Jack Canfield: The Success Principles
Shawne Duperon: Perfect. That can lead us right into courageous conversation of facing what isn’t working, what are your thoughts about that?
Jack Canfield: Yeah, the things that we are in denial about are the things that are uncomfortable to deal with. So if we are uncomfortable with rejection, we are not going to ask for information, we are not going to ask our lover to maybe do different things for us. There is this fear that stops us from facing what’s not working. So I write about it in a chapter called Replacing What’s Not Working. I talk about yellow alerts.
It is a metaphor that comes from Star Trek. Whenever they were going through space, there would be these yellow alerts and then when it would turn to a red alert, that’s when the show would start because now they had an adventure they had to solve or some major thing to get out of. A yellow alert is when we start to notice things, like my husband is not coming home from work as early as he used to, there is lipstick on his collar, he smells like perfume, he is a little drunk, and we don’t want to bring it up because we are afraid of a conflict or we are afraid that if we did get a divorce, that I would have to go out and earn my own living. I don’t know how I would do that. And so there is all this fear that shows up. So we don’t want to face what’s not working because it is uncomfortable to tell our boss maybe we are being anything from sexually harassed to overworked to not being respected for our work.
We are afraid to bring up a topic because it might start a fight. We are afraid to confront somebody because they might reject us or not like us or become uncomfortable. So it is really, really critical that we learn how to have what I call crucial conversations, that we know how to deal with the uncomfortable topics, that we know how to talk to someone and have tough love with our children. We see so many situations of people with kids where the kids are just acting out all over the place. They have gone into major entitlement, and the parents aren’t there. This is one of the things that we see with single parents a lot. Single parents are afraid to confront their children because they are engaging in something called emotional incest. Emotional incest means I am getting needs met from my child that I should be getting from an adult. If I confront my teenage daughter who in a sense is my best friend and I haven’t gone out and made more friends at an adult level whether it is male or female, then what happens is I am afraid to confront her drinking, or smoking marijuana or the people she is hanging out with or the fact that she is not doing her homework because I don’t want her to not like me.
