The Worst Lies are the Ones You Tell Yourself

 I am a liar. 

That's hard for me to admit and frankly these lies are old, very old, and I was yesterday years old when I realized that I had been lying for a long time...to myself.

Lie Number 1

"Me do myself".

This lie began when I was just learning to walk and talk and my brother was a newborn in NICU as a preemie. My parents were spending a lot of time at the hospital and I was being cared for by a kind loving woman name Joyce Hilden, who was a friend of my mom's and a neighbor. As a 26 month old boy in the middle of a developmental stage called "rapprochement" (Jean Piaget's term) which normally involves a child moving toward independence from mom  by taking a longer and longer stretches away from her and then running back to mom for a hug or a reassuring message.  My mom was nowhere to be found, and I adopted the hyper-independence that abandoned children sometimes do- "Me do myself".  That "cute" expression of self reliance, as adults at the time reportedly labled it, became a lifelong theme of emotional independence and eventually social mistrust which undermined many of my relationships for my entire life. 

Of course, no one gets through life without help, and I was no exception. I was a remarkably successful guy in virtually every area of my life, with the exception of intimate relationships, and I had caring adults step up and help me when I needed help, even when I could not or would not ask. As I discovered, it's impossible to have an intimate relationship with someone who doesn't need you for anything, and who insists that they are "fine". That was me. That was a lie.

Lie Number 2

"I am not a good story teller."

I was a precocious child, fueled by my inherited intelligence, my insatiable curiousity, and my early reading ability strongly encouraged by my parents.  Irospect, I think my constant questioning and my favorite word "why?" must have driven them to say "go read". In any case by the seventh grade, I was reading more than 1000 words per minute with 90% retention (according to the test results at the time). Around that same time, Mrs. Minga Hall, one of my elementary school teachers, launched a competition for the "Best Autobiography" in our class of 30 kids. I won with my manuscript entitled "Me" and written in cursive, no less.  

Later in my career, I would win recognition for co-authoring an award winning professional book "Psychiatric and Psychological Evidence" with a former law school professor. That award "Best Book in Law and Psychiatry" published by the prestigious Shepards/McGraw-Hill legal publishing house, was certainly not a story book but it was also published with NO editorial changes to my manuscript.  I may not have been a story teller, but I became an award winning author.

A few years later, I volunteered to be a story book reader at a Read-a-thon at an elementary school in a disadvantaged neighborhood in South Dallas. As I sitting on the floor reading a book to this group of first graders, I noticed how engaged, even enraptured, they were as I read to them. That triggered a research project for me that led to a troubling discovery: a huge perentage of children who don't have parents who read to them, never learn to read by grade three. And as everyone in education knows, before 4th grade, kids learn to read; after that, kids read to learn.  So I started "The Reading Company International, LLC" to produced learn-to-read video media for kids who had no parent to read to them. We produced a demo video; I created a network of children's book authors through the Writer's Guild, and I became the President and CEO of a company that wrote and told stories to kids who were learning to read. And to raise money for the startup, I told their stories, hundreds of times. I am a story teller, and have been since I was 11 years old. 

As an award winning professor to psychology grad students, law students, and business students, I have told hundreds of stories about cases and clients. 

I am not a story teller. That's a lie.

Lie Number 3

I am not a leader and I don't deserve to be paid for the value that I add in my work.

A few months ago I did a self assessment and counted all the leadership positions I have held in my career. 14! 14! Of these, all but 2 were given to me without a single request, campaign, or promotion. Other people saw my leadership behavior/character/heart and put me in those positions, frerquently to my surprise and sometimes to my dismay, honestly. I rarely asked for help (see number 1 Lie above). 

The two exceptions were these: 

1. I actively campaigned to be the American Bar Association on the Student Bar Association Executive Committee for two strategic reasons: I wanted to know what was really happening in SBA student government and the law school since I was 6 years older than most of my c classmates, and the ABA rep position was clearly NOT a high responsibility job. I ran a funny campaign based on hade made posters lampooning Ronald Reagan for his role in "Bedtime for Bonzo" and won by a landslide!! 87% of the vote. 

2. I petitioned the American Psychological Association to be a member of the Committee on Practice and Professional Services while I was a corporate staff guy and Texas Instruments. I got my boss to agree and even got the Corporate General Counsel to agree that it would be a good PR move for the company. After I attended one meeting in Washington, DC, my boss reversed his decision and forbid further participation. (I am pretty sure he was jealous of the attention I got and felt threatened; he was widely hated in the company I later learned.) 

Since my second law clerking job for a boutique family law firm became my specialized divorce litigation consulting/jury research company after I finished law school, I never really hustled for business. I got invited to give speeches at the mental health association and various legal and judiciary groups and business flowed to me without an organized marketing effort. One new case for each speech was the general rule. I had no sense  at all that I deserved the business or the fees or the recognition; I avoided the spotlight. I was the the wizard behind the curtain.

A perfect example of my failure to recognize let alone promoted and defend my value as the ONLY divorce litigation consultant in the country at the time, came just a couple of months into my business. A law school classmate and friend called me and told me that the reason the phone was not ringing in my new downtown Dallas office was that I was charging too little! She adviced me to double my fees! Reluctantly and with great trepidation, I did just that and within a few weeks the phone was ringing off the hook (This was before Al Gore invented the internet, so there was no web/internet online presence; just yellow page ads).  I still didn't get it. While the attorneys I worked with steadily raised their fees, I rarely did. 

Early in my career, my wife and I built a new two story home in Coppell. It was a tract home and well within our expanding budget and my ex was a very talented, creative, and thrifty decorator so our house was gorgeous filled with discounted second hand furniture and accessories. We were proud of the house and invited my parents and my brother and his wife to come to Texas to spend Christmas with us. My mom walked into our entry, stopped, looked around and said "What do you need all of this for?" I was stunned, hurt, angry, and my wife was too. In retrospect, this was Lie Number 3 spoken aloud--you don't deserve to be valued or own assets of value.  And the kicker is that Lie Number 1 was driven by the Big Underlying Lie: I did not deserve to be loved and cared for and was not important/worthy of being loved or deserving of having what I wanted and needed. 

And since that time, I now realize at this very minute as I write this, I have never allowed myself to have anything so beautiful and valuable again because that Lie has been running in my head for the last 40 years undetected. And that lie has blinded me to both business and personal relationships with people who wanted to either use me as a source of financial and/or emtional security with no expectation of reciprocity or undermine my success to prevent them from being overshadowed. 

I am a child of God, Created in His image. Not perfect but forgiven. Worthy of being loved, honored, respected, and successful and affluent as a reward for the value I provide. Learning to speak life over myself is a work in process, repeated intentionally every day until the truth about my value runs automatically. THAT is the TRUTH.

PS. The neuroscience is now quite clear. Our brains are wired for repetition NOT truth finding. External input is required to interrupt the automatic negative messaging. Internal messaging affects brain function, perhaps even the external world at the quantum level by creating expectations for what we observe in the  world (think the classic double slit experiment applied to your world view). The Biblical world view of my value leads me to expect blessings and love. I want that.