Richard Lloyd Jones: Today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. It's something we dream about. We visualize. We hire coaches to help us achieve it. We jeer the soap opera villain who sells his grandmother to get it. We stand around the water cooler and shake our heads at the lives of those who have it and destroy it. Today, a closer look at success. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Well, I'm a North American. It would be impossible not to be affected by the blinders on, full sheets to the wind, hell-bent for leather, single-mindedness of the North American culture and its focus on achieving the promised land that is the state of success. We treat the subject with the reverence and hushed tones that mystics from former times reserved for the awe of creation and poets for the sweet pains of love.
But perhaps it's true that in our strivings for material success, we've lost a lot. It was Canadian writer Mordecai Richler who wrote one of the great stories on this very theme in The Apprenticeship of Doody Kravitz. And if you've never seen that great 1974 movie with Richard Dreyfuss, you should check it out for a reminder of the perils to our souls of an unrelenting quest to fulfill me, me, me.
Success, what is it really, and what stops us from having real success? Susan Berkley is, by most accounts, a very successful entrepreneur. She has her own company, The Great Voice Company. She's a highly sought-after voice whose clients include AT&T. She's a trainer and a writer, and she has a lot to say about success. Susan, what's the current buzz, the current viewpoint on how to get success?
Well, the hottest thing now is something affectionately known as LOA, which is the law of attraction.
And we've seen that with The Secret. Probably many of our listeners have viewed that video that's out there right now, which talks about the centuries-old law of attraction, which says that "anything you can visualize in your mind, you can have." And to a certain extent, that is true. But yet, what's missing is the hidden life, the psychological life. So we could consciously be wanting success, but unconsciously be working against ourselves.
And these are the discoveries that Dr. Keppe has made with his work called Analytical Trilogy, Rich, that you base these podcasts on, which is that we really have, and he didn't make this up. I mean, this came from Freud, as everybody knows, who found that we have something called an unconscious, which is a hidden part of ourself, which rules the outcomes that we have in our life.
So all of these success methodologies or theories, if you could call them, they completely ignore that part. So we could be consciously wanting something, but unconsciously wanting something else. And unfortunately, our unconscious intentions determine our results.
Richard: Yes, I agree. And actually, the unconscious intentions of human beings is something we've explored a lot here on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. Our listeners can check out our other podcast for more specific explorations of that crucial psychological understanding, because our psychological aspects actually affect all areas of our
lives, both individually and socially.
But most success orientations, Susan, out of their ignorance of the psychological conclusions that have been reached, opt for programming the mind with positive thought and affirmations and crystallizing your intention.
How do you see all that? I mean, I've tried those. They don't work. And believe me, I tried them. I wish it was that simple. And unfortunately, it doesn't because these attitudes, I guess you could call them, are very deeply entrenched. Because the problem is, Rich, that we apparently, according to Dr. Keppe's discoveries, not only won't and refuse to accept success in our life.
He says in his book, The Origin of Illness, in the very first chapter, that "the hardest thing for us to accept in life is goodness." But he also says in that book that we take pleasure out of destroying the goodness in our life and unconscious pleasure in destroying the goodness in our life.
Richard: Well, now we're heading into a rather controversial aspect of Dr.
Norberto Keppe's work, perhaps. It's important to stress that this is all based on over 50 years of clinical and academic research, though, so it's important for you listening to know that these findings are not just pulled out of the air.
It's something that you've noticed a lot, isn't it, Susan, in your work with voiceover actors and public speakers, that we actually resist being successful. Many people say that this shows a fear of success, But we here in Brazil have a much different and broader view of that, because fear is usually masking a deeper unconscious intention against something. And that's something we need to see a little deeper.
Expand on this a bit for us, would you, Susan? How do you see all this?
Well, what happens when we start to do good in our life, what happens when we start to go forward, is that we get a lot of consciousness. We gain awareness, increased awareness. And what happens with consciousness, think of it as a light shining into your life, into your psyche.
That amplifies a lot of things, our talents and our abilities, but also our shortcomings.
I think that's why a lot of people don't want success. So it's not that they're afraid of success. They're afraid of what it's going to show them. For example, I teach people how to do voiceover and public speaking. Those are things that might look easy to the outsider, but the minute you start to do it, you see how truly difficult it is.
Any adult that's ever tried to learn anything, be it tennis or golf or anything or singing, will find that as soon as you start to actually do the thing, you're shown how far you really are from the fantasy goal that we have in our mind. So it's not so much that we're afraid of the success. We're afraid to humble ourselves and see where we really are.
And we're also afraid or uncomfortable seeing our shortcomings. But yet, any great person, I think anybody that's truly developed themselves in life, is constantly watching videos, looking at how they can do better, getting feedback.
And it's not always pleasant. To rise in life, you have to work with your shortcomings. And I think this is something that a lot of people are very censored about doing. They find that consciousness painful. And this is something, a flaw that every human being has. We regard the very thing that's going to help us. That's going to bring us health and happiness.
As the most painful, which would be consciousness. This light that success shines into our life. Yes,
Richard: it certainly is difficult to see our weaknesses. I can attest to that personally. When I first encountered the idea that you go forward. By really looking at your mistakes. I was, frankly, not very enthusiastic, to say the least. But Keppe here is basing himself on a key philosophical point.
We are not creatures in a process of becoming. We are already fully realized in our essence, but we have many attitudes against that.
In this philosophical view, then, seeing our attitudes against our mistakes is essential.
Dr. Keppe calls this the dialectic. In order for us to grow and develop and be successful, we have to compare ourselves to something healthy. So we have to be able to stand that kind of dialectic, that weighing ourselves, judging ourselves against something higher. You can't resolve anything in blindness and darkness.
And I think that's why a lot of people are not successful, because they really can't stand, They almost have an elevated self-image unconsciously, and they don't want to see who they really are.
Richard: Talk a little bit more, Susan, about some of the other limitations about the common views about how to deal with success, how to create success in your life.
The other flaw with a lot of these success principles is that they're very egocentric.
They elevate the individual, and they kind of stimulate a part of ourselves which is not so healthy. They want to feed our narcissism, which is not a very nice part of ourselves. If you think of some of the great leaders of our time, a JFK, a Martin Luther King, a Gandhi, a Mother Teresa, of course they were humans. They had flaws, but nobody would really define them as being narcissistic individuals.
They were known for their idealism and for their drive to do things for the greater good, for their country, for their people, for justice. So I think that's what's missing in a lot of these success theories today. It's all about me, me, me, how you, you, you can be the center of the universe, be your own little private billionaire without helping doing things for the greater good.
Richard: So give us your idea of what we do need to do in order to bring success to us, Susan.
I think have a big ideal that is not just self-centered, but one that will benefit others and benefit humanity. And you've really got to do, I mean, the AA people use the term fearless moral inventory, and I think that's a great term. I think we really have to explore our inner lives through programs like this and through work like Dr. Keppe's, which provides us with a path to really get to know that hidden part of ourself.
Because without that, you're just going to be sunk. You are going to take five steps forward and, you know, ten steps back.
Richard: It was Einstein who cautioned us not to try to become people of success, but people of... Value. And it strikes me as sage advice. One thing for sure, we have all we need right now. Will we accept it is the question.
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
