While reading this book, some of you may find that a few of the ideas, concepts and issues presented are very new to you or make you have to reconsider how you currently view your world. This section is designed to help you through this process of changing the way you see things by identifying what often gets in the way of that.
The following list is of some of the common signs that you’ve got some key strategies that are holding you back from getting what you want. The first step is to identify them:
Obviously, the next step is to find a way to work through those issues:
Strange as it may seem, this is probably one of the most poisonous phrases you can ever say in your life. It has a number of different ways of appearing, and you need to become wise to them all. It can appear:
These things are all indicative of the ‘I don’t know’ state.
The ‘I don’t know’ state is a horrific place to find yourself in, because it always has very dire consequences. There is only one time when ‘I don’t know’ is okay, and that is when you are asked for a factual bit of information. For example, if I ask you, ‘What is the capital of Outer Mongolia?’ you may well reply, ‘I don’t know’. But if I say to you that it’s really important that I find out, then you would probably say, ‘Well, I could probably look it up and find it out for you’. (It’s Ulaanbaatar.)
But we don’t always use ‘I don’t know’ in that way. Instead, we sometimes use it, often unthinkingly:
In polite society we can get away with ‘I don’t knows’. If someone asks you a question and you respond with ‘I don’t know’, they will rarely question you any further, but there are huge problems as a result of using ‘I don’t know’.
I’d like you to imagine for a moment that you are a travel agent and your job is to book a holiday for me. Imagine I answer every question that you ask with, ‘I don’t know’.
So you would ask, ‘Where would you like to go on holiday?’ and I reply, ‘I don’t know’.
And you would say, ‘Do you want to go somewhere hot or somewhere cold?’ and I would reply, ‘I don’t really know’. So you might say, ‘Do you want to go somewhere relaxing or somewhere adventurous on your holiday?’ and I would reply, ‘I don’t really know’. And you’d say, ‘Would you like to go soon or later on in the year?’ and I would reply, ‘I don’t really know’.
What kind of holiday would you end up booking for me? Well, if you didn’t throw me out of your office for being your most annoying customer ever, you’d book me a holiday that you think I might like. But, because you have no information to go on, you are guessing what my preferences would be. What is the chance of me liking that holiday? Probably quite slim – because I didn’t choose it, you did.
Also, as the travel agent, you have to work really hard, making all the suggestions and doing all the work. Responding with ‘I don’t know’ means that as the holiday booker, I have taken no part in the decision-making process; therefore, if it isn’t as I wanted then I can blame that ‘dreadful travel agent’ for choosing the wrong holiday.
When people say, ‘I don’t know’, it can seem like a safe choice because then they’ll never get anything ‘wrong’. So, although they avoid being seen as making the wrong choices, they also naturally avoid exerting any influence on a situation or decision. This means that they won’t be in charge of the direction their life goes in, and someone else will be designing their life for them. Unfortunately, although people may help you design your life with the best will in the world, they will never design it as well as you could because they don’t know ‘you’ as well as you do. I insist, when people come to see me, that they never, ever use the phrase ‘I don’t know’. The reason for this is that if you use ‘I don’t know’ in my clinic it will make any training or therapy much longer than it needs to be, and so it’ll take you that much longer to get your issues sorted. So, if you want to move forward in your life as quickly as possible, then I suggest you start by dumping the ‘I don’t know’ phrase. This kind of usage of it serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever – unless you want everything to stay exactly the same.
There are two excellent approaches to deal with ‘I don’t knows’. The first, which is often very effective, is to decide to be creative whenever ‘I don’t know’ appears and find an immediate solution. Occasionally, when you’re really stuck, you will need to ask yourself the following question: ‘When was the last time I found myself in a similar situation (by similar I mean another time in your life when you were stuck in some shape or form) and got myself unstuck?’
It’s true to say that there are times in everyone’s life when they become stuck. Maybe we get to the checkout at the supermarket and we find we can’t pay because we’ve left our wallet or purse at home. Or maybe we get to the train station and the last train has left or been cancelled and we can’t get home. Or we have a flat tyre and haven’t got a spare and we’re stuck. We’ve all been in situations similar to these where we are really stuck, but interestingly enough, we know you didn’t stay stuck there because you’re not there anymore – you got through it.
Now take a few moments to think about a time when you thought you were really stuck, but you worked your way through it. This may be a time recently, a time in the distant past, something you think about a lot or something you seldom think about. It may be in a work context, a family context or in some other context altogether, but as you think about it notice what you notice about yourself, and how you dealt with it. Write down how you got through the situation.
You will notice there are a number of key factors. First, you believed there was a way through – that’s the first thing. When you got stuck at that station, for instance, and you couldn’t get home, you knew you would get home eventually, but you didn’t know quite when. When you had a flat tyre and didn’t have a spare you knew you would survive that experience; you knew you would get home eventually, it was just a question of how.
Second, when you get yourself into these kinds of ‘stuck situations’ and you’ve tried everything that you think will work but it doesn’t (for example, you’ve looked at the flat tyre and you’ve got the spare out and that has a puncture, too); you’ve used up all your natural options. What do you do next? You have to start thinking creatively, and that’s what you did in these situations. You thought through things in a different way, believing that there was a solution and you found it.
It may be that the first solution you came up with didn’t work, but you knew there was an answer and you flexibly and creatively came up with it. Remember this memory, because it is vitally important. My experience tells me that 99 per cent of people reading this book will come across ‘I don’t know’ somewhere in their lives and it will really seem to bog everything down.
If you let it get to you and think there is no solution, then it will make everything grind to a halt. If you start to approach this stuckness more creatively, in the ways I’ve outlined above, then you will beat that ‘I don’t know’ and start to move your life on. ‘I don’t knows’ are one of the key ways that people keep themselves permanently stuck in their lives, so please make sure you are really aware of them. Act on them every time you find them because they are a massive part of the reason why your life isn’t the way you want it to be. Each time you do that, you will reveal a new part of your future that was hidden from view with that ‘I don’t know’.