This is one of those subjects that I'm always torn about when it comes to this blog.
How much of my personal life do I really want to reveal for public scrutiny for the rest of my life and even possibly beyond?
However, the whole point of this blog is to show the very human side of someone who's made it big. To show that successful people are really no different than you are, dear reader, except in the way they choose to organize their thoughts.
Anger is not an emotion most people associate with me. I'm a very calm and cool natured guy. Every few people have ever seen me angry but when I do lose my temper I tend to be loud and intimidating.
It's not a trait I've ever appreciated but for most of my life I was just of the opinion that 'that's me'.
Well it's not actually.
Technically, it's my father.
My earliest childhood memory is of being 3 years old. We had just moved into a new apartment and I was walking out of the kitchen and into the adjoining living room when I walked right into my father who was coming the other way.
I stopped abruptly, looked up and saw him scowling down at me, annoyed.
That in itself was no big deal, but what jumped out at me, even then at that tender age was my immediate thought.
"Oh no!! I've bumped into the Big - Bad - Monster!!"
He was not my father in my mind, he was just a monster that roamed the house and occasionally yelled at me or beat me. For some reason, it occurred to me then and there that this was indeed my father and shouldn't a father be thought of as a loving person and not a monster?
Now one of my ambitions in life was to be nothing like my father and for the most part I feel I have succeeded in that endeavour. However, my anger issue is really just a childhood learnt behaviour. A behaviour I adopted from that very same 'monster' despite the fact that it put an irreparable gap between him and I. So why am I continuing it?
I was talking to my ex-wife the other day and I asked her, from her perspective, what was the main reason she never wanted to get back together with me. Let me stress, I've no interest in getting back together with her either but I wanted to see what she would have to say to identify my own charater flaws and improve on them. To my surprise her answer was my temper.
Obviously it had to go. The realization that it was part of a subconscious paradigm that I had developed as a child, and learnt from my father, helped me to realize that it was not 'just me' at all. In fact, being an angry, inconsiderate ass, is in no way, shape or form part of my internal self description of who Preston Squire is.
The only way to get rid of a subconscious paradigm is to write over it with another paradigm, a new code of conduct. NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programing) or visualization is the usual suggestion of Bob Proctor, Tony Robbins and other success-based speakers but for more immediate and powerful results I find the most effective course of action is self-hypnosis.
I'm not getting into a discussion on hypnosis here, suffice to say I have used it before to great effect.
So my new code of conduct that I'm trying to implant goes something like this:
Anger is an invalidation of self. It goes against everything I identify myself as being.
The only possible response to someone who is upsetting me, a disagreement, or other situation that makes me uncomfortable is love, compassion and understanding. For the only reason someone else would be doing anything that would be making me feel uncomfortable or upset is because they themselves are uncomfortable or upset because of something that I am doing. Therefore the only way to permenantly remove this issue is to listen acutely to that they are really saying (reading between the lines) and help them to find a resolution to put them out of discomfort that works for both of us.
Such a person may need to be complaced with love and compassion before they will be willing to accept my help and I'll have to show that I can understand where they are coming from (even if I don't agree) so they will be willing to allow me to help.
But once I've helped someone to be free of their pain they will love me for it.
I see it like the difference between the man who, when an angry lion comes roaring, bashes it away with the biggest stick possible and the man who sees past the roar, calms the beast down with his demenour and removes the thorn from it's paw. The lion will either retreat and resent or attack the first man but it may give it's very life for the second who had shown it such kindness.
It's still early and there's been no serious challenge but so far results from this approach seem to be working very well for me.
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