REALITY REPAIR: With Stress-less Success

REALITY REPAIR: With Stress-less Success
By
Bill Cottringer

“Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it.” ~Lily Tomlin.

This is my 7th book and I am trying something entirely new this time around. I am starting out with a definite title to my book in mind; then I will write the content to explain the title. This is the reverse of the usual way of explaining the ideas first and then trying to summarize their essence succinctly and accurately with a clever, pulling title at the end.

The main title of this book—Reality Repair—refers to our perpetual efforts to fix the broken realities we don’t like and create new and better ones we want. Reality is simply what we perceive to be so, through our senses, thinking, reading, communicating, perceiving, scientific research, intuitions, experiencing, or reliance on external authorities.

The typical approaches we use to engage in this reality repair business result in either success or failure. Either way though, both outcomes are accompanied by before and after stress. This book is all about successful, stress-less reality repair. And by the term “stress-less” I am not guaranteeing completely stress-free success, but rather much less unnecessary distress.

Where does the stress come from in our reality repair efforts? Whether we fail or succeed in repairing realities, we encounter much undesirable distress. This distress usually comes from trying to wrap our arms around miles and tons of information overload to understand even the smallest of realities we are trying to repair, well enough to change them for the better. Of course when we fail, we just get more frustrated and stressed, and even stressed more about that undesirable state of affairs!

Long ago I discovered a useful concept from an engineering and math genius colleague, Herb Gross, called perturbation point. In engineering terms these are the strategic stress points in a building that can be instrumental in imploding it with the smallest amount of explosives.

I expanded this perturbation concept in my many vocational fields of mental health, law enforcement, college teaching, correctional administration, private security and building maintenance to finally translate into “psychological power points,” or just “P” points for short. These are the little, but well-timed and well-placed actions we can take to get the biggest results in successful, stress-less reality repair. These are the most useful solutions to get more by doing less. Given the current level of overload and lack of time to get much done, such solutions should have high market value.

Here are seven very useful “P” Points you can consider as you attempt to fix the broken realities you find at home, work, school, play, and life in general and then create new and better ones you want.

PRINCIPLES

One of the best movies I have ever seen was “A Beautiful Mind” played by Russell Crowe. John Nash, the character Crowe played, had a single passionate pursuit in life—to discover one truly unique governing principle in life. His unique discovery was the one that drives the business marketplace today—competitive economic, win-lose game theory. I think Nash’s real discovery was that this win-lose, scarcity mentality was only half the whole picture, with a cooperative win-win. abundance mentality capable of expanding success. At least the Positive Psychology movement of today is proving that reality.

One of the most useful governing principles I have discovered (certainly not a unique discovery though!), is that the rules to the game of life were established by the Creator before we started playing the game. A few of these rules are:

• You can’t be truly successful until you learn the important lessons from your failures. Failures always tell you what you are doing wrong.
• Success is what you get from doing what you do to get it. You have to figure out what gets it.
• Success comes about when you find and use your God-given talents with passion and determination to help others be successful. Giving precedes getting.
• The real character test is how you deal with adversities; the positive purpose of an adversity is always there, it just takes patience to see, usually more than we have.
• Things are rarely as they first appear; success often involves learning to see past what you are looking at or to change your viewpoint.

PURPOSE

Whenever I get too overloaded or over-stressed from anything I am trying to do, I stop and think about the main purpose of what it is I am doing and what the outcome is I want. It is very easy to get distracted away from your primary mission at any given time, but the results are always the same. You don’t succeed and you end up with more stress. Whenever this happens, start over again and ask yourself what is your main intention?

One of the most important purposes we all need to uncover is the reality of what our unique personal mission here in life is. One way of discovering this very basic purpose is to get in touch with what gifts we seem to have to generously and unselfishly serve others with. Many people have become immensely wealthy, healthy and wise helping other people get that way first.

PERSPECTIVE

In order to become a reality repair expert, you first have to get positioned to the most advantageous perspective of a particular reality you are trying to fix or reinvent. That means getting to a place (usually a balanced one), where you can see in all directions. That way you can have a more complete and correct understanding and perception of the problem reality you are trying to repair. You won’t be focusing on all the unnecessary distractions, but rather seeing the priorities and other “P” points that can give you stress-less success.

One of the most important perspectives to have about life in general is optimism—thinking and feeling positive and hopeful about your ability to become a successful reality repair expert in a stress-less way. There is no further proof needed for leaning towards being optimistic than offered by Martin Seligman’s compelling research findings that optimistic people live longer, make more money, have more happiness, are plagued with fewer physical symptoms and are engaged in happier, more satisfying relationships.

PASSION

I have taught college psychology classes for nearly 40 years now and I can tell you something with utmost certainty. It is not all the great information, knowledge and wisdom I have about the subject of psychology that inspires students to learn, but the passion of the subject I bring with me—all the personal reasons why I know psychology is probably the most useful and practical subject area to know and use to improve the world.

Passion moves mountains. That is one of the Creator’s rules to the game of life. Nothing much gets done without passion and there is no genuine satisfaction or contentment from any achievement, without passionate effort to do the achieving. If you are not doing something because you can’t keep yourself from doing it because of the passion you feel about what you are doing, then you are wasting your time trying to fix or create the wrong realities in all the wrong ways. But don’t dismay because there is hope in finding the needed passion by using these other “p” points in your reality repairing efforts.

POLARIZATIONS

Either-or polarizations probably started in the Garden of Eden with the impossible choice of eating from the Tree of Life or the tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil. This brought on the curse of self-consciousness, which started the first polarization of sense of self apart and distinct from the rest of life. From there we began to divide the whole world down into this or that categories—good or bad, right or wrong, true of false, up or down, liberal or conservative, responsible or irresponsible, sane or insane on ad infinitum

PRIORITIES

I have an unshakable theory that we waste most of our time accumulating too much stress from focusing on mistaken, non-priorities—the 95% nonsense, BS, uncontrollables and what I call priority reversals. Priority reversals are an interesting phenomenon. They result in much extra stress and needless failure and are exemplified by situations where the tail is wagging the dog or when the cart is being placed before the horse.

One very good example of a unproductive priority reversal is the normal sequence in which we approach jobs and relationships. We try to change the situation or person first, before we try to fit in and accept things. When we learn to flip-flop the sequence to this important process and focus on what we can do to fit into the work environment or relationship, we get in a much better position to see what actually doesn’t need changing (much less than we imagine), and then can be more successful in skillfully doing so. More gain, less pain.

PERCEPTIONS

Too much of what we think we know to be so and feel certain about, comes through the very faulty process of perceptions. When we learn to be honest and humble, we realize we can’t even trust our own perception of our own perceptions. And until we can begin to control the controllable parts of the perceptual process, such as realizing we will always have an active influence in a situation we are already part of and can’t not be part of, we will be hostage of inaccurate and incomplete information. When we act on such wrong information, we are most likely to fail and end up with more overload and more stress.

The fact that people’s perceptions are their reality is a very huge reality to learn how to deal with effectively in the reality repair business. This is especially true when other people have a very distorted perception of you or you have a distorted perception of an important situation at hand. The safest position to take is always the hardest, the bigger the ego—what you think you know may not necessarily be so. But allowing your self to get to this humble, doubting perspective is probably the smartest and most productive way to use all these seven valuable “P” points to be more successful in repairing this particular reality.

“Stress-less success comes from making reality repairs without wrong, personalized interpretations.” ~The author.

William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security in Bellevue, WA., along with being a Sport Psychologist, Business Success Coach, Photographer and Writer living in the quiet mountains of North Bend. He is author of several business and self-development books, including, Re-Braining for 2000 (MJP Publishing); Passwords to The Prosperity Zone (Authorlink Press); You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too (Executive Excellence), The Bow-Wow Secrets (Wisdom Tree), and Do What Matters Most and “P” Point Management (Atlantic Book Publishers). This article is part of his new book Reality Repair coming soon. Bill can be reached for comments or questions at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer@pssp.net