Do Corpses Bleed?

In my last story, I talked about setting goals and how some people are hugely successful in achieving what they set out to do, while others are much less successful. Our beliefs play an important role in influencing how we succeed or fail. Changing limiting-beliefs require one to have an open mind. There is an old story described by Abraham Maslow that illustrates this. A psychiatrist was treating a man who believed he was a corpse. Despite all the psychiatrist's logical arguments, the man persisted in his belief. In a flash of inspiration, the psychiatrist asked the man "Do corpses bleed?" The patient replied, 'That's ridiculous! Of course corpses don't bleed." After first asking for permission, the psychiatrist pricked the man's finger and produced a drop of bright red blood. The patient looked at his bleeding finger with abject astonishment and exclaimed: "I'll be damned, corpses do bleed!"

Your Beliefs Are Acquired, Not Inborn

The good news about beliefs is that all beliefs are learned. They can therefore be unlearned, especially if they are not helpful. When you came into the world, you had no beliefs at all - about yourself, your religion, your political party, other people, or the world in general. Just as you once shed your belief that Santa Claus or tooth fairy was real, you can shed any belief or acquire new beliefs if you want to.

In my coaching work, I have been working with a gentleman (we will call him Jim) who has been, what I would call, a successful businessman. At sixty-six, he runs a family business, with a turnover of a slightly over a million pounds. On the surface, he is happy –he makes a decent living from his business which is managed by a Chief Executive and his team. But somewhere in his mind is a long unhappiness that his business wasn’t growing over the years. He has had his close circle of friends desert him as they grew their businesses and some of them became multi-millionaires. They grew up together, spent their youths together, set up business together, and went to the same golf clubs. Suddenly in the last ten years, Jim noticed he was getting cold shouldered by some of them as they had moved on to being friends with more successful, richer people.

Losing his friends and self-esteem, Jim invested all the time and finance he could master in his business in the past three years, wanting to expand his business. He has worked closely with his Chief Executive and management team to push for business growth and expansion. But nothing has really made much of a difference in their business – Jim’s company manufactures DIY tools for well known brands like Black & Decker, Draper tools, Bosch, etc. Competition has been stiff as manufacturing moved to Asia and Eastern Europe. Jim’s company has had to work harder and harder to stay where they were. He had no doubt that his management team had done all they could.

It turned out some of his friends have ridden on this wave of global change and moved their production to China, and that’s how they grew their business several-fold, while Jim saw that same change a block to his business. Jim did not want to take risks. He likes his management team because they run the business in the way he ran it for two decades, and they don’t take risks. Although Jim pushes them to expand, he subconsciously likes it when they come back with the explanation that times are difficult with competition from the emerging countries.

All his life Jim has valued safety and security, and avoided risks. Back in his teen years, he joined horse-riding and football. A couple of times he came home slightly injured. His loving mother who had his best in her heart always advised him not to do those risky sports. He will be no good in those.

In his later years, he would go to the skiing slopes of Swiss Alps and would spend his days there sipping wine while his wife would be go skiing with their children.

Jim had managed his entire business with this single motto: don’t get hurt; don’t take risks so that you do not fail. Be safe!

Once he realised how a few childhood incidents had such a grip over him throughout his life, it was easy to make a change – the safety advice he got in childhood was no longer relevant to run his business. And one of the first things he has done in the past few months is to hire a dynamic CEO who is a risk-taker and has proven track record of growing businesses he has managed.



How to Set and Achieve Compelling Goals: this 21-page practical self-help manual is full of easy-to-use tools and tips which management gurus and coaches will charge you a fortune to learn.YOU can download this for free here for a limited period. All we require you to do is share your experience and feedback once you have used these tools. We are looking for inspiring stories of life-changing experience through the use of these tools and exercises described in this eBook. To obtain your free copy, please register here

How you can guarantee success with the goals you set

Last week I talked about three critical steps towards setting and achiveing goals. In that I had mentioned about a research done by Harvard Universtiy on graduating students, and they found that only 3 per cent of the students had set written goals and ten years later, they were the ones who were most successful amongs the peer group.

In fact, the research did not stop there. A few years later, another University (Dominican University) carried out slightly more elaborate research. They divided participants into five groups: one simply thought about their goals; a second group wrote their goals down; another wrote their goals and formulated action steps to reach these goals; a fourth group was asked to write down their goals, formulate action steps, and send their goals and steps to a friend; and a fifth group wrote down their goals, formulated action steps, sent their goals and steps to a friend, and created weekly reports on progress towards the goal. The test was conducted over the period of a month and a total of 149 participants were part of the study.

What do you think the research showed?

The participants in the study who simply thought about their goals scored a 4.28 on a scale of 8 in terms of achieving their goal where 0 is no progress made and 8 is goal fully accomplished. However, those in the last group who wrote down their goals, formulated action steps, sent their goals and steps to a friend, and created weekly reports on progress towards the goal scored 7.6.

Isn't this a powerful evidence?

In the past couple of years, I have been fascinated by the stories of some very successul people. What makes them succeed, and achieve extra-ordinary things in life? I used to think success comes with luck, being in the right place at the right time, and all that. In the past one year, I have enrolled myself in a mastermind group with a very well known coach, and this has given me opportunity to study some very successful people in business and social sector. Every month we get together on a Wednesday and visit a successful entrepreneur, some of who have acquired almost a celebrity status in their fields. What I find amazingly common among all these men and women is that they almost followed the same script: written goals, action plans, social commitment of their goals and follow through. They do this with such consistency that it becomes a habit, no matter if the goal is big or small.

More on this in my ebook. If you are interested to see how this can transform your life, click here and register. I will send you a free copy.