Scott Gallagher

Now that was weird!!  I am sitting here at the Edmonton Airport after just checking through airport security.  On my way to the the security line, I said to myself "I never get taken aside for the random check.  This would be a great time for them to pull me aside since I've got 5 hours to wait before my next flight".  Literally two minutes later a guy comes to me and says "Please come with me.  I'm doing a "random" spot check on you".  He proceeds to take me ahead of about 70 people where I tell him that I was just thinking about this happening.  As it turned out, he only spent a couple minutes with me and put me ahead of everyone.  Makes me wonder, did I have an intuitive thought that I was going to be spot checked, or did I cause the spot check by thinking about it?  What do you think?

To create lasting change:

First, don’t try to change or fix yourself. By focusing too much on your problem, you’ll only get more of it.

Second, shift your focus. Think about what you want, instead of what you don’t. Give your energy – thoughts, feelings, words, actions – to what you want to experience and create. And that’s what you’ll begin to feel inside yourself and have show up in your life.

And third, to help someone else, stimulate (and support) the same thinking in them.

Not What We’re Used To Doing...

When you think about it, these ideas go against what almost all of us, including myself, do whenever we have a “negative” habit. What it says is: Change doesn’t come from trying to control our behavior, “break” our bad habit, or force ourselves to stop by criticizing, guilting or beating ourselves up. Instead, it comes through releasing our unwanted behaviors – by stimulating and growing the mental habit of focusing on what we want in our life; and then replacing our old habits with new ones that give us our desired experience.

These same principles are beautifully illustrated in a book from a totally different source, called Whale Done, by Ken Blanchard and several other authors. The book is about how professional trainers train killer whales to do those amazing feats at top aquariums. Since I describe this story in more detail later, I won’t give it all away here. But what it basically says is that the way to train a whale is not to focus on what it is doing wrong, because it will simply ignore you – or eat you! The key is to focus on what it is doing ‘right.’ In other words, look for the behaviors you want to grow, then give the whale positive reinforcement when it makes progress in that direction.

Intuitively that makes sense, right? Yet this idea is hard for most of us to actually do. Why? Because we’ve become so focused on what people are doing ‘wrong,’ as well as trying to fix or correct ourselves and others, that that’s what we give our energy or power to – and as a result, we get more of what we do not want.

The key to this approach is shifting our focus onto what we want. By growing these thoughts, feelings and behaviours, these will gradually begin to replace what we are doing now and give us the experiences that we seek.