The Rules Of Insanity.

Color Commentary for Thursday, March 1, 2007
By Maikel Bailey

"Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your children!"
~ Samuel Levenson

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We asked Maikel Bailey, a world-renowned expert on sales and professional development, to comment on the reasons behind our success-limiting procrastination.

Maikel is in the process of completing a sensational new book entitled The Rules Of Insanity: The Fears That Drive Us—The Desires That Inspire Us.

As we say in our Miracle of The Goal TeleSeminar, people have three primary fears:

• The fear of success...

• The fear of failure...

• And the fear of the future.

As you will see, these fears are easily vanquished!

We are happy to present Maikel's views in this series of 5 wonderful articles, and grateful to him for sharing his thoughts well before the book's publication!

The Rules Of Insanity...

This is the fifth part in a series on desires and fears, and how they affect our lives. Last week we asked What Happened to the Magic?

In a brief review, when we keep going through the same habits of procrastination and drama, again and againavoiding this and avoiding that with the same old sing-song of excuses, justifications and reasons, life does get to be rather repetitive. It gets to be predictable. And when we "know" what is coming next, it just sucks the "Magic" out of all of it.

This week the focus is on recognizing and eliminating the insanity in our lives!

Three "working" definitions of insanity...

"The condition of being insane; a derangement of the mind; extreme folly; senselessness; foolhardiness"
~ Dictionary.com

Picking up on the senselessness and foolhardiness of people who do the same things, hoping for a different outcome, Einstein offers this classic definition of Insanity...

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."~ Albert Einstein

Extreme folly? No question! Here's my take...

"While irresponsibly attempting to avoid a consequence, we end up stuck with that consequence…again…and again…and again…and again…"
~ Maikel Bailey

If not insane, what would you call it?!

Clip and Hang.

My new book, The Rules of Insanity – The Fears that Drive Us, the Desires that Inspire Us, comes from years of coaching students and watching what they do after they receive assignments which when done, improve their lives, their businesses, and their relationships. But that’s not the way things always go.

Years ago, I was befuddled as I watched many of my students and the students who worked with my coaches, do things that brought about the very thing they wanted to avoid.

It was as if they ducked to miss being smashed in the face with a cream pie, only to have the pie come around again and splat them in the face full on. Bam! There it was, exactly what they did not want; exactly what they had been maneuvering to avoid.

What I am talking about here, is their avoiding taking responsibility for some part of their lives, their businesses and/or relationships.

The more they attempted to avoid that responsibility the more it came around and “got ‘em!”

Obviously, these were self-sabotaging behaviors. So, of course as coaches we would point them out to them and then make suggestions as to what to do differently and move on. The student would agree to make these changes and take on the new assignments to remedy the old shoot 'em in the foot behavior. But...

What was crazy was that many of these students kept doing it! They didn't get it.

Talking to them further, we found that they had been doing it FOR YEARS! (Of course, that was one of the underlying reasons to get into coaching.) But...

And as they saw it, for them, this was it! What they had hopelessly resigned themselves to was how this was the way it was always going to be…and there was no way out! As they saw it, they were helpless to change it and therefore the situation they were in was hopeless.

Getting these students on the side of the table of success, where their coach was, was a formidable challenge. It was as if these students were tenaciously clinging to the side of the table marked “Failure.” It was a “perplexion”, like a moth to blow a torch, but...

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Please attend The Miracle of The Goal TeleSeminar! We have custom-designed 2 great, 1-hour classes to support individuals, coaches and trainers in setting and achieving WOW goals for 2007... 2011... and beyond. This is your opportunity to talk directly to the authors of TQ, and get YOUR personal questions answered. See Class Schedule...

This mystery was to become a predictable phenomenon.

Whereas before I just watched it happen like a train in a slow motion wreck, loaded with caramel and thumb tacks, knowing it was going to be messy and painful and I was helpless to stop it, to where, over time, I could see it coming before the train rolled out on it's tracks.

From this predictable pattern of foretelling behavior I was able to dig a little deeper and reveal the roots, not in some deep psychological way, but in a very plain, common sense point of view and explanation.

I discovered that while our students would tell their coach how they were going to setup their next self-imposed slam down, they were not even aware that they were telling us this.

Somehow it was leaking out of their very being, screaming to the world, “Here it comes, here it comes. I'm going to do it to myself, again!”

And sure enough.

Then when it happened, strangely these students were both surprised and not surprised. There was a certain “I knew it!” and at the same time a shocked, “Who did this to me?”

As I paid greater attention to what they said, I heard certain words again and again, foreshadowing and foretelling the coming events. Once I learned the words and “really heard” what the students were saying and not saying to me, I was delivered The Rosetta Stone of the Fears. (You might laugh, but it was like a revelation of pure light cutting through the dark, so clear, so simple, so obvious I could only ask, “I did I miss this before?”)

I began by telling my coaches, who were at first baffled and perplexed, but as they listened, they too began to see the patterns coming into focus. The more they listened and watched, the more I pointed it out, the clearer it became.

At first, they could see it happening to their students, then they could see it before it happened and not long after that they could anticipate it before anything ever began, even before their first meeting with a student.

Oh, yeah, it was spooky.

It was like we had been slipped some mystic Kool-aid without our knowing and were seeing things only the few anointed were allowed to see. It was insight into a new kind of “truth” everyone had danced around, but never before “saw” the whole picture.

Then we started telling our students what they were telling us, what it meant…what they meant.

When talking to couples, husbands became speechless and their wives laughed out loud as we fed back to them what their husband had told us he was going to do. She’d seen it before! It was the bad B movie re-run she had been living with for years. Thank heavens, somebody else was seeing it, too, she’d sigh. But these were strangers! How’d they know?

How did we know? We knew because we listened and we knew what to listen for.

So now, we could say with confidence, “If you don’t proactively manage yourself, you’re going down and from what you have told me, here’s how you are going down, and here’s how you are going to do it to yourself… again.”

Student’s asked if we knew where they lived and if we were following them around. At first, we said no, but later we couldn’t help ourselves and said, yes. That cranked up their fears! (Kidding.)

No matter. Some were surprised, others impressed, while others denied. Ironically, within moments the deniers would reveal the very behavior they had just denied. Even denial became a path to awareness.

Moving from the sick, crusty underbelly of the world of procrastination, drama, and the blame game that endlessly and mercilessly loops back on itself, we showed them how to free themselves by doing new things, creating new routines, living new healthy, happy habits and renewed lives!

But fear is strong.

And these are fears with irony. The irony is in the attempt to irresponsibly avoid a consequence we insure the consequence. And if we are honest with ourselves, while we have never knowingly uttered this irony, we know it.

Call it Murphy’s Law, the devil, the Sith Lord, bad luck, another stupid mistake, voodoo, an evil omen, self-sabotage, or Snidely Whiplash, you know it, you’ve always known it.

This irony has tricked us into thinking it is like our best friend, there to protect us and keep us from harm – from losing, from criticism, from self-belittlement of all we do, from the ever changing world and certainly from the overbearing weight of success.

Oh, yes, we have been deceived into believing by taking the road of avoidance we will be protected and safe, while the truth is we always get that which we sought so hard to irresponsibly avoid.

• We sought to avoid loss, but we lost.
• We sought to avoid criticism, but we were criticized.
• We sought to avoid failure, but we fall short and fail.
• We sought to avoid change, but things changed anyway.
• We sought to avoid exposures for our inadequacies and we are exposed.

Well, it’s time to make a real change, not mouthing lip service.

The Rules of Insanity is about bringing us out of our coma of denial about these fears. It is about revealing to us these fears, how they work, how they drive us, rob us, keep us from becoming who we aspire to be, doing what we long for and enjoying what we truly dream.

The Rules of Insanity is about showing us how to face those fears, deal with them, one day at a time, and turn those fears into inspiring desires that will move us to what we truly want.

It is about learning to laugh at what we fear and do the things we once fearfully avoided.

Can it be done?

The book…is coming. Watch for it!

Maikel

"Insanity in individuals is something rare -- but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule."
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

About Maikel Bailey

While Maikel may not have done it all, at times it feels like it. From digging ditches, framing houses, teaching personal development before it was called personal development, selling business to business, seminar speaker and leader, selling personal development for Denis Waitley and Zig Ziglar, coaching others how to achieve their dreams personally and professional he has covered a lot of ground over the years. He now owns and runs a coaching business that trains individuals how to transition from "employee thinking" to the "entrepreneurial mindset" and establish a successful online marketing business. With an elite stable of 10 coaches and outstanding support staff, Maikel is responsible for the "coaching of the coaches", and curriculum development.

Maikel is married to Michelle Winslow, the love of his life. They are the parents of seven children and nine grandchildren with two more on the way at this time.

Contact Maikel...