves and/or our businesses. It requires focus and discipline and many other things. Perhaps that’s why we hold back from striving for greatness.

Donald Trump won the Republican nomination by stirring up millions of Americans with a call for greatness. “Make America Great Again” is his theme, his brand, and his vision. Quoting how things have fallen back— from kids failing to finish school, falling back in mathematics and reading, schools in the USA now 30th in the world, increase in unemployment, and the permanently unemployed who are no longer even looking for work, more millions living in poverty, higher unemployment among young black men (nearly 50%), the economic stagnation, more police shot on duty (up 50% this year), etc. His call to becoming great again has struck a chord with literally millions upon millions of people.

Not long ago we witnessed the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro Brazil and what it means to be a great athlete. I didn’t see everything there, but what I saw was astonishing, especially in diving, running, and gymnastics. There’s something undescribably delicious in watch true greatness. Why does it evoke goose bumps? Why do we stand in awe and amazement? Why do we clap and cheer?

There’s something inside all of us that greatness calls to. If we are growing healthily, there’s something within us that invites and challenges us to be great. There I said it. We want to be great, we want to do great things, we want to achieve great accomplishments. Don’t you? If you are honest with yourself, wouldn’t you want to do or experience something great? And where does this come from?

It derives from an innate drive within, a drive for greatness—for excellence, for stepping up to one’s full potential. Maslow named this drive, the self-actualization drive. It is what truly distinguishes us from animals. It is the realm of the being-values for knowledge, meaning, justice, fairness, excellence, contribution, making a difference, beauty, order, giving love, etc. These are the things that endow our lives with greatness.

Greatness presupposes standards—values and criteria. It presuppose doing the best one can do at a given time—by giving something your full presence, intention, and learning. It is not about perfection. Greatness entails accepting mistakes and learning from them. It entails receiving feedback so you can tell where you are and how to move forward.

The greatness that we aim for in NLP and Neuro-Semantics we call expertise or excellence. That’s actually how this field got started—being amazed at the “magic” (or seeming magic) of a few truly extraordinary individuals who could speak healing and wellness to people. From that came the realization that this is not magic at all. It is structure. There is rhyme and reason regarding how any particular expertise works. And that’s why we have been doing—modeling the structure of human excellence, or if you will, greatness.

Whatever we consider great has structure. If every experience that you consider great has structure, then by discovering it and using that structure, you can replicate that greatness. That’s one of our key themes in Neuro-Semantics. As great communication has structure, so does great resilience. So does great forgiveness, great leadership, excellent wealth creation, etc. What is great speaks about our values—that which we consider to be most important. It speaks about not only what is good, but extremely good—what is great, what is superior.

This was Maslow’s passion and quest. Question: How much does greatness scare you? How much fear do you have toward greatness? It is the same question that Maryann Williamson addressed in her famous statement that our greatest fear is that we are “powerful beyond measure. That it is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.” Maslow called this the Jonah Syndrome. Using the biblical story of Jonah who ran away from God’s call to him, to the divine destiny that he had, Maslow said we also run away from our potential, we play small, and we shrink from discovering and developing our real self.

Greatness calls to us because there is that self-actualization drive within. When it calls to you, will you heed the invitation and step up to it? This is what we do in Neuro-Semantics with all of our programs, from Accessing Personal Genius (APG) to NLP to Self-Actualization Series. Come and see.