Who do you think you are?

Many years ago I heard on a tape by Dr Denis Waitley, a story about a scientific experiment entitled “The Pike Syndrome”. Apparently if you take a pike, a very aggressive fish and place it in a large fish tank along with a number of minnows, the minnows disappear and the pike gets fat! In this particular experiment they then divided the tank into two by placing a clear glass screen down the middle, the pike on one side and a whole new group of minnows on the other. As you can imagine the pike’s first instinct is to chase his next meal but he soon gets to realize that his action only leads to headaches and eventually he stops trying. Some time later you can remove the glass plate and the pike will remain in his half of the tank, leaving the minnows to live a long and healthy life in their half. The pike has been taught to be a “half tanker” and may even starve to death despite being able to catch and eat all the food he needs.

This process is known as conditioning and the pike has developed a conditioned response artificially created for him. Apparently we have all been trained in the same way although for most of us hopefully this didn’t involve tanks, jars or chains!

Every one of our past experiences in our lives, our successes and failures, our embarrassments and our victories, our highs and our lows are all stored in our memory banks. This includes all our past interactions with the people around us, those who help us and those who try and harm us. Our memory banks also contain all the standards that society has placed upon us and all the media’s perceptions of what is happening in the world. All these past experiences give us a sense of who we are, how right or wrong we are, how good or bad we are, what position we take on the list, whether we are at the top or the bottom and we use each new experience to strengthen what we know about who we think we are.
By the age of 30 you’ve had more than a quarter of a million hours of this external conditioning from family, friends, teachers, peer groups and bosses, from the environment around you and from the media and some studies suggest that more than 70% of this conditioning is negative. Many of us have been told that we are not old enough, tall enough, good enough, intelligent enough. We’ve been told we are too young, too fat, too nice, too hard on others, too trusting of people. The media tells us we need to have flat stomachs, big boobs, white teeth, and society says that we need to be more aggressive in business, caring and kind to others, well disciplined, relaxed but focused etc.

But this external conditioning is only part of the story. Who do you talk to the most? Who is it that does the most conditioning and damages your self esteem more than anyone else? Psychologists suggest we talk to ourselves more than 70% of the time and very often we are much harder on ourselves than we are on other people. When we fail to achieve our desired outcome we might say something like “Typical, you always screw things up”. If we don’t make an important deadline we might beat ourselves up with a comment like “Late again, when will you ever learn”. Even when we succeed and produce an outstanding result we may be tempted to take away some of the potential positive feelings with a comment like “You were lucky there, you don’t usually do that well”.

Now I don’t know how much of your 250,000+ hours of conditioning has been positive and how much has been negative but I do know that if you come along to one of my motivational talks hopefully you’ll get one hour of positive messages. However, how will that one hour stack up against the pile of negative hours you may have stored in your memory banks? You may leave my one hour talk feeling positive and motivated to raise your game and set your sights a little higher than they were, however the 250,000+ hours are waiting for you just round the corner to set you straight and put you back in your place!

All of your past conditioning has created what you currently believe you are capable of, and as we all know we can never exceed the level of our self image. However the good news is that our future self image can be changed by changing our current conditioning. This isn’t a quick and simple job, we may have a lot of negative past conditioning to overcome, but with constant effort we can change what we believe about ourselves. Have a look at the questions below and see if you can find some areas of conditioning that you can change.

Who do you see on a regular basis that doesn’t support your efforts, runs you down or is critical of your goals? Other than yourself who are the people who damage your self esteem the most? Can you limit your exposure to them?

What TV programmes do you watch that send messages to you about life that are less than positive? What could you do with the time that you currently waste damaging your self esteem watching these programmes?

Do you have a support group that you meet with regularly whose job it is to build you up and support you despite any setbacks you may experience? If not, who would you invite if you formed one?

What do you say to yourself when you fail to achieve your goals, meet your deadlines or produce a poor result? Are you critical, damning or even abusive towards yourself? What could you say instead that would build your self esteem?

How do you treat yourself when you succeed, what language do you use to raise (or lower) your self esteem? Is there a time of day that you could use to give yourself a positive uplifting pep talk, something that you could walk away from feeling good about yourself?

Let’s make 2009 the year we take control of the conditioning process and stop ourselves becoming a half tank pike!