main thing is to get well again. People are not cars on a production line. Each person has his integral temperament. There are great differences in sensibility, character and in the level of activity. Active people find their salvation in movement; passive people love peace and contemplation. But common to both is their disposition. Hopes and fears form our characters. Our need to grow and interact with other people is a fixed integral part of our system. Unconscious feelings steer our consciousness. Many people who have grown up in poverty for example never lose their fear of losing everything, regardless of how much money they have.
Personal values are the secret spices in the recipe for prosperity. If you can train yourself to develop courage, humility and awareness, you will be in a position to change to the winning side.
Many people who have grown up in a successful business family imbibe certain values with their mother’s milk. Others – most of us – look for models that can help us to develop perspectives. But the majority of people train their brains to find excuses for their existence or put the blame on others, such as politicians or their boss, for their situation. If they spent only half the time they spend in regret and finding out where they went wrong on producing results they would be rich.
Every time you obtain personal success a blemish in your personal system always threatens to bring your best plans to nothing: vanity, pride, arrogance, presumptuousness and haughtiness arise. Your faults appear as soon as you come into close contact with other people. Life is simply too short to iron out all your faults. It doesn’t matter. The main thing is to know the advantages and defects of your character. It concerns your positive as well as your negative values. The outcome of this is your talent. You can integrate them into the structure of your character as you earn money.
Often it can even be the negative influences that lead to a business. One of our clients was a loser in private, but a winner in public. Wherever he went he opened his big mouth to show that he was the greatest – to the distress of his fellow human beings who knew him better.
As far as they were concerned he was a pure exhibitionist who by any means and with a lot of shamming annoyed everyone so much until all eyes were fixed up on him. He failed interviews regularly because he made requests and demands that bore no relation to his actual accomplishments.
Of course the coaches didn’t know anything about this. It came out during the session that he was on the wrong side in his chosen profession, the media. He was a complete actor, who belonged in front of rather than behind the camera: a limelight hogger! No sooner had he discovered this for himself when he found an honest and deep relationship. Now he is working on a personal project which he will stage one day; and he works willingly and hard on it, so he can get his well-earned applause.
Character, persona, personality
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our talent determines your personal success. The personality determines the goal. The personality often changes when you undergo a deep crisis – as the example above shows.
During a crisis you encounter your self-deception and discover what you believe to be right in the innermost part of your unconsciousness. Many people have a dichotomy inside themselves that they carry for all of their life, and are too occupied to notice it. There is the type who always questions others, criticizing and commenting on their actions – without ever giving himself away. That is to say he knows like no other of the danger and must have had bitter experiences with it. Now he is paying the others back by pumping them for information and questioning the reasons for their doings and not doings - without noticing it himself. He has a special talent for looking for mistakes and rubbing more salt into the wounds. The interlocutors in his life are constantly forced to give an account of themselves, and it seems that they are living their lives the wrong and he the right way. Many avoid him – not least because he never opens up to them, and doesn’t do himself what he demands from his fellow human beings.
A client of ours told us about one of his own clients, who cultivated a very serious and correct business jargon, only to fall into the wildest linguistic excesses outside working hours: he couldn’t be foul-mouthed enough. When after a drunken, backslapping, all mates together evening he introduced this vocabulary into an email his client was stunned by his sleaziness and found his personal style vulgar and obsequious. And that was the last he heard from him.
This is the pathological side of values. Such people have genuinely not found their inner self. They combine contradictions without noticing it. The inner divisions in human beings first have to be discovered both in order to analyze them and eliminate them (the job of the psychoanalyst), or to push them open without realizing it and to make them as fruitful as possible (the job of the coach). Normally one always assumes that one is right and everyone else wrong. This is a very costly argument. There is a saying in America that “you can be right or you can be rich”.
Personality values are mostly especially intractable because our pig-headedness prefers us to appear as we would wish to be. You are convinced that you are a nice person and put great trust in your own press. Unconsciously you expect that other people will like you and treat you well because of it. But you don’t know what other people think and say about you. Very few people take the trouble to find out and prefer to fall in love with their reflection. It would be unpleasant if a “personality” who acts like Louis XIV, but in reality is totally unpopular had to lead his team out of a crisis. Only then do the true values that are hiding behind the mask of the ego appear.
“Public virtue, private vice” is what the 18th century doctor and philosopher Bernhard Mandeville called the phenomenon whereby even the greatest criminals want to appear as good men in society. These ego values glitter on the surface and hide the inner being of a person. They are based on vanity, on false pride or false self-estimation. Of course it’s fun to dress up and go out and turn men’s heads, or to tell stories where we come across quite by chance as high principled heroes. But other ego values are simply vitriolic. Basically the ego always strives to bring together people who think like us, gets them to follow us and at the same time excludes people who don’t think as we do. This way of thinking can lead to the end of a career.
The ancient Greeks called the masks that they used in tragedy “persona”. They represent a character that can’t be found in the original face. Many cultures have believed in such masks. There are the Melanesian peoples for whom there is no death, as their dead live on in demons: small carved figures who lie in the demon house. They don’t just represent the ancestors, they are the ancestors.
In our culture it only depends on whether we see through the masquerade or not. We all bring forward superficial values in society and project ourselves, as we would like to be: great guys, good human beings, the social mask, our image. Many people use the laws of marketing and develop another character to become someone by ham acting an artificial figure that is constantly onstage. If the “persona” is the mask that we show in society, the ego is the make-up. We paint nice colors on our faces to appear more interesting and more important and to hide our true face. It is a childish way of drawing attention to yourself. To develop into a person you only need to wipe the character cosmetics off your cheeks and just lower your guard to see yourself as others see you. The mirror that shows you how you really are is society.
You need courage to find and develop your own values. For often other values determine our lives. Possibly we have pursued a course of studies which our parents are proud of, not us. Perhaps we have shone in a subject so that we were forced into it rather than choosing it ourselves. At the moment when you come out with your real values and goals – often after a tragedy – people around you will be shocked. But when the puzzle stage is over your dream begins. You have established the first roots of the performance scale tree. Now strictly speaking it can only lead upwards.
Partners worth their weight in gold
