Stop the Sabotage

Making and Maintaining Change During Difficult Times

Herman "Ray" Barber

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781614481409
• Topic: Desarrollo personal
• Subtopic: Éxito personal

Stop the Sabotage: Making and Maintaining Change During Difficult Times is written for those who are tired of starting over only to fall back into old behavior. If you are feeling discouraged and are telling yourself that maintaining a desirable change just isn't going to happen, now you have a guide to understand why success hasn't occurred. Before learning more concepts, learn how to eliminate those personal choices that have sabotaged your ability to keep change going. If you have been devouring self-help information for years and haven't succeeded with your personal change agenda, this information isn't wasted once you identify and eliminate the sabotages that have you stuck. Learning more concepts the equivalent of putting perfume over body odor. "Stop the Sabotage: Making and Maintaining Change During Difficult Times" is the equivalent of taking a bath before putting on perfume and new clothes. It keeps it real and keeps the focus on you, not on others. Those who cannot identify exactly what needs to happen differently for their lives to improve for the better now have a view of the dynamics that stop our efforts to maintain change and to continually move forward. Whether you discount perfectly good information, spend time and energy swimming up-stream, cannot develop a solid support network or use your strengths to move forward, these and other self-sabotaging issues will be history. If you are tired of playing with change, get serious. "Stop the Sabotage: Making and Maintaining Change During Difficult Times" calls for self-honesty and your willingness to take a personal inventory of yourself. If you aren't ready for the challenge just yet, buy "Stop the Sabotage" and give it to someone who is serious with getting on with his or her life. If you believe you are worth it, spend a little time, effort and money improving your life.

Discounting
Information

Where do we begin in our increasingly important quest to make and to maintain change? With the advent of the information age, we can access information with a few strokes on the keyboard, watch an on-line video or listen to discussion about the topic of change. Thus, the quantity of information isn’t at issue and much of the available information is excellent. However, we seem to be stuck. My opinion is that people increasingly discount perfectly good information.

In selecting the order of Stop the Sabotage, I placed discounting information at the beginning because this can sabotage the utilization of the remainder of the book and all self-help information. Unfortunately discounting information is one of the major reasons why people do not benefit from therapy, self-help books, CDs, podcasts, talk shows and many other sources of good information that could be helpful in making life changes.

Those who discount educational and self-help information often impose the supposition that, unless the information is perfectly aligned with their personal beliefs and their exact circumstances, it is flawed information and thus could not possibly be useful. This is a common excuse for not moving forward. This reasoning also feeds our need to be terminally unique.

If you are reading Stop the Sabotage, evidently your methods of trying to make and maintain change have not been totally successful. Thus you must not have the answers and/or the motivation to do it on your own. Tell yourself that you will read Stop the Sabotage with an open mind and without spending time and energy pointing out things with which you don’t agree. This advice will put you on the right track and will serve as a long-term life lesson. Finding and using good information that works for you isn’t some sort of reality show where you are voting people off an island. In the world of making and maintaining personal change, you are the biggest loser when you become too judgmental about self-help information.

If someone is really striving to make lasting change, lessons can be found anywhere and from anyone. Many of the lessons found in Stop the Sabotage have been derived from those who had problems with segments of their lives, but who also had areas of great insight, wisdom and success.

If you wish to learn acting techniques, would you listen to an award-winning actor who had problems with infidelity or drug addiction? If you are a talented singer, would you take advice about singing from someone with three Grammy Awards but who had problems with personal relationships? Great actors, singers, athletes and politicians often have noticeable character flaws, but they know their area of expertise and have a great deal to teach.

Take a look back at your own history and select some of the most profound lessons that have stuck with you. Did these lessons come from perfect people or perfect events? We may find perfection in one area of a person’s life and may consider them a role model. But people we admire for certain strengths often have imperfections. A great deal of our current media is built around pointing out people’s flaws and shortcomings. We are exposed to an on-going barrage of invitations to discredit others. This often leads us to discount excellent information because we are becoming much too cynical.

Can you name a few professional athletes and movie stars that, although experts in their profession have fallen into some serious problems of their own making? Hopefully you don’t discount the importance of their contributions because of imperfections. If you struggle with discounting people and thus their lessons, make an effort to get past their imperfections. Looking at the imperfections of others is a way of not looking at yourself and your own imperfections.

During my first two years of graduate school, I worked in a therapeutic community for the treatment of drug addiction. This community consisted of mostly heroin addicts and many were very adept at using their defenses to fend off any sort of change. One common problem among people in long-term substance abuse treatment is that they will look for faults in the staff so that they don’t have to look at their own issues. Their magical thinking was that they would not have to change unless the staff members were paragons of virtue. Thus a focus of treatment was to teach the residents that taking stock of other people’s imperfections was not going to help them become drug-free, happy and productive.

As children we all learn how to best control our environment so to maintain as much comfort as possible. Children often learn the skill of refocusing attention away from themselves and onto others. When confronting these children they quickly point out any imperfections in the adult. Discrediting others is a common defense against change and is often perfected with age as we begin building our ego—that part of us that we totally construct. Discounting the ideas of others is an inherent part of the process of internally defending against change.

Tabloid news is a classic example of media that discounts others. Tabloid news is a paradise for those who enjoy keeping the focus on others while not spending time and effort in self-improvement activities. It appears that when we get overly focused on Tiger Wood, Al Gore, or others who have made errors in judgment, we tend to spend less time looking at ourselves.

Take a moment to look at the ways that you have traditionally discounted information that may have been helpful? Do you find yourself increasingly looking at the misfortunes of others to realize how well you are doing? If you are overweight, do you tend to focus on those who have a much more severe weight problem or those are too underweight to really be healthy? As you confront yourself with such questions, are you also saying “yes, but?”

I have known many people who say “yes, but” to every piece of advice. Some seem to be looking for an exact prescription for their special problems, however they will take prescription medication that was not specifically designed and manufactured for their exact physical problem. One useful exercise is to be aware of each time that you say “yes, but”. Once you become aware of saying these words think about why you are saying them. The utterance of these words is often a symptom of “terminal uniqueness”.

Terminal uniqueness is one of the biggest excuses for discounting useful information. It means you believe your problem or situation is very different from those that other people experience. If you truly believe this, do a bit of reality testing. To some, being terminally unique makes them special and we all love to feel special. There is secondary gain in feeling special. If we feel special by feeling that our problems are unique, then this can become part of our self-identity. Do you want your problems and excuses to be part of how others define you and how you define yourself? Self-indulgence in feeling crappy about yourself can become a way of life that isn’t really going to allow self-improvement into your life.

Besides attitudes and self-images that hinder growth, there are a number of issues that are hard-wired into our psyche. At times, simple awareness of these processes will allow us to recognize why we are getting off the track with personal change. With this awareness, we can slowly and intentionally move forward.

During the time that I taught introductory psychology, students seemed to love the chapters on sensation and perception. They were fascinated about how the human brain often fills-in missing pieces of information. For example, the missing letters in a neon sign are hardly noticed because we fill in the blanks. We also tend to correct stimuli in our environment that is not correct. There are many example of this phenomenon.

When I primarily treated clients with post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder), I took some classes on the topic of psycholinguistics. This gave me a different view of how the human brain will tarnish and discount information or change the thought process. An example will clarify my point.

If I am in the early stage of working with a rape victim and exploring her personal story of rape and the accompanying feelings, I will simply listen to the story. She may say that the five-foot eight, blue eyed, blonde man approached her in a dark blue Ford pickup truck. She may then state many details about his appearance and manner. However, when I paraphrase her words back to her, I should speak in generalities. “When the man approached you there, then, and that happened, what were you feeling?” If I attempt to repeat her exact words and made a mistake in any of the details, she would most likely get out of her feelings and into her thoughts in order to correct me. For example, if I said that the man was in a light blue Ford van, this would typically stop the flow of feelings and she would correct me. The lesson in this story is that we tend to pick-out details from information that aren’t exactly correct. The next step is often to discount the information.

In this example, one can see that we tend to listen to someone very closely until we find ourselves verbally or non-verbally correcting his or her inaccuracies. This is a form of discounting information. To make this point, I kept a few writing errors in Stop the Sabotage. See how quickly you can move past these while staying focused on the message and not the error.

The paradox in this process is that we tend to pick-out the details from information that isn’t exactly correct—as we know them to be correct. If we are and have been looking for resolution for our personal change agenda, we evidently don’t know all of the answers. We only know what we know. This is one of many reasons to digest self-help information with a very open mind.

During a conversation, don’t stop and correct someone who makes a simple mistake. While reading material, don’t correct every mistake or think about how it could have been written better—unless you are being paid as an editor. If an article has one flaw or inaccuracy, don’t focus just on that part. After years of practice, I can hear more of what is being said to me and I retain much more of the material that I see, hear and experience.

One secondary gain from this type of exercise is that you will learn the true answer to the meaning of the question “would I rather be right or would I rather be happy?” Would I rather be critical or kind? Is your ego so fragile that your self-esteem varies from high to low depending on whether you are right or wrong? Are you one who looks for deficits rather than for strengths?

When we are shopping for information for our own personal benefit, we need to turn down mechanisms that discount incoming information. There is a saying in group therapy and 12-step programs that we should use what fits and discard the rest. This is excellent advice but I recommend taking it one step further. I often believe that things we hear today may be useful later in life. For that reason it is good to use what fits today and store the remainder for another day.

I discuss this point in parenting classes. I frequently hear testimonials from parents about lessons that their parents and others taught them as children. Although they discounted this information at the time, later in life they recognized the value of the early lessons and used this information to their benefit. Perhaps you have your own examples of how this applies to you.

Why do people take one small piece of information and discount all of it? Although this may be intellectual dogmatism, this is frequently derived from fear of being incorrect about old ideas. People do not like to admit that they are wrong. Before we will admit that we are wrong, we will reinforce our old stance and defend it. It is one thing to do this in public to save face, but information that comes to you in the privacy of your own space can be agreed upon without admitting anything to others. As children, we learn not to believe everything we read, as mature adults we learn not to believe everything we initially think.

As adults, many of us learn that listening to our ego is pretty much a joke. As we realize that our ego is a construct of our own making, we learn to get further and further from it and the garbage it brings to contaminate our lives. If I find myself in a space where my ego seems to be running my life, I think of something for which I am grateful. Since the ego and gratitude can’t occupy the same space, I quickly find myself centered in a healthy place.

Many people get caught-up in the trap of monolithic thinking. This practice is common among those who propose that, unless we agree with their rhetoric, we are BAD. Bad is a relative word that in recent years may imply that one is un-American, un-patriotic or un-Christian. Those who polarize society require that we all take sides. People on each side of an issue have their own particular beliefs. We often believe that we are expected to agree with 100 percent of a group’s beliefs or not at all. This supposition makes it uncomfortable for many of us to pick and choose our beliefs individually rather than selecting entire ideologies. We then generalize this to self-help information.

When we look at our personal philosophy or ideology, there are those who are like us and those who are not like us. Those like us are often framed as good and those not like us are framed as not so good. Thus we often tend to listen to those who are like us. If we don’t know anything about the person or organization that is offering us new information, we are looking for clues as to whether they are like us or fall into the camp of those who are not like us.

Areas such as politics and religion are two of the great areas of differentiation. The point here is that people who don’t think as we think and who don’t subscribe to our belief systems can offer excellent information. Do you know the religious and political affiliation of your doctor, dentist or attorney? If so, why should you care?

When we look for clues as to whether a person is like us, we tend to search for signs of commonality or difference. In the process we seldom hear the entire message. When reading material that contains useful personal information, avoid the tendency to determine whether the presenter of the information is like or not like you.

Another underlying belief and practice that feeds the process of discounting information is that a person may not be comfortable with picking and choosing bits and pieces of information to arrive at a solution. Fear of what others will think can be a major roadblock. Fear that you will identify yourself with those “other people” can also stop us in our tracks.

Think about the world of information as a grocery, clothing or furniture store. Do you always buy prepared meals from a box or from the freezer? Many of us will put together a meal by combining various types of foods. We mix and match. We buy meat that we can serve with different pasta and vegetables. In putting together a wardrobe, we buy a shirt or blouse that will go with different pants and skirts. In decorating a room, we often combine color, form, and texture to fit our taste. Much of the content of Stop the Sabotage is about variety and about picking those things that fit your individual needs.

I taught Transitional Analysis^® (TA) for many years. From the perspective of TA^®, some people will select an “I’m OK—You’re not OK” life position because they don’t feel good about themselves—not because they feel superior. I often used Archie Bunker as a good example of someone who takes this life position. During the early years of the television series All in the Family, Archie put people down because he did not feel good about himself. He discounted blacks, Jews, intellectuals and many others because he had a dead-end job and a very limited education and understanding about the world in which he lived.

Anyone who is dogmatic in his or her thinking will discount perfectly good ideas because there is a small piece of the idea that does not fit into his or her worldview. Hatred for a person or a group can sabotage one’s efforts to change. Believing that only those who believe as you believe can keep you stuck in a sea of ignorance and bigotry.

I recall developing my first co-existing world-view during elementary school. I recall the day that I was introduced to the scientific method. I immediately had a revelation that science and the scientific method were not the end-all in knowledge and reason. Upon learning the scientific method, I immediately knew that it was an extremely important tool on the continuum of methods of knowing information. I believe in it, use it, teach it; but I know there is much more in the universe than the scientific method can ever explain or prove.

Quantum physics clarifies that we can neither explain nor predict some events and processes with certainty. Thus I am open to spiritual teachings, lessons from the arts, or from those who know nothing of science. Answers can be found in some of the most unlikely places. Because you believe in one thing doesn’t necessarily mean that you are opposed to something else.

Social psychologists have much to teach about why we tend to discount or discredit concepts and ideas. For example, we tend to believe in what we do (i.e. our profession and religion). We may especially believe in things that we have suffered for. If most people living in a particular geographic area work in the defense industry, they will more likely have strong opinions in favor of defense spending...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Discounting Information
• Chapter 2: Structuring Time
• Chapter 3: Throwing Out the Garbage
• Chapter 4: Our Economy of Energy
• Chapter 5: Cost/Benefit Analysis
• Chapter 6: Clarity of the Issues
• Chapter 7: A Plan and Timeline for Change
• Chapter 8: Developing and Utilizing Support
• Chapter 9: Looking, Acting and Feeling Different
• Chapter 10: Personal Sabotages
• Chapter 11: Building on Past Success
• Chapter 12: Using Symbols, Action and Ritual to Enhance Change
• Chapter 13: Staying in the Flow
• Chapter 14: The Next Level
• About the Author