I’ve heard a lot of talk about “the human potential movement” over the last few weeks, and sometimes I hate the term – it’s used to describe everything from corporate motivational seminars to firewalking to Tony Robbins to meditation on a mountaintop. In other words, it’s a term that often doesn’t really mean anything, since it lumps so many unlike things together.
So when a woman recently blogged about taking both the landmark forum and franklin covey’s 7 habits of effective people, and saying that they were both essentially pointing to the same thing, I was initially skeptical. I also winced a bit at her suggestion that each course was essentially that the barriers to success are in our own minds – it sounded a bit like the positive thinking thing that is often rightfully criticized. But after I read it over, I got what she is trying to say, and I think it’s pretty accurate, which is this:
‘Integrity and character form the heart of everything…the reason for all our misery is our compromise on these.” Sounds a bit like an obvious homily, but I think it also captures the heart of “the human potential movement”, if there really is one!
Said another way, who one is being and how one is acting ultimately determines our satisfaction and the results we produce in life, not just the circumstances. We spend a lot of time worrying about stuff that’s out of our hands (the circumstances), and probably not enough dealing with our end of the deal – how we react to those circumstances. And this is why “The human potential movement” is inward looking – not out of narcissism, or any inherent interest in the self, but because the self is the thing we actually have power over – we can’t change the world, or we can only by changing ourselves as the conduit to that change.
As the famous Tolstoy quote goes: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
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