Richard Lloyd Jones: The literature is full of advice about what you need to do to attain it. You'll hear loads about purpose and forming habits, about listening and motivating and focus. We read the books and watch the videos and pop in the CDs on the commute to work. We do the visioning they recommend. We pay for the coaching. But we're missing one important understanding. Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, the psychological habits of highly successful people.
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Well, this is a follow-up to a podcast I produced about a month ago with psychoanalyst Leo Lima. Leo joins me again today to penetrate a little deeper into this area of success. This is not something that I think we understand well in North America, actually. For all our focus and purported reverence for it, I think we just feel, frankly, traumatized by this subject, or at least by the focus on only one aspect of success, that being the financial fame aspect of it.
We've had decades of Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill and the thousands of others with The Recipe for Success, and if we haven't achieved it within those narrow parameters, don't you think we start to feel a little desperate? Either that or we just check out completely, looking at it all with an ironic and disparaging gaze. We hoist another martini or hug another tree and congratulate ourselves for living a balanced life, far from the craziness of the corporate climb.
But this misses the point, too, because there's something to all this success stuff. We don't have all this focus on it for no reason. The problem is that we're asking the wrong questions. Instead of worrying about what we need to do to achieve success, what time management system we need to adopt, or what habits we need to strengthen, we need to understand a metaphysical point.
Success is natural to the human being. We're made for this already. It's not something we need to build or reinforce, although there is certainly work and effort and discipline required. The whole thing is much more subtle and profound than that. We have all we need to operate at maximum capacity already, but we have attitudes, psychopathology in Norberto Keppe's language, against that maximum capacity.
This is some pretty revolutionary research that's being revealed from the International Society of Analytical Trilogy in Brazil, where I produce these programs. And the content of Thinking with Somebody Else's Head arrives from these pioneering discoveries about the psychological and spiritual state of the human being. Our psyche, it turns out, has been understood. And its comprehension through Dr. Norberto Keppe's science leads us to far different conclusions than the vast bulk of published material that graces the bookshelves and TV talk shows up to now.
This makes Keppe's work among the most vital knowledge available on the planet today, which you'll hear more of in a moment. Keppe divulges all of his wisdom in over 30 books that contribute significantly to the intellectual treasury of mankind. You can explore those on our Trilogy portal site at trilogia.ws, T-R-I-L-O-G-I-A dot W-S. I'd also like to invite you to participate with us in our call-in psychology show, Healing Through Consciousness.
Dr. Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco, the Vice President of Keppe's International Society of Analytical Trilogy, joins me every week to take your calls and questions about specific areas of your life that you'd like some clarification on. We record every Monday at 2 p.m. Eastern Time through Skype. Healing Through Consciousness is our Skype name. Just enter that in your Skype contact list and you're set to go.
JonesHealing at gmail.com is our email. If you prefer to be more anonymous, joneshealing at gmail.com. Today, I asked Leo Lima to join me again to continue our discussions about success. We had a lot of very positive response to our Redefining Success podcast a month or so ago. So let's dive in again to the psychological habits of highly successful people. Leo, I was having a look again at Dr.
Keppe's book, The Origin of Illness, because in this book he deals very much with envy and censorship and projection, these ideas we were talking about in our last podcast on success. And in there he has a quote from François de Rochefoucauld, the French philosopher, who said, It takes greater virtue to sustain good than evil fortunes, meaning that it's much more difficult for us to stay in goodness.
And this has a big relationship to success. How do you see that?
Leo Lima: Yes, it's true, because for you, success is something very good, not only for the person who has the success, but also for other people. Because what does it mean to be successful at something? It means that you master something that you do. You are doing something in your profession in a very good way.
And why that's good? Because it's been useful for someone. It's been good for society. It's being good for your clients, your customers, whoever. So you are doing something good, you are being useful. And so you cannot be very envious because if you are too envious, and to be envious doesn't mean to wish to having something good, but the opposite, trying to spoil what's good.
So if you are too envious, you will not be willing to be successful. You will spoil your talents, your capacities, your abilities to doing something good because you know deep inside, even if you don't perceive it very clearly you know deep inside that that would be good for people, would be good for society. So if you're envious, you won't be successful.
Richard: Interesting.
So success is not necessarily success for myself. True success would be success in a greater sense for other people. Yes,
Leo: many people think of being successful in a selfish kind of way. In other words, you want to be successful to feed your megalomania, your ego, to feel important, to abuse even the privileges you will have by being successful. So many times people seek success thinking about putting themselves in the center of attention, in the center of the world.
In this sense, success is not good for the person. First, because it's short-lived. I mean, it won't last long. But even if it lasts longer, the person is not fulfilled. He doesn't feel good inside. And as soon as they finish, they are not successful anymore. They are not at the center of attention. They will not feel very good. There are many examples in history, right, of artists who were very famous, very successful.
And Greta Garbo, the famous film artist, Swedish, she was like that, right? I mean, she was very successful. But at the end of her life, she didn't want to face that she was not the center of attention anymore.
Richard: And when this person falls out of the limelight, it's like a big crash, right? The person
Leo: can't recover from that. Because their ego is not being
filled
Richard: anymore.
But I was thinking as you were speaking that, actually, it's kind of, in a way, impossible to be successful on your own because success implies success in the society, right? That you have to do something for somebody else. Sooner or later, I have to provide a good service to my customer or I have to record a new CD or I have to paint something.
I mean, to be successful in the societal sense, even that implies that we have to do things for other people, right?
Leo: Exactly. Exactly. So, you will be always serving someone, serving, being useful, doing something that is demanded, is wished for, right? Right.
Richard: Needed. And the moment you step out of that, the moment you step out of doing that and start to do things only for yourself, the popularity starts to go down.
Exactly. This is a bit controversial what I'm going to say now, but I can think about this in jazz music. Because jazz music, when it started at the very beginning in the early 1920s, 1918, 1920s, in that period, was very much involved in making people dance, making people feel happy. The golden age of jazz was that period up to the stock market crash in 1929, in the 20s there.
Louis Armstrong and these, there are many of them from New Orleans and other parts. And they were very interested in expressing something for the people, to make people happy, to make people dance. And then there was a whole period of jazz where it got much more introverted. And I don't want to make past judgments on whether which jazz music was better. But in my opinion, the jazz music that became more introspective through the 1940s into the 1950s and 60s, to my mind, was a sort of a diminishment of what jazz could have been.
Not musically, but in terms of what it could do for people. This is, in essence, what you're talking about, isn't it?
Leo: Yes, very much so, because you're saying that when people are self-centered, when the focus is their own person, they will lose this contact. With reality, with society, with people, with what people want, need, right? And then their success will diminish. I'm just remembering that famous dancer also, Nijinsky.
He was a genius. Absolutely. Perhaps the best dancer ever, right? And what happened to him very early, he was extremely successful, but he was extremely self-centered. And in the end, he was in psychiatric hospital where he died because he couldn't leave his ego and go out to other people to do something for society, for other people, for his art. He was more thinking about himself.
And then it
Richard: was a tragic end. Well, this happens to a lot of these great artists. This is very common in the opera world, right, where the prima donna begins to be more involved in themselves than in what they're doing. And this is many stories of the great Swedish tenor, Jussi Björling, who was very difficult in his later career. But at the beginning of his career, his voice would heal people in the hospital.
I mean, he had an extraordinary talent. But when he started to get more difficult and more complicated, then he starts to lose that popularity.
Leo: The talent even, yes. Yeah. So that's where envy comes in, isn't it? Because you have your talent and you don't need to be a genius. Everyone has talents. And actually, we are not genius because of our envy, right?
Because the talent is there in everybody. If we don't develop our talents to the fullest extent. It's because of our envy, right? I mean, this is difficult to face, but it's our responsibility. I mean, without realizing, you spoil many opportunities. You don't make enough effort. You don't work as much as you could. I mean, in many ways, you spoil your talents and then you don't develop as much as a genius.
But everybody essentially has lots of talents. So, when these artists and anyone are too envious, either we start spoiling our talents, because we don't want to be good, to be useful to society, and to serve and be happy in return, we will not be successful. We will not develop or spoil our talents, such as these people you mentioned. And
Richard: there's another example of a student in our school who is a very, very good guitar player and singer, but he refuses to play for people.
He feels shy or nervous. He doesn't want to expose himself in some way to criticism, whatever, all of these things that we say. But when he comes to the classroom, he has no problem being critical. He has no problem criticizing or saying, oh, I don't agree with it. I don't like that. It's this kind of thing. So, he has no problem in doing something sort of critical or against, but he has great difficulties to do something good, to uplift people, to make people happy.
This would be this envy you're talking about. And if he's criticizing people in the classroom, you said. Yes, and also the texts, the ideas in the school, this kind of thing.
Leo: Right. So, then he's spoiling his opportunities as well, to grow, to learn more, right? And then behind this envy,
Richard: we hide behind a fear. We think that it's a fear of success.
No, the person has a fear of success. It's much deeper than that, isn't it?
Leo: It's much deeper. Of course, you may be a little afraid, but because if you feel guilty, we all feel guilty, because we should be doing good 100% of the time, and we sometimes don't reach the
Richard: 100%. You're being very diplomatic today. So
Leo: you know you have faults. You know you're not doing what you should do all the time.
Everybody knows it. So guilt feelings are something that we should pay attention. We have to feel our guilt feelings. Usually people think we should get rid of them, but it's it's a mistake. We should feel our guilt feelings, see what we are not doing, what we're doing wrong, and try to as much as we can to change, to correct ourselves. And when you don't, when you repress the consciousness, the awareness of your guilt feelings, then you will also avoid success.
You'll be afraid. But this as you said is just the surface, because deep inside, if you are uh successful, you have, you will have more responsibilities. You have to give something, and in the end
Richard: continue to produce, to
Leo: continue to please. And in the end, that's the bottom line, I think. People are not trying to be helpful and be happiness in return.
Richard: So this is so fascinating because the idea is that I have a fear of success. But what's really underneath that is that I don't want to take responsibility for the talent that I have, for the ability that I have to help other people. This I don't want responsibility for.
Leo: Yes, because, you know, we are not the ones who have created our talents, right?
We've been given our talents. And then if you spoil your talents indirectly, you're trying to what? To say, look, someone else gave it to me. I mean, the creator, nature. So if you spoil it, you're kind of being aggressive to and not grateful to whoever gave you your talents. Yeah. You want to see me fail? Just watch me. Yes,
Richard: exactly. I want to be successful not to please you.
Yes, you gave me these talents. Now watch me destroy them. I was listening to an interview maybe a couple of months ago with a Canadian musician named Neil Young. And Neil Young has been around since the 60s, late 60s. And he's still recording, still producing vital music, still recording, still writing. And he said something very interesting in this interview. He said that he considers this ability he has to be a gift.
And when that gift calls me, I drop whatever I'm doing to follow the gift. So, if I'm having dinner with my friends, he says, and I feel this urge to compose, I leave the dinner. I make an excuse and I say, I'm sorry, I have to go. And I may be gone for an hour, I may be gone for two days, but I honor the gift that I have.
This seems to me very humble, doesn't it?
Leo: Exactly, of course. And also, Rich, I was thinking that being successful, people sometimes think it's something just for a few people. An artist, some some prominent person, personality, but no, being successful is for everyone. You don't need to be a star to be successful. You can be in your work normal and being successful, being doing something good and being recognized and being fulfilled for that, right.
So we we all have been born for success. We could say like this, no one was born to fail. I mean we do that because of envy, because of our arrogance, megalomaniac, etc. But in the end, everybody was born to contribute. We are a society, right? Nobody lives alone. And this society needs your talent, needs your gift. And so everyone should be successful.
Success is not something rare. It is rare at the moment, but it shouldn't be. Everybody should be successful. I mean, useful. You don't need to be a big star. You can be an aunt, but you have your role to play in society.
Richard: And you could do it well. Yes. And we all have stories of that. If I ask my students about people they admire in their family, they're often very humble, simple people who do a good job, who help the family, who contribute to the community in some way.
These are the people they admire. And many people will say, you know, I just love to be around this person. Not because they're famous in any sense socially. They could be as well. But they're not often. They're just people who humbly do their work and contribute to their family and their community in a beautiful way. And they're successful. And they're very successful.
And they have a lot of love and a lot of appreciation. One of the things that comes up a lot, Leo, in our conversations with our various teleclasses, and sometimes I see this in the responses I get to our podcasts, are this idea we have a lot that the person thinks that they don't deserve it. That I don't deserve success. I don't, this is not something that, you know, and so we have this attitude against our development because we have this feeling that we don't deserve it.
How would you address this?
Leo: I think it's rather an excuse the person gives, to put it bluntly. If the person is honest to himself, you see that's an excuse because everybody wants to be successful in the sense that you want to reach your goals. It's not natural for one. So this is an excuse people give for all these reasons we've spoken about.
Not to be useful, not to help other people, not to contribute to society, to the group you live in, etc. So they say they don't deserve. It's a mask. They are hiding the truth behind that excuse, I think.
Richard: The question you mentioned in our last podcast about the fear of failure was you said it was connected to arrogance. There seems to be a lot of idea that we're afraid of failure, and you mentioned quite articulately, and I just want to explore this a little bit more to see if you have any more to say on this subject, that it's connected to arrogance, that we don't want to see any mistakes.
We don't want to acknowledge any problem, and how is this arrogance, Leo? Because, again, this is a more complex definition of arrogance than we are used to hearing. And the person thinking of somebody who's like afraid of failure as being an arrogant person, this is kind of counterintuitive.
Leo: Yes, because I think that living and by. Doing something, working, by living. You always have to see problems in yourself.
Things that you are not doing very well, you have to correct yourself, etc. And this demands some humbleness, doesn't it? A minimum of humbleness. So uh when arrogance is too unconscious, if people don't perceive, not that they are not arrogant, because we are all arrogant, the point is to conscientize, to be aware of your arrogance, you can control it. So not that people are not arrogant, we are all arrogant in some degree, but if they are not aware of their arrogance, it dominates them.
And then they will not be able to face any problem, any little fault in themselves, you know, and this is inevitable.
You always, for you to live, otherwise you become a catatonic person. You won't move because if you move, you'll see something wrong in yourself. And this is important for people to cope with, to develop your talents. There are many examples. I have an example of a client who believed she was very afraid of seeing her mistakes. That was what she thought, but deep inside there was a big arrogance.
So she was afraid at work of participating teleconferences where she had to speak English, and she's not an English, a native English speaker, but when she goes to her English classes she criticizes all other students who don't speak very well. I mean she's so arrogant that she cannot see any mistake in her colleagues, in herself, and how can she develop something if she doesn't work with her difficulties, a complete
Richard: lack of tolerance of any kind of mistake in anyone, right.
I have a student who um I was teaching theater classes for her and I noticed that during the the classes she was one of the last people to memorize her lines. So you can imagine, as we're preparing, we have a three-month program, we're preparing for a presentation at the end, the longer you go into it without memorizing your lines, the more stress you're going to feel, the more tension.
So she was under a lot of pressure because she just couldn't or wouldn't memorize
Leo: her her part. Yeah, because people they want to be perfect, shall we say, right. Uh it's not true, because for you to be perfect you would have to work. They think they are all right, perfect, that's the
Richard: difference. No, they want to be perfect, they think they are, so they won't take any less than that, but the point is not that it's not real, so they will never reach any, they will never come even near perfection.
Yeah, with this arrogance, in fact there's an enormous self-sabotage, because the longer you take to prepare for something, in this case the worse your performance is going to be. So she had an enormous self-sabotage of herself without perceiving, and then it translated into uh a fear that she thought she had, a fear. Well she did, she did have a fear, because she knew she was going to sabotage herself, so her fear was very justified.
But the fear was not the fear of success or the fear of failure. It was the fear of her own attitude, her own
Leo: attitude against her own development. Yes, because usually we try to find causes of our problems outside. For example, fear. Well, this fear comes to me. What can I do? It's not me. But as you said, we cause our problems.
There was a great Greek philosopher called Tatian in the second century, he said that evil is a denial of good. So what does that mean, basically? That everything in nature, there's no problem. In nature, there's nothing wrong. Everything has its purpose. You see, the ecosystem is completely organized. Harmonious. Harmonious. One thing needs the other. That's why when people do these experiments, you know, with genetics or something, whatever they change something
Richard: in this chain and there's a big imbalance in the chain, because it's all very harmonious. And not only ecology, everything in nature, in our body, in our psychological mind, everything has its
Leo: purpose.
So you are, you cannot, everything wrong, any problem, any fault, it's caused by us, it's not an external factor, so we have to face our responsibility. On the one hand, we are very important, so to speak, in this sense, because we have full responsibility for our lives. And on the other hand, we have to face that it depends on us. And many people don't want to face it.
It's much easier for you to feel a victim of external factors, right? So it's not fear. We are doing something to spoil our success. I
Richard: think this is the big message we could give in this podcast, is that the idea that we have a fear is a very superficial thing. There's something underneath that that we don't like to see, that's difficult for us to see.
We don't have much contact with our psychological life. We're a very exteriorized culture these days. We see the problem always on the outside. And Dr. Keppe's work is deliberately trying to bring us to return us back to this psychological interior life, because that's where we can affect the greatest good in our lives. It's where all the source of our problems is, too.
But also, as you said in our last podcast, it's the source of all the goodness that we have, too. The beauty, the success, the genius that we have inside is all inside us. It doesn't come from an outside factor. So
Leo: there's great hope here, isn't there? Yes. So we could say that we should always be successful, right? If we are not, we are doing something to spoil it.
Richard: We are heirs to the greatest riches and magnificence that exist is how Keppe puts it. Our problem is that we rarely accept this. Perhaps now we can begin to reverse that individually and as a society. Let me know what you think. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Talk to you next time on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
