The specific things people do which change their lives never take longer than ten seconds. So say relationship field pioneers Gay Hendricks and his wife and partner Kathlyn - who help people remove their limitations in a gentle and straightforward way so they can accept more love, creativity and abundance into their lives.
The master commitment is a diamond with several facets. The master commitment continues: — from The Conscious Heart
It begins in this way:
Gay Hendricks: I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it. My wife Kathlyn and I have been together now for eighteen years and we developed our work together. We've been around the world over thirty times now, teaching our work, so it's always a pleasure to talk about it.
There are several aspects to our work. The first is a deep conviction that human beings have a great deal more potential than we're using. We've worked with the presidents of Fortune 500 companies, and we've worked with juvenile delinquents, and we've worked with over 3,000 couples in relationship therapy and we haven't met a person yet that couldn't open up to enjoying more love and creativity and abundance in their lives if they were able to remove the limitations. These are often very clear to another person, but can't be seen by the person themselves. Our work is really about helping people remove their limitations in a gentle and straightforward way so that they can experience more love and energy and abundance in their lives. This work of ours expresses itself in several major ways. We've developed one area of our work in which we deal with business people and corporate transformation. There is another part of our work that deals with relationship transformation, where we primarily work with couples and families; and we've developed another aspect of our work, individual personal growth.
TMA: What are the differences between these approaches?
GH: Let me say a word about the similarities first, and then I'll say a word about the differences. One of the things we emphasize is the incredibly powerful healing value of commitment. We believe that no change really begins to be possible until people can consciously commit themselves to it, and it doesn't matter if it's a couple or a corporation or a person who needs to lose thirty pounds, no change is going to happen until the person commits themselves to it. So we do a lot of work on commitment and helping people to find out what the barriers to commitment are in themselves. That runs across everything we do.
Some of the differences are that in the business setting, we do a lot more work with practical goal setting. We find the biggest failure in business is a failure of vision; that a lot of people are languishing and not doing well in their business world because they really haven't done the visionary work that allows them to create innovations that allow them to get a market edge. So we do a lot of work on helping people remove barriers to creativity and innovation.
TMA: What about the case of somebody who has a lot of vision but has a hard time settling in and doing the work?
GH: That's a very good point. A second major failure in the business arena, as well as in the personal and relationship arena, is what we call "failures of commitment" and "failures of integrity"; a lot of people are ungrounded. They haven't got their feet on the ground because they have integrity problems. And when I say "integrity" I don't want to mean that as only a moral issue. We use it in the sense of physics, not just morality. For example, if a car is going down a freeway fast, it has to have integrity by having all four wheels in alignment — otherwise, you get a rattle that can shake all the passengers silly. So when we say "integrity," we're talking about several very specific things.
One thing is being accepting of all of your emotions. We find that people get out of integrity very quickly by not accepting certain emotions such as anger, sadness, fear. If you don't accept those as normal aspects of human life, then there's a tendency to hide them — which often turns into physical symptoms such as headaches and backaches and that sort of thing, or to express them in noisy ways that inconvenience other people. So we do a lot of work with helping people get what we call "emotional literacy," which is the ability to be comfortable with their feelings and to express them in straightforward ways.
A second thing that integrity involves is speaking authentically. It's very important, whether it's in a relationship between a couple or in a boardroom of a business, to create a situation where people can speak authentically with each other; where they can tell the truth, where they can listen to the truth, where they can really open up to hearing whatever needs to be said and saying whatever needs to be said. We find that one of the biggest problems across the board in human life is the tendency to hide things from each other and not speak authentically. We do a lot of work on helping people learn how to communicate and listen to each other in an authentic way.
A third area, which is very controversial in our work, is that we ask people to take one hundred percent responsibility for any situation they're in. For example, if we're working with a cancer patient, we ask them to take one hundred percent responsibility for their healing; and if we're working with the board of a Fortune 500 company, we ask every person sitting at the table to take one hundred percent responsibility for the success of the organization. The problem is, often people either take too little responsibility or, which is often more common, they go home at night with a headache by taking too much responsibility instead of just taking one hundred percent and demanding and expecting that other people take one hundred percent.
TMA: Where does The Ten Second Miracle come into this? I suspect it has to do with commitment.
GH: It does. The Ten Second Miracle is my new book which is about to come out in the late spring, probably the early part of May. What I did was, I went back through thousands of sessions over the past thirty years and found that the specific things that people did which changed their lives never took longer than ten seconds. So I identified what those things are that people can do that take only ten seconds or less, and I put them in the form of a book — where people could literally look and find the ten-second thing they need to do or say which would change their lives.
I figured that hardly anybody has enough time anymore, so if people were really going to change their lives, what they need to do is have things that could be done very quickly. In The Ten Second Miracle there are five specific actions that change people's lives. In our workshop, we do experiential activities. They're easy to do if you're sitting in the room and can do them, but they're a little bit hard to explain because they often require things that you do in the moment . . . that wouldn't make a lot of sense if the person were simply reading about them without a lengthy explanation and some of the charts that I provide in the book and that I'll be providing in the workshop.
TMA: Well, can you give us an example or two of a situation?
As our relationship grew in depth and understanding, we found that there were seven major process commitments that really made a difference. We took years to develop, understand and embrace these commitments in our souls. Once we did, however, the heart-level satisfaction of our relationship became much more profound. Here are the commitments that we discovered to be essential: The First Soul-Commitment I commit to realizing my full potential for both closeness and autonomy. I open myself to learning about and honoring my essence-rhythms of closeness and separateness, and to learning about and honoring those rhythms in others. The Second Soul-Commitment I commit to full expression, to holding back nothing. This means telling the truth about everything, including my feelings, my fantasies, and my actions. I commit to telling the unarguable truth — truth that no one can argue with — instead of giving my opinions, beliefs, and prejudices. I also commit to listening, nonjudgmentally, to what people say to me. The Third Soul-Commitment I commit to becoming the source of full responsibility for my life, including my happiness, my well-being, and my life-goals. I absolve everyone, living or dead, past or present, from any implication that they cause my feelings or actions in any way. The Fourth Soul-Commitment When faced with the choice between being happy and being defensive, I commit to choosing happiness. I commit to doing this especially in those situations when my defensiveness seems most warranted and when it is totally obvious to me that I am right and the other person is wrong. The Fifth Soul-Commitment I commit to learning to love and appreciate myself and others in my close relationships. The Sixth Soul-Commitment I commit to the full expression of my creativity, and to inspiring th full creative expression of those around me. The Seventh Soul-Commitment I commit to celebration as the dominant emotional tone of my relationships. Particularly, I commit to celebrating the essence of myself and those close to me. As you step into these soul-commitments, you may find, as we did, that you have stepped off the shore and into a vast ocean of possibilities and currents. As we learned to appreciate the daily challenges of riding the waves of discovery, we sometimes tumbled and rolled with an unexpected swell. from The Conscious Heart
GH: Yes, I can give you a very specific example of a man named Ken Hecht. He's a television producer who was over 120 pounds overweight. He lost the weight — he lost over 120 pounds. He had struggled with weight all of his life, but the moment he actually changed and began to lose the weight was after something he did which took only ten seconds. What that ten second miracle was, was that one night he was sitting home alone and he felt this anxious feeling in his body. It was the feeling he'd felt ever since he was a kid that would always make him overeat.
Instead of going to the refrigerator and eating to make that feeling go away, for ten seconds he just stood there and felt the feeling. He just felt and breathed with the anxiety instead of giving into it. He decided to feel it and not eat to conceal it. By doing that for just a few seconds, suddenly it let his mind know that he was the master of that feeling. He didn't have to overeat anymore to conceal that feeling. That, for him, was the moment that started the whole weight loss that led to him losing 120 pounds.
TMA: Wouldn't that feeling try to come back thirty seconds after that ten seconds was up?
GH: Exactly. And when it did, guess what he did?
TMA: The same thing?
GH: The same thing for another ten seconds. After you do that a few times, you don't need to do it anymore. It goes away.
TMA: After a few times it just gives up?
GH: Yes.
TMA: A lifetime habit?
GH: Yeah.
TMA: What about in a relationship situation?
GH: Let me give you another example of a ten second miracle at work in a relationship. We had a situation where a couple were having all sorts of difficulties over a period of seven years, and when we found out what the issue really was, it took ten seconds to solve the problem. When you hear what happened during those ten seconds, you'll see there's a key here that I want to come back around to and talk about.
What happened was, the man had had an affair and was concealing that from his wife. And of course, you know, there's lots of books you can pick up that say, well, if you've done something like that it's better not to tell your partner because it will just upset them and that kind of thing. But the fact is, human beings are built in such a way that we feel guilty — most people — when we lie. So then if we can't accept what we've lied about, we end up taking it out on other people and finding fault with them and that kind of thing. And here is this fellow that has been criticizing his wife for several years mercilessly because he wasn't willing to open up and feel the guilt and tell his wife about the affair he'd had. What happened was, the confession we invited him to make literally took seven or eight seconds, and went like this: "Honey, I'm scared to tell you this, but I had an affair with _____ some years ago." So by the clock it took seven or eight seconds to say that. Now predictably, his wife was upset, but I'll tell you a little secret: If people would let themselves really feel it, most feelings don't last a matter of minutes.
In other words, if you let yourself feel sad, you'll cry maybe, but it will be over with in a few minutes. If you let yourself feel angry, it will be over with in a few minutes. And the same thing with that sort of situation. She experienced some rage and betrayal and anger and grief and that kind of thing, but afterwards she was deeply grateful because she felt something had been off for a number of years but hadn't been able to put her finger on it.
TMA: I would have thought maybe after his ten second miracle she would need a thirty second miracle.
(laughter)
GH: Well, feelings are always dealt with ten seconds at a time. To get a handle on them, you have to give yourself that ten seconds of feeling them. Ten seconds is only the time it takes to take two or three deep breaths, so it's not a very long period of time at all. And if you let yourself take two or three deep breaths into any feeling — like anger, fear or sadness — you'll find that it simply disappears. It may come back later, but then take two or three more deep breaths. You won't have to do that very often. You don't have to do that more than a few times usually until the feeling loses its grip on you.
TMA: So what is it, our avoidance mechanisms that keep it hanging on? But as people get locked into a feeling and they stay there for days —
GH: That's right. That's partly for an avoidance mechanism but partly for a physical reason. Most people, when they're trying to avoid the feeling a feeling, hold their breath a little bit. They don't breathe very much, so they end up getting a little bit depressed or sluggish, and that takes their mind off of it and then they may eat something and that takes their mind off of it further.
TMA: Or they lodge it into their bodies somewhere.
GH: Yeah, it just drives it deeper into their bodies.
Now, about the ten second miracle. And that is, a key ten second miracle is any ten seconds of authentic communication where you say something unarguable to another person. If I said to you, "You're a jerk," that would be arguable. That wouldn't be honest, that wouldn't be authentic. But if I said, "My stomach feels tight," that would be very authentic, perhaps, and it would also be unarguable. I wouldn't be judging you or blaming you, I'd simply be saying something in myself that was unarguable.
TMA: Where do you go from there?
GH: When you communicate something unarguable to another person, your relationship changes. If I say to you, "I'm feeling scared" or "I'm feeling angry" or "I'm feeling sad," the moment I say that, our relationship changes and become more intimate. And then you're more likely to say something to me that's intimate. If people are defensive with each other, they never get around to saying those authentic, intimate things to each other. But the moment they speak authentically with each other, they get closer.
TMA: Well, that would work a lot better than saying, "You're a jerk." Is there anything else of an essential nature that you want to talk about?
GH: I just want to say that what we're going to be talking about works equally well in the boardroom, in the livingroom and even in the bedroom. So the same principles apply right across the board.
Gay Hendricks, Ph.D., has been a major contributor to business, psychology and education for over twenty-five years. The author of twenty-one books — including The Conscious Heart (with Kathlyn Hendricks), Conscious Loving, The Corporate Mystic (with Kate Ludeman) and At the Speed of Life — Dr. Hendricks has appeared on over 500 radio and television shows, including multiple appearances on Oprah, Sally Jessy Raphael, CNN and others. His work has been the subject of positive features on ABC News and CBS' 48 Hours, and is widely used in hundreds of companies, including Motorola, IBM, Dell, Monsanto and others.
After receiving his doctorate from Stanford, Dr. Hendricks moved to Colorado where he was a professor at the University of Colorado for twenty-one years. He and his wife, Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks, opened their center in Santa Barbara, California in 1995.