A newborn lion cub can’t take care of itself. For the first year of its life, its mother, and other female members of the pride, take care of the lion cub’s needs. But after a year, a lion cub knows how to be a lion. Everything that a lion needs to know is built into it. It knows how to hunt and how to be a successful lion. It runs on pure animal instincts.
This is true of most living things on earth, with the noted exception of we humans. We aren’t born knowing how to be an effective human. We aren’t born with any of the accumulated knowledge of those that have come before us. Instead, we are a blank slate and have to be taught from scratch everything that we need to survive and thrive.
We learn a lot of what we need to know from our parents. We learn even more from our culture. Then we are sent to school to acquire some of the foundational knowledge that we need to obtain a job—even if most of what is taught is directed at our working in Industrial Age jobs.
But we are never given classes or instructions in the one area that makes the greatest difference in the results we produce throughout our lives: our personal psychology.
We Aren’t Taught
We aren’t taught that an optimistic, abundance-based worldview leads to success and that a pessimistic, scarcity mindset quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So many of us walk around hallucinating that there isn’t enough to go around and that life is a zero-sum game.
We aren’t taught that our only real limits are the limits that exist in our minds, that literally anything is possible. Forces teach us the opposite; they convince us that our limits are the limits others would place on us. Too many of us believe these limits exist and live a life that is less than it might be.
We aren’t taught that we are born with the greatest of all human attributes, resourcefulness, and that we are born to create, to find a new way. Instead we are taught to color within the lines, to follow instructions. We don’t use our greatest gift, and we deprive the world those gifts.
We aren’t taught that our emotional intelligence counts for more of our results in life than does our general intelligence, or that our ability to produce results will almost always include our working with others. We are instead given diplomas that document the accumulation of general intelligence and say nothing about our ability to work with others or lead a team. We know a lot, but we don’t know how to get things done when we are missing a positive personal psychology.
Look Around
Look at the people around you. How many of the problems and challenges that they face are the direct result of a poor personal psychology? Think about your own problems. Aren’t they the result of your poor personal psychology, someone else’s poor personal psychology, or some combination of both?
If you have a positive personal psychology, it’s because you were fortunate enough to have had a parent or mentor who taught you, or you were hooked by the these ideas at some point in your life.
If you would produce better results, if you would have the life you want, start working on building your own positive personal psychology. Read books, magazines, and blog posts on your personal psychology. Listen to audio programs. Go to seminars. Keep a journal of your thoughts and spend time thinking about what you think about.
You are the only real asset you have for producing the results you want. To produce those results, you need to empower yourself with a positive personal psychology.
Questions
Think about people you know with perpetual—and perennial—problems. How much of their problems are caused by their own personal psychology?
Why aren’t children exposed to positive personal psychology early in their lives?
How much of your own personal psychology is the result of being infected with negativity by the world around you?
How much time have you spent developing and empowering, positive personal psychology and what steps have you taken to do so?
.jpg?width=768&height=994&name=salescall-planner-ebook-v3-1-cover%20(1).jpg)
