TO BREAK THROUGH THE MYTH of human personality is to achieve real joy. And it’s something we all can do when we start to realize how much control we have over who we are.
My friend Janese Morter is someone who I first heard sing in a church. I was a guest of her pastor that Sunday, and Janese had just moved to Phoenix from Chicago. She had already recorded one Gospel record, and she has one of those voices that can lift a human heart.
In the past, whenever I could get her to, she would sing a song right before the lunch break in my Owner–Victim seminar. It’s from Michael Jordan’s movie Space Jam and it’s appropriately called “I Believe I Can Fly.” As she soars within the song, you can hear that Janese is not singing from any kind of personality, but rather from the human spirit itself. People who hear her feel their own spirits start to stir.
Do you believe you can fly? Surveys show that most people have had dreams of flying. Deep down inside, we suspect that we’re not stuck here on the ground. Even though we often claim to be weary and “down,” we secretly long for lives of pure and soaring action. It happens in dreams because our dream body knows what we really want. Jiminy Cricket and Freud were in agreement that a dream is a wish your heart makes. Your heart knows who you really are. You are an angel. And as it is so poetically presented in Willie Nelson’s song, you are an “angel flying too close to the ground.”
Lives of soaring action are described by action words. And it was Buckminster Fuller who first observed, “I seem to be a verb!” And in that one powerful observation, he expressed a valuable secret of human potential. Owners of the spirit know that they are verbs—pure action words. Victims remain convinced that they are nouns: things, permanent things.
But the thing called personality is merely an illusion. We can change it at will. For example, it is a different “me” that goes to answer the door when my children say, “Dad, some guy from the IRS is here to talk to you,” than if they were to come in and say, “Dad, a woman named Jennifer Lopez is here to see you.” It is a different “me,” because what the victim calls personality is just a history of habits.
The extensive work done by Dr. Martin Seligman on learned optimism spanned 20 years, and he studied more than half a million children and adults. He found and scientifically confirmed two things: 1) Optimism makes you more effective at whatever you do, and 2) optimism can be learned.
These findings confirmed the work of many other great contemporary psychologists who have put to death all the old superstitions revolving around the fear that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. The truth is, you can. This old dog, for one, can tell you.
People who have figured out how to access and own this optimistic spirit soon become less interested in their personalities than they are in their purpose. They love designing commitments and keeping them. They see them as the basic building blocks of a happy life.
People who have not connected to this spirit do not have much interest in commitments, but instead retain an exaggerated fascination with their own put-upon identities.
An owner will change his personality on the spot in order to keep a commitment. A victim will break any commitment in order to keep his personality.
When victims discuss commitment, they refer to it as a feeling that comes and goes, as in, “I don’t feel as committed to this person as I used to.” They will say, “I gotta be me,” especially when you point out that they are breaking their promises to another. They want personality to trump commitment.
The misplaced loyalty we give to our personalities causes us tremendous misery and confusion throughout our lives.
A longtime friend of mine who is a talented musician and songwriter wrote to me after I’d sent him an audio version of my Owner–Victim seminar. His words are an illustration of how quickly someone can change once he sees the mistake in his original thinking. It is not about years of therapy and transformation; it is about an understanding that can be immediate:
You clearly heard my last desperate cry from the wilderness and, like a red cross of the spirit, you responded . . . . I spent an entire week in my office listening over and over to this voice that spoke directly to the core of my being, teaching me much I needed to know but didn’t, and reminding me of much I’ve known but “down I forgot as up I grew.” Nothing had a greater impact on me than the seminal wisdom of the price we pay for the “I Gotta Be Me” orientation. It never occurred to me until I heard you say those things out loud that no, in fact, one does not “gotta be me” at all costs. On the contrary, the “me” is a matter of choice. It is empowering to change the “me” to honor commitments, not, as I’d always assumed, the other way around. I paid an excruciatingly high price being “me” at the expense of my commitments. Your seminar was like an elevator ride up from hell.
If you tell yourself you have one personality, you limit your range of action. When you label yourself as “shy” or “lazy” or “cowardly” or “disorganized,” you shut down your ability to make a magnificent gesture. You rule out being great. You weave a cocoon for yourself to live inside. You might pray for some circumstance to break you free, but the problem is that you simply don’t understand where the power is.
The power is not out there. It is in you.