Lessons from a Navy SEAL Part 1 of 4: 4:30 means 4:15
June 30, 2009 by dr. lam · 14 Comments
A few months ago I attended a business symposium in Houston that featured ex-Navy SEAL, Marcus Luttrell, and I thought, “What is a Navy SEAL doing here at this conference?” That is what Luttrell pondered as well, as he said, “I don’t know why I’m here.” After his hour and a half “lecture”, which was really a story of his life, there was no question. He was the most inspiring, mesmerizing speaker of the entire weekend. He culminated his talk with an excruciating recounting of how he was the only survivor in Afghanistan where his entire SEAL team was killed in front of him in his search for Osama’s right-hand man, Ahmad Shah, the story of which was documented in his New York Times bestseller, Lone Survivor. He talked of how he was riddled through his legs with 11 bullets through-and-through, bit his tongue half off, had his back shot through, interrogated (read tortured) by the Taliban in a small Afghani village, how he made hard decisions, and how he was eventually saved by merciful locals.
During his speech, I thought what lessons could I cull from this remarkable man who had such remarkable experiences that make my meager existence pale in comparison. I wanted to take some key lessons of his life and see if I could put my own personal spin on them to help my readership. So that is what I am doing here.
He started his talk with how he grew up in a small Texas town of Huntsville and his father telling him, “Boy, before you take from this country, you better serve it first.” With that exhortation, Marcus and his brother decided to become Navy SEALS. He had not even heard what that was exactly, but he knew he wanted to do it. He trained with this ex-Green Beret, Billy Shelton, from the Vietnam era who had that always “crazy look in his eyes.” Marcus said that when he walked up to his door the first time he interrupted the man’s dinner and was so petrified he couldn’t remember why he was even there. Shelton told Marcus, “If you want to train with me, we start tomorrow at 04:30.” Marcus sheepishly showed up precisely at 4:30 am the next morning to begin his pre-military exercises. Shelton responded, “Boy, you are late. When I say 04:30, I mean 04:15. 04:30 is when we roll not when you arrive. Don’t let that happen again.”
I thought that was a great piece of wisdom. When I was undergoing moderator training for my EO forum group, I was told not to get there at 3:30 pm when we would start our meeting. That means at 3:30 pm, I’m still flustered by just arriving. I’m trying to open all of my papers to start figuring out the agenda. I am not really ready until 3:35 or 3:40 pm. Instead, I try to arrive 10 to 20 minutes in advance so that I am ready to roll at the appointed time. I think when we have an important meeting, we should consider getting there a few minutes early to prepare for the meeting so that we are ready to roll both psychologically and emotionally at the appointed time.
Mindfulness Mondays 5: Radical Humility
June 29, 2009 by dr. lam · 5 Comments
One thing that I have been struggling with is my ego. Yes, believe it or not, I am human. A lot of things have pointed me toward thinking about the importance of humility. I finished Jim Collins’ book, How the Mighty Fall, that talks about stage 1 descent of a company being caused by hubris, which he describes as outrageous arrogance. Further, I just finished Elizabeth Lesser’s Broken Open in which the psychologist turned guru, Ram Dass, talks about his stroke and how it led to his release of ego. Finally, I also just finished Wayne Dyer’s Excuses Begone! in which he features Ram Dass talking about his events prior to and after his stroke. I will be covering a lot of these topics in the coming months in blog format.
I would like this week’s focus of mindfulness to be what I would like to term “radical humility” being the opposite of Jim Collin’s hubris, or outrageous arrogance. I would like all of us, especially me, to turn our hearts with gratitude to God for giving us our breath, talent, desires, strength, rather than feel that it emanates from ourselves. As a human, we all are limited creatures but we invoke the power of God or our own spirituality (which these blogs are centered on) and we are reflections of our Creator.
As you know, I do not talk directly about religion or politics in these blogs because they are conversations that ultimately lead to division or offense. Instead, I am talking about a spiritual consciousness that we can live and breathe this week whatever our religious persuasion, or even lack thereof. We can be mindful this week of being radically humble in the face of our perceived accomplishments or whatever makes us prideful. Replace that emotion with gratitude for what we have and say a prayer or meditation about how we can be thankful for where we are today. Be radically humble this week with me and set the intention for that starting this week and move that forward into our lives in full.
namaste,
sml
The Story of Alfred Nobel: Changing His Legacy
June 26, 2009 by dr. lam · 4 Comments
As we transition to a new blog series, I thought it would be great to talk briefly about a man, Alfred Nobel, who changed the world with the Nobel Prize and is remembered especially for the Peace Prize. However, where did he make his fortune? The answer surprisingly was in dynamite. Quite the contrary to how the world remembers him.
Nobel developed nitroglycerine and then was able to harness that energy more safely in the form of his invention he called dynamite. Nitroglycerine took the life of his brother Emil in the process. At the age of 55 living in Paris, Nobel read the account of his own death in the newspaper’s obituary when in fact it was his brother Ludwig who had died with the newspaper confusing the two siblings’ names. Alfred saw that the words used to describe him were “merchant of death” and “dynamite king”, which left a bitter taste in his mouth and forced him to reexamine what his true legacy would be.
At that moment, he saw that his life would be remembered for everything terrible so he set up a private will that established that his money would go to prizes in chemistry, physics, medicine, literature and peace (with the economics prize started in the 1960s) so today he is remembered as the father of the peace prize, the exact opposite of what his life and business stood for.
What will your obituary say about you? What legacy will you be leaving behind when you pass away? How will you be remembered? What are you doing to secure that legacy in the hearts and minds of those around you? Are you contributing to your legacy each and every day or are you leaving nothing behind?
I think we all can see a much larger vision for what we want in our lives. I hope that the one word that will be associated with me will be “healing”. I know I love my family and friends a lot. I know that I am passionate to the point of being crazy about my work. But my true work is in healing those individuals with whom I have the honor to come into contact. I told a woman yesterday who came from Florida for my services and who had some bad eyelid surgery (3 in total) before me that I fixed with fat grafting, “Your journey has ended with me and it will now begin with me.” The journey that ended concerned her plastic surgery; and the journey that began was her healing through my blogs. I think these blogs are fundamentally about healing: healing the wounds of those around me and also healing my own wounds. So I close this week with the message that we opened it with, i.e., healing, and I look forward to commencing anew some wonderful blog adventures in the coming weeks, months, and years.
Namaste,
SML
Psycho-Cybernetics Part 30 of 30: Action Manual
June 25, 2009 by dr. lam · 4 Comments
Maltz ends this edition of Psycho-Cybernetics recalling the story of Jeanne Sanders, a woman afflicted with muscular dystrophy who for years toiled to try to walk and not be wheelchair bound. She struggled with her progressive disease that ravaged her self identity. Then in 1960 when she was at a book store curious about this new book, Psycho-Cybernetics, she asked the clerk whether it was any good. The store clerk said that she couldn’t keep it on the shelves. Sanders read the book and was mesmerized. She changed her negative self image into that “winning feeling” and began to see herself differently. She used it as an “action manual” rather than a philosophical treatise and with that she became what was known as a “medical phenomenon.” She could walk and drive, two things the medical community had judged to be impossible in her case but wasn’t with Psycho-Cybernetics.
I encourage all to read Psycho-Cybernetics, especially the new edition The New Psycho-Cybernetics by Dan Kennedy, that updates Maltz’s thoughts and uses relevant, contemporary examples to pull his classic text into the 21st century. I have found such a wealth of information in it that it has greatly helped my life as well as my patients’ lives. I have used it not quite daily but several times a week now to help my patients’ overcome their own battles with self image to liberate themselves and achieve a higher consciousness and thereby to affect their own servo-mechanism to flourish and succeed.
I particularly like the image of a man (or woman) that seeks self betterment (as we are all doing with these blogs) as a natural course for a human being to take, i.e., Maltz’s idea that we are like bicycles, moving we are stable and doing well but stopped, we fall over. We need meaning in our lives and we need purpose. I truly like the idea that we can move from struggling to go toward our purpose to just setting our purpose to move in the direction we want and allowing our guided missile of our unconscious mind to do much more powerful things. Playing the mental imagery in our mind (Theatre of the Mind) of what we desire can be as vivid as if we already undertook it making the task or objective more easily realizable. Like Jack Nicklaus selecting his golf clubs using his unconscious servo-mechanism or Greg Louganis playing out his dive 40 times before the jump, we all can control where we are going through this mental exercise that allows our more powerful unconscious mind to do the work.
Many people ask me how do I film all of these videos on facial plastic surgery subjects, doing several back to back with no script and no pre-planning? The answer is that I don’t work on a conscious level. I have a creative idea in my mind and then with only the germ of the idea and with no script and with no prethinking I let the cameras roll. I have never thought of in the past how intuitive I work as a human but I truly work on a deep level of unconscious drive. I don’t force a lot of things (remember the Tao verses on this subject) but allow my intention to carry me forward. As a counterpoint to this, I also work with multiple accountability groups (see my previous blog on this subject too) to keep me directed where I should be. They are my “bunkers”. Remember that Maltz talked about keeping your eye on the green and knowing where the bunkers are. We must all have a positive self image but one that is steeped in reality not a self-deluded lie. We also must know where the bunkers are so that we can avoid these traps and “zig-zag” (as Maltz says) toward our goal through minor corrective maneuvers.
I hope all of you have been using Maltz’s plan as an action manual for your life rather than reading these blogs as merely provocative thinking. If not, we always can start today.
Psycho-Cybernetics Part 29 of 30: Life Force
June 24, 2009 by dr. lam · 5 Comments
“We age, not by years, but by events and our emotional reaction to them,” says Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker. Maltz curiously looks at how people heal, how people live, and how people age. He looks at an abstract notion called the Life Force. The life force that he talks about allows some people to live vibrantly whereas others to live in a stifled existence. Some are predisposed toward love and happiness, whereas others bring themselves to misery. He looks at the self image obviously as the core element in that those with a positive self image have a tremendously positive outlook on life and thereby create their world accordingly. People that live in the past slowly die and those who live in the present and the future have a reason to flourish.
He sees some as rapid healers from sickness and those who linger in sickness due to an ill psyche. He says those that retire from a job should not retire from life otherwise they will shortly die. Maltz discusses how at the age of 61 he became a writer and lecturer for Psycho-Cybernetics and how others his age were “fossilizing”, he remained vibrant, energetic and youthful. He sees the creative individual with an eager spirit to be the most blessed when it comes to this life force. He says “Michaelangelo did some of his best painting when past 80; Goethe wrote Faust when past 80; Edison was still inventing at 90; Picasso, past 75, dominated the art world; Wright at 90 was still considered the most creative architect; Shaw was still writing plays at 90.” We all can be creative in our own way and we all can live life creatively. This does not necessarily mean that we must pick up a paintbrush but instead view the life force as a way to live life with abundant energy looking forward to create a bright future for ourselves.
Remember that a sense of self must be aimed somehow toward a sense of purpose. We must all be moving toward a brighter future. We have that innately within us. Those who enjoy living and breathing will continue to live very full and long lives. He talks about 2 types of widows. Those who feel that their husband’s death is the beginning of the end for them and they retire from life. Their hair begins to rapidly gray and their faces wither. Then, there are those who begin to feel a sense of renewal either looking for a new husband or a new career or opportunities to explore their life in full. I really think that plastic surgery (done with taste, discretion, and moderation) can bring about the renewed life force when one looks in the mirror and sees the congruity between external manifestation and the inner peace and vibrancy that abounds.