High Performance Therapy II: A Sense of Value ($)

Competition

Competition is rooted in conquest for scarce resources. Sport has evolved into a contest of who gets to be recognized, rewarded, and survive. Winner takes all, and others get none.

The Olympics, a paradigm of success and specialization, are the heritage of the culture of conquest. To have value was to be the most powerful. In Roman culture, change, when it happened, was destructive.

Competition is appropriate where choices are exclusive. Perhaps the best genetic partner is the biggest and strongest if survival is at stake. But in the human sphere, situations are rarely so cut and dry and outcomes are not simple.

You are the winner at the cattle show. You don’t have to play the game.

When human needs are satisfied, those who prevail become gene-pool resources. But productivity is enhanced when the needs of all players are supported. We need those who don’t win in order to find change. It should not be “winner takes all.”

The Hunger Games

Individual ideas combine into collective attitudes that reflect a shared perspective. The individual idea of scarcity becomes the social perspective that we prevail or succumb as a group. In a competitive society, the winner controls the market, resources, power, or people. The winning society does the same.

There is feedback as social attitudes enhance or diminish individual ideas, even when they’re not clearly stated (Janis 1971). Most people see groupthink as the coercive force of majority suggestion. Collective thought patterns extend beyond immediate decisions. The groups you affiliate with become part of your mind.

If we’re embedded in a society that sees the environment in terms of either abundance or scarcity, then it is all around us. It appears in images, tales, politics, and what pretends to be “objective” news. As our thoughts change, our brains change, and what we think becomes part of us. Do not think human value is a scarce resource.

We don’t recognize how pattern oriented we are. We perceive and respond to patterns unconsciously. Manipulating this is the trick of mind reading; the mind reader does not read you, they lead you. This plays a role in therapy where a counselor works to re-pattern a client's thoughts.

Even therapists are only weakly aware of what they’re doing. Most think they’re effecting change by exploring different ways of making sense. They’re not. Change happens through the predominance of new patterns. We learn this as hypnotherapists. Creating new thinking patterns does not depend on making sense. More importantly, what you’re thinking now does not depend on what makes sense.

Your Virtual Reality

A deceptive aspect of game-play is that it presumes you believe that playing the game is real. Not that the simulated game-reality is real, but that the play is real. All games presume you accept the rules before you start. On this basis, nearly everything we do is a game: family, love, war, business, school, and life.

Few competitors, spectators, or coaches consider the implications of their participation. They don’t question the game. If you were to question them, they might say, “When you agree to play, you agree to the rules.” Or they might say, “If you don’t like the game, don’t play it.” When two boxers begin a match by shaking hands, they’re not saying they respect each other, they’re saying they’ll play by the rules.

Stop playing your games and consider what these games presume. They have rules and the rules rarely change. In those cases where the rules seem to change, that’s also part of the game. The rules don’t change so much that the game falls apart. Are these really growth-fostering environments? Is this really the environment you need?

The person who changes the rules is called the designer or the architect. If the game is life, the designer is called God. We are taught to be social animals. We are not taught how to design our own game.

It is presumed that the environment will stay the same long enough for your game to conclude. When the environment changes, gameplay becomes unstable. The game may not conclude and your safety can be in jeopardy. This is where trauma happens and marriages fail. More commonly, you’ll grow out of the game, and that’s healthy.

Playing a Better Game

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If you’d like to play a better game, call me. It’s free.