Faking It Till you Make It, Ensures You Wont Make It.

A common and often used phrase today is “ Fake it till you make it “. Somehow this makes it ok or encourages it, as part of a healthy strategy towards reaching our potential. Actually this is the furthest thing from the truth, faking it is the exact same thing as covering up and covering up just keeps the flaws hidden but does not stop them from reeking havoc on our lives. What is truly needed for potential to emerge naturally is a radical paradigm shift from a cover up mindset to an uncovering mindset. What our minds require is a healthy self-leadership where we uncover our flaws, the very things which inhibit the natural flow of potential, to paraphrase John Gardner, most of us are ailing because we have developed a functional blindness to our own defects, we are not suffering because we cannot resolve our problems, but because we cannot see or do not want to see or cover up our problems. Faking it is only deceiving ourselves.

Unfortunately most of us have been reared or cultivated with a cover up mindset and we can see the results very clearly today from a societal point of view, and if we look deeply enough, in our own personal lives also. The growth paradigm or mindset is very much dependent on uncovering, whereby we can feel safe to explore and understand our flaws and failures and their origins, in doing so we overcome our psychological blindness, if we cannot do this our potential gets trapped by our faking it.

The Cuckoo Mind and The Root Cause of Restricted Potential

What causes us to long for greater and more fulfilling lives but to become increasingly frustrated at not being able to do so. On my own quest to answer this question I came to understand it by coining the term the Cuckoo Mind. If you can remember the story of the Cuckoo, It flies in from Africa and Spain and spends a short time finding nests of other birds to plant it’s eggs into, and then gets the other birds to do the rearing for her, the mother bird of the nest has no awareness of what has happened and proceeds to nurture it’s young as well as the cuckoo chick, who, we know kills the natural brood by pushing them out of the nest while the mother continues to feed that which destroyed the natural.

In many ways our minds follow a similar story, where is the comparison? Our infancy and early childhood, the formative years, equates to the unprotected nest, we like the mother bird have no real awareness of what is being planted in our minds , by the time we do have the awareness to notice, the Cuckoo is well gone and in our ignorance we like the mother bird begin to feed very often a false belief system that creates a small lens for us to see the world through, and prevents a huge amount of potential to be seen and flourish, fortunately our potential unlike the young natural fledglings never dies but is hidden from us. We are greatly controlled by this parasitic vision rather than the the true vision of our potential. This hiding and ignorance of healthy potential is cultivated by our shame, because we are not aware of the parasitic vision we believe it to be who we really are and we cover it up with our masks and personas. But if we could begin to become aware of the spell we have been put under and understand how it got there we can liberate the natural restricted potential. By operating out of a growth mindset we can become curious about this alien part, identify it and it’s alien planting, Rather than unconsciously identifying with it we can begin to transform our minds from repeating small visions and past mistakes, to a mind that begins to fulfil our natural potential. So in truth most of us are being controlled by a Cuckoo mind, in order to change this, it is essential we become the leaders of our own minds, The first step is to become AWARE

Going Deeper into Elite Performance. It’s not all about Performance.

Recently I was listening to a small clip on youtube, Brendan Gleeson the actor was being interviewed, and he was asked about his own mortality now that he had turned 70. Interestingly he replied that he had been considering his mortality for many years, his own inevitable death, and then he said something very very true, that if he avoided or looked away from his own death he would in turn miss out on the deliciousness of life.

So we come back to the dangers of elite performance, life is more than performance, it is not just a results based experiment, we are not just sophisticated performing monkeys, our human condition demands more. Many of our elite performers both athlete and corporate are not experiencing the deliciousness of life.

How Do We Avoid The Trap And Temptation Of Elite Performance?

Let me try to answer this by recounting a true story of my own. I had the opportunity of visiting the hospice over a two year period while my mother died of a slow neurological disease. Like Brendan Gleeson, in the hospice I had the time and environment to become aware of my own mortality mine and yours - and ponder on the delicious/ adventurous life or the not so delicious. One day a woman in her mid seventies came into the Hospice, I was told by the sister in charge that this woman had a week or so left to live. I found this hard to believe as the woman looked so alert and relatively healthy, for the next week I observed this woman, what I noticed was that she had no fear and never became distressed in the face of the reality that was facing her. As the week went by her family and friends regularly visited her and she remained happy and calm. It was obvious to see the richness of relationships she had. One day I came to visit my mother and the woman was gone she had died the previous night and I had witnessed her last week, but in that week what was obvious was the substance of her life, not just a performance. I have over the years thought about this woman, pondered why she was so happy, content, fulfilled at the end, I had also witnessed the opposite, people dying in distress with regret and fear. My understanding of this woman’s demeaner was at the end she was satiated, she was satisfied, we normally associate the word satiation with hunger, when we are no longer hungry we say we are satiated we are satisfied, I imagine if I had gone to this woman to tell her she was coming to the end she would have communicated to me she was no longer hungry she had drunk and eaten her fill.

We all have a natural hunger for life, in the end we will have to face the question, Am I full or did I fulfil my potential and become satiated. The tragedy is that by just performing in a unidimensional way does not give satisfaction to this hunger and this is what I believe many elite performing athletes and elite performing professionals find out, results do not guarantee deeper purpose and meaning.

So what are you hungering for and is it leading to the deliciousness of life? What is the big vision?

The dangers of elite performance.

As I reflect on the wonderful spectacle that the 2024 Olympic games gave us, I like many of you have become aware of what a fantastic arena of human potential and spirit they are. It is clear the benefits that come from discipline and resilience and setting oneself targets and goals to achieve. I can well understand why many of us look to sport to gain inspiration and learn vital life lessons as so often there are great similarities between the sporting and life’s journey. It is also easy to understand why so many businesses ask elite sports people to give keynote speeches in the hope of creating similar mindsets in their employees. But we must also be aware of the ever growing stories of the potential negatives of a life of elite performance. Many of these great sporting heroes are now openly talking about great battles with depression, drug/alcohol/gambling addiction and of going to very dark places that they thought they may never come back from. Just as much as we can learn from their major achievements we can equally learn from their struggles and mistakes. One of the things I think we can all learn from is the difference between elite performance and potential. Let me leave you with no doubt I fully acknowledge the benefits of setting goals and performing to meet those goals both in sport and life, but I very often see people as a psychologist who are performing well yet are full of anxiety, depression and who report feeling tired all the time and burnt out, everything looks good from the outside but inside they are dying and very often feeling deeply alone just like many of the elite athletes. Most recently Adam Peaty the multi record and gold winning medalist has talked about where elite performance had brought him to, similar stories have come from Tyson Fury, Tiger Woods and Michael Phelps all performing well yet not feeling alive and pressurised to hide this struggle from the public’s gaze.

So How do we avoid a similar fate? Many of us can report of similar feelings in our lives. For me it is important to differentiate between performing at a high level and potentiating, for me potentiating involves performing while also growing more fully into oneself, this growing into oneself is held as an equal or even greater priority than just performing highly, it would seem that the human condition demands more than performance to be happy, it yearns for wholeness, roundedness and authentic connection to others, while performance on it’s own can lead to short and medium term success but inevitably burnout, just like a lot of our successful athletes who then can’t perform.

Blog Post Title One

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Blog Post Title Two

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Blog Post Title Three

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Blog Post Title Four

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.