The Power of Your Past: The Art of Recalling, Reclaiming, and Recasting - Softcover

Schuster, John P.

 
9781605098265: The Power of Your Past: The Art of Recalling, Reclaiming, and Recasting
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1605098264 ISBN 13: 9781605098265
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Discover your path of personal and professional development with this practical guide to actively and purposefully engaging with your own past.
 
Most of us don't use our yesterdays very well. With so much focus on living in the moment, we neglect to engage in creative reflection on our personal histories. In The Power Of Your Past, John Schuster demonstrates that the past is the most valuable, most accessible, and yet most under-utilized resource for anyone wanting to make positive changes.
 
Offering a practical three-phase model for working with one’s past—Recalling, Reclaiming, and Recasting—Schuster illustrates the process with inspiring histories of those who have experienced transformative results. Schuster provides insight, encouragement, and practical steps for essential professional and personal development. Readers who follow this model will make progress in their endeavors, overcome persistent obstacles, and make decisions based on their own truth rather than relying on someone else’s.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John P. Schuster is a principal of the Schuster Kane Alliance, Inc. He serves on the faculty for the coaching programs at Columbia University and the Hudson Institute of Santa Barbara and is the author of Answering Your Call.

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Introduction:
Your Past Can Work for You

A common story line for movies and novels is the amnesia-stricken hero, who doesn’t know who he is or how he got to wherever the story starts. We meet him as he embarks on a quest to find out his story.

We are all that character. In the movies, the amnesia is total. Our amnesia is partial. Either way, the effect of the amnesia is a kind of disorientation. We know that we are somewhere, doing something, and we wonder why. In the movies, a sinister secret spy agency or a trauma to the head is the common origin of the amnesia. In our case, the origin is a culture that encourages us to disconnect from our past and focus on the present and future.

You are the hero here. You are about to go on a quest to overcome amnesia by harnessing the power of your past and clarifying your identity and direction. Amnesia is a metaphor; your being a hero is not.

MANY OF US don’t have a useful, full relationship with our past, the kind that could inform us for a lifetime. We avoid the difficult parts and underuse the enriching parts, when we could draw lessons and energy from both. We find ways to demonize, sentimentalize, ignore, forget, and more.

What we don’t know does indeed hurt us. We don’t know what we don’t know about our collective underuse and misuse of our past. We don’t know what our personal history can do for us or how our amnesia carries such a big price tag in life and work. The price is paid at different times and in different ways, but it is always paid in full.

I recently witnessed a seven-year-veteran vice president of a large enterprise getting fired for his collective acts of self-delusion, ones that had grown more dramatic over time as he refused to confront his inner scam. He blamed and undermined the boss artfully at first, and then increasingly recklessly. He subtly and then not-so-subtly manipulated his employees’ impressions, and hid the contracts that weren’t working. It all went up in flames of indignation that he could be so underappreciated when his “incompetent” boss delivered the termination.

Some false story he had started spinning about his capabilities and his role, born of past failures to accept feedback and see the truth, became the fiction that led to his demise. Among other things, he pictured himself as the smartest guy in the room and felt that being reared in a tough environment with ample money gave him an edge over his rural-born, middle-class boss. He wasn’t, and it didn’t.

This executive’s behavior is an example of what Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic, describes as flawed leadership: “Many leaders . . . leave little room for self exploration. . . . Often, [they can] be successful for a while, but it [leaves] them highly vulnerable, as their lack of self-awareness can lead to major mistakes and errors in judgment.”1 The seven-year veteran was all of these: vulnerable and without enough awareness to see his huge errors in judgment.

Don’t let our speed-addicted, now-biased culture’s widespread ignorance about the gifts of the past keep you from harvesting the lessons of yesterday and putting them into the hands of the person who can use them wisely—you. Your yesterdays are a fount of guidance and lessons that can energize you throughout your life, if you know how to tap them.

When we approach our yesterdays with the courage to confront their truths and the imagination to expand on their lessons, then we move into our future equipped with richly sculpted identities.

This collective amnesia exists for a reason: many argue that the past has no value. None other than Eckhart Tolle, who has a sizable following, starts out his popular book on the importance of staying in the moment, The Power of Now, with this sentence: “I have little use for the past and rarely think about it.”2 And then he argues for a few hundred pages on why now is the only source of real human potency.

“Little use for the past”? This is an extreme position to take and feels like a loss—and, in many instances, an outright danger. Our yesterdays are a rich vein for learning and more, if we use them well. We all sense the validity of Santayana’s axiom, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”3

I contend that an easier and more fruitful way to improve our awareness is to do what we do naturally, which is to scan our past, creatively. Our memories are more important than doing mental gymnastics on behalf of all-powerful nowness. Our history is richer and more useful as a resource than pretending we don’t have it. I grant Mr. Tolle that in one sense, now is all we have, and I would grant him that many of us attend to our history quite poorly. Yes, we can get stuck in our stories as we repeat them.4 But that in no way means that we should not regularly dip into our yesterdays with awareness and care, learning what we can from them and drawing inspiration and self-definition.

Niels Bohr, the early-20th-century physicist, said that the opposite of one profound truth is another profound truth. It is the dynamic tensions between polar opposites that hold the field of truth. So this book will provide the truth opposing nowness.

The dynamic truth is that now and yesterday are of equal power and value.

Using your past well is not a cakewalk, but it is easier for most, and I would say more fruitful, than nowing-it-out at all times, minimizing the lessons of your yesterdays. More on this when we discuss our underused past.

THE PRICE: WHAT YOU ARE UNAWARE OF CONTROLS YOU

The failure to understand the truth of our yesterdays leads to errors in judgment and a significant sapping of our energy. It robs us of the very power that life yearns to have flow through us. Each denial and misassessment, even the small ones, has a cost. Collectively, they go far beyond any price we think we may be paying. This amnesia-caused mistaken sense of ourselves creates major obstacles in three important areas:

Image Identity: We fall short of identifying who we are and what we are here to do.

Image Potential: It lessens the expression of our unique capacities and our ability to make a difference.

Image Self-direction: It allows us to be influenced by others and the social messages around us rather than charting our own course.

Not knowing how to harness the power of yesterday is an honest-to-goodness showstopper. It is a game ender, a crying-out-loud shame, a mission mangler.

If the underlying falsehood of the immature person is failure to accept personal responsibility, then task number one in life is to see and claim the truth about ourselves.

I vividly remember the woman at a workshop who came up to me at a break and said, “I feel like a puddle compared with my husband.” My heart got a bit caught in my throat at this offhand self-destructive description. The image of her negatively comparing herself to a puddle will never leave me—what a devastating self-assessment, at what cost, devoid of any realization of her inner beauty, gifts, or opportunities to be uniquely herself in the world. Without any more information, we can all sense how the puddle image damages her identity, her potential, and her self-direction. What in her distant and more recent past had driven her to such a conclusion?

TRANSFORMING THE MOMENT THROUGH REDISCOVERING YESTERDAY

Misinterpreting your past is one thing. Using it really well is another. Let me give you a few examples.

You can’t be around Tommy Emmanuel, whom many think is the world’s greatest guitarist, without getting infected by his enthusiasm.5 He is contagious with possibilities, the...

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1605098264
ISBN 13 
9781605098265
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
232
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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Pärnu mnt 139b-14
Tallinn
11317
Estland

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