Strategic Discipline Blog

My journey through Acute Myeloid Leukemia continues with Chapter III from CANCER CURED - Why Did I Get Cancer?

(Previous segments from CANCER CURED are available here: CANCER CURED – What do You Feed?, CANCER CURED - Fear Not - TURNING POINT, CANCER CURED - CHAPTER II - LIFE INSURANCE, CANCER CURED - Texting – A New Environment, Refractory Period - Monosomy 7 – Doug Loves a Challenge, CANCER CURED – CHAPTER III - Why did I get Cancer?, CANCER CURED – CHAPTER III - Spontaneous Remission)

This is the third section of Chapter III

“There are two kinds of guilt: the kind that drowns you until you’re useless, and the kind that fires your soul to purpose.”

― Sabaa Tahir, An Ember in the Ashes

Taking responsibility for my outcomes has always been one of my strengths. The opposite of your strength can also be a weakness.

My friends believe one of my greatest strengths is being sincere. My weakness is, that when I’m not sincere you immediately feel it!

It can be a blessing or a curse to be responsible.

The blessing is when you take responsibility, you accept the outcome and recognize you are accountable for how you are feeling, whether it’s a mess you made or the good you’ve achieved, it’s still yours.

The curse is you can scourge yourself with blame, shame, and guilt. Too often this is where I invest my thoughts. If you recall, when we don't know how to control our emotional reactions after a strong event that produces a strong emotion, and we allow those chemicals to linger, there's a period of change in chemicals called the refractory period. Consumed with shame and guilt, I’d whip myself with misgivings and doubts about my behavior and character. It becomes a black hole.  A self-fulfilling prophecy of doom. I often stayed in refractory mode for weeks!

The first week in the hospital, I remember repeating an affirmation from Brain Brian Tracy’s Phoenix Seminar audio series, “The Psychology of Achievement” focused on self-development and growing responsibility: “No one is Guilty, I am responsible!”

When you’re remorseful and depressed, each affirmation can become burdensome and self-incriminating.

Thinking this way sunk me into a deeper state of emotional and mental depression. Believing I was responsible for my life-threatening Acute Myeloid Leukemia shook me to the core of my being. My self-worth diminished.

As a child, my guilt response could be attributed to my mother’s disciplined beliefs in our Catholic faith. Religion often gets a bad rap for what it teaches. At the time, the Catholic principles used guilt to control and reinforce the discipline expected to reach the heavenly gates. My mother unquestioningly believed in priests, nuns, and any aspect of the church. So much so, that when she was in the hospice, near death, she still wondered if she’d be forgiven for sassing back to her mother when she was a child.

I reassured her, that she was forgiven. Her life had been one of compassion, filled with caring for others. My mother was exceptional, however, at using the nuances of guilt to get us boys to behave, whether it was Santa Claus or fear of eternal damnation.

The Catholic Church I grew up with reinforced guilt. The priest would tell stories about the consequences of not following the rules. Two I recall were a family who didn’t go to church on Sunday, instead getting an early start on a vacation and being killed in a car accident. Another reminder of the sacredness of Holy Communion: Someone who'd committed a mortal sin went to communion and the host burned their tongue, or the host flew away refusing to enter the person’s mouth.

Guilt, through my mom, the Catholic Church entered my thoughts. It became a prohibitive limiter on my success.

This deep inner soul-searching was probably one reason why I accepted the disruption in my normal routine.

Contemplation overtook me. When approached, I was often in deep thought, mentally I scourged myself for my past behavior.

"All sins are attempts to fill voids." ~ French philosopher Simone Weil

My Temper

My temper was a guilt target to consider.

My angry outbursts frequently occuried during sporting events. It became more personal and embarrassing when Josh, our son, played basketball. It certainly embarrassed Josh too, something I never even considered.

When Josh played school-sanctioned games, I managed to master these outbursts. During rec games during the summer when he participated in elite leagues the officiating was unsanctioned. I frequently criticized the officiating. One game I even stepped onto the court, since I was standing courtside due to the small venue the game was played at.

I was an Iowa-sanctioned official at the time. This may have contributed more to my disappointment. I knew the rules.

That’s not an excuse. There is no excuse for my behavior.

I know life isn’t fair. I recall a quote one of my salespeople taught me that should have helped me realize this, “Fair is what you take your pigs to in the fall!”

Maybe I wanted to protect my son to ensure he looked his best because we had such high hopes for him. It may have been my paternal instinct combined with my sense of fairness. Whatever it was I would get loud and obnoxious if I felt the officiating crew were not doing their job correctly!

My temper emerged when I became impatient. I’m not very good mechanically. Handyman jobs that should take minutes typically take me hours. A screwdriver, a hammer, or a wrench might be heaved during times like these.

My dad criticized me as a child for not knowing how to loosen a nut from a tire. (He never said to me "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey") My temper at times like these might have been from hearing him swearing at me when I couldn’t do something. What came through at times like these is, or “You’ll never amount to anything, you can even loosen a lug nut on a tire!” My dad was automatic around anything mechanical, as was my oldest brother, Jim. Not being able to do something I’d seen them do easily, reminded me of my futility, diminishing my sense of self-worth.

Regardless of intention, my father didn’t intend the consequences it had on me. I would lose my temper when I felt out of control or unable to manage a situation because I would feel this sense of worthlessness.

I finally decided to hire handymen to fix or complete small jobs because I knew my impatience and mechanical incompetence would make the situation worse, or I’d lose my patience and upset those around me.

The guilt, shame, and blame I heaped upon myself was not something I shared with others. Unlike the “Why don’t you just shoot me now!” I had exclaimed to Dr. Zenk and my family upon hearing the news I’d be confined to the hospital for a year, and unable to work, this was an internal mental whipping. It would become the basis for my “change” theme when I began to meditate.

Contemplation/awareness is the first step in change. Suddenly, my sins, the consequences they may have produced, hastened my desire to change. I knew I was guilty of not behaving to a standard I believed I was capable of.

My responsibility and guilt produced the nugget of a thought providing the miraculous outcome I was able to produce.  

To change, we must become greater than our environment, the body, and time. The first step is awareness.

The refractory period I would endure after making a mistake and feeling unworthy I eventually called, selfish self-pity. It became the focus of my meditation.

Selfish Self Pity

The dark side of responsibility is blame, shame, and guilt. If you remain there you tend to beat yourself up. Scourge is a good word to use, in this case, it’s self-inflicted. Nobody is torturing you but yourself.

Negative emotions must be continually worked, or they die of their own volition. I am very good at working, and working, negative emotions. The reverse side of this is it’s helped me be good at reciting affirmations. I may not get sick of beating myself up, but I also don’t get sick of repeating a message designed to lift my spirits up either.

Just this year I learned more in my Neuro Change Solutions coaching training. By attending Dr. Joe Dispensa’s retreats I’ve learned that positive thinking is not enough. You need to change how you think, see other or new choices, act/behave in new and different ways, create a new experience, and feel a new emotion.

When we rehearse this "Think, Act, feel" (which makes up our personality), we can begin to think, act, and feel differently.

Repeatedly rehearsing new thoughts, and new choices, acting and behaving differently, creating a new experience, and feeling a new emotion from the old self, you break the habit of being yourself. That’s why it took so long (5 months) to achieve my remission.

Change isn’t easy.

Call to Action

Challenge your team, your business, yourself. Contact Positioning Systems to schedule a free exploratory meeting to challenge, inspire, and ignite purpose and passion in your business!  

Create an environment where everyone is inspired to give their best.

Growth demands Strategic Discipline.

Learning to be worthy and to feel loved became a continuous battle for me. If I wasn’t doing something, working on a project for my customers, I often felt worthless. The negative spiral of being a workaholic is the subject of my next blog.

Building an enduring great organization requires disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action, superior results, producing a distinctive impact on the world.

Discipline sustains momentum, over a long period, laying the foundations for lasting endurance.

A winning habit starts with 3 Strategic Disciplines: Priority, Metrics, and Meeting Rhythms.   Forecasting, accountability, individual, and team performance improve dramatically.

Meeting Rhythms achieve a disciplined focus on performance metrics to drive growth.

Let Positioning Systems help your business achieve these outcomes on the Four most Important Decisions your business faces:

Positioning Systems helps mid-sized ($5M - $500M+) businesses Scale-UP. We align your business to focus on Your One Thing! Contact dwick@positioningsystems.com to Scale Up your business! Take our Four Decisions Needs Assessment to discover how your business measures against other Scaled Up companies. We’ll contact you.

NEXT BLOG – CANCER CURED – CHAPTER III - 2011 Workaholic – Karoshi