The Secret, Tested
Last week, we saw a post by Comm's, that inspired another by Bold. Both were in the vein of The Secret.
As an empiricist, I am pleased to note the following natural experiment:
The Secret Tested
Update: comment #2 by Comm's provides context for his post, and a serious outlook on dreaming and achievement.
As an empiricist, I am pleased to note the following natural experiment:
The Secret Tested
Update: comment #2 by Comm's provides context for his post, and a serious outlook on dreaming and achievement.
posted by Brent Buckner at 3/20/2007 08:46:00 am
6 Comments:
These bits of pop psychology come up regularly under many namees. You may recall Tony Robbins (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Robbins) and Neuro Linguistic Programming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming) as one from the 90s.
The secret was not a secret to me when I saw it. In fact it was a testament to the mentoring I have received for over a decade from my boss /business partner.
The quote that spurred Bold, was an affirmation i wrote several years ago and still read regularly based on a much older book called the Laws of Prosperity.
What the secret did not do very well was explain two things, CAPACITY AND ACTION. It is one thing to manifest a desired outcome but if you do not have the capacity or ability it will not pass. (i.e. someone w/o a college degree or inherent trade ability will not run a fortune 500 company or even manage a bank) ACTION is the effort.
The harder I work the more mysteries I solve.
Stay tuned...
Thanks for the elaborative comment, Comm's!
I’ll start by saying I will stay away from notions of the Devine which the detractors of “The Secret” will likely not believe in anyways.
Isn't sport's visulization a commonly accepted and understood to be sucessful practice? Or are the teams of psychologists that follow our Olympic Athletes around just a big waste of money? Yes "The Secret" is an incomplete program in the sense that it does not offer a complete program for goal acheivment. Visualization and desire are one step in the process. My sense of society and individuals is that in general they live below there “potential”. What about the oft quoted remark that the average human only uses 5% of her brain capacity. Whether we can bend spoons or walk on water is rather irrelevant in a culture where we need to be focused on raising children’s test scores - not debating whether we can raise the dead or heal ourselves of cancer.
I have seen first hand how changing perception and mental reinforcement have impacted the performance of both of my children. I know my preception “Vision” of the them matters.
When I was a teenager I listened to depressing alternative “death goth” music and you know what I was a very depressed person. Now, I believe that causality in this direction flows both directions.
Do people who are successful practice “Visualization and emotional management” or are they sucessful b/c they practice “Visualization and emotional management”. Some of both to be sure.
But….
Surely those who criticize “The Secret” are not arguing that the mind is irrelevant in outcomes. Surely you are not saying that the language we use is irrelevant either in talking to ourselves or others. Surely you are not saying that our emotional state has no impact on either physical or cognitive function.
Would Edison have invented the ligh bulb without visualizing it first? Or all acts of creation done without vision? Too often I hear “well he was a genius his succeess was inevitable.”
Was Oprah’s success inevitable? A fat black woman, with little education, a broken family, sexually abused as a teenager and no money from Mississipi. How much did she contribute to her success, and how much of that was from managing her mental/emotional states -or was it all luck?
Research has shown a statisitically significant increase in car crashes in US cities in the areas around stadiums when the home sports team loses. Frustrated and angry fans drive worse- hello we all perform worse when we are angry and frustrated (maybe even consume more beer).
If the choice is betweeen either potentially over-encouracing a NLP message or the propogation of the “Death of a Salesman” culture of victimization I prefer the former to the later. Greg Kinnear’s character in “Little Miss Sunshine” represents Hollywood’s viewpoint on the matter, as did Tom Cruise’s in “Magnolia”. I trust that perspective about as much as I trust everthing elkse that comes out of Hollywood, like their take on climate change and HMOs and big business. The truth it represents is about as narrow as it is deep.
i don't get it.
me and Farrah dated, she wasn't my bag of chips, so i moved on...
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