JOHN SHACKLETON
Are you a half tank pike? Your “barriers” might just be imagined.
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any years ago I heard a story about a scientific experiment entitled “The Pike Syndrome” on a tape by Dr Denis Waitley. Apparently if you take a pike, a very aggressive fish, and place it in a large fish tank along with a number of minnows, the minnows disappear and the pike gets fat. In this particular experiment they divided the tank into two by placing a clear glass screen down the middle, the pike on one side and a whole new group of minnows on the other. As you can imagine the pike’s first instinct is to chase his next meal, but he soon gets to realize that his action only leads to headaches and eventually he stops trying. Some time later you can remove the glass plate and the pike will remain in his half of the tank, leaving the minnows to live a long and healthy life in their half. The pike has been conditioned to become a “half-tanker” and may even starve to death despite being able to catch and eat all the food he needs. This process is known as conditioning, and the pike has developed a conditioned response artificially created for him. You may have heard of similar experiments done with fleas in a jar or with elephants chained to stakes in the ground, in each case the animals are trained to believe that they are only capable of actions that are a small fraction of what they are really able to achieve. Once trained, the animals
operate on a modified and limited basis for the rest of their lives, and in some cases will die despite having the physical capability to save themselves. Apparently we have all been trained in the same way, although for most of us, hopefully this didn’t involve tanks, jars or chains! Ever y one of our past experiences in our lives, our successes and failures, our embarrassments and our victories, our highs and our lows, are all stored in our memory bank. This includes all our past interactions with the people around us, those who help us and those who try and harm us. Our memory banks also contain all the standards that society has placed upon us and all the media perceptions of what is happening in the world. All of these past experiences give us a sense of who we are, how right or wrong we are, how good or bad we are, what position we take on the list, whether we are at the top or the bottom. And we use each new experience to strengthen what we know about who we think we are. If you are 30 years old, then you’ve had more than a quarter of a million hours of this external conditioning from parents,family, friends, teachers, peer groups and bosses. Some studies suggest that more than 70 percent of this conditioning is negative. Many of us have been told that we are not old enough, tall enough, good enough, intelligent enough. We’ve been told we are
too young, too fat, too nice, too hard on others, too trusting of people. The media tells us we need to have flat stomachs, big boobs, white teeth, straight/curly hair, and society says that we need to be a new man, a super mum, more aggressive in business, caring and kind to others, well disciplined, relaxed but focused. Etc. Etc. But this external conditioning is only part of the story. Who do you talk to the most? Who is it that does the most conditioning, and who damages your self esteem more than anyone else? Psychologists suggest that we talk to ourselves more than 70 percent of the time, and often we are much harder on ourselves than we are on other people. When we fail to achieve our desired outcome, we might say something like “Typical, you always screw things up.” If we don’t make an important deadline, we might beat ourselves up with a comment like “Late again, when will you ever learn?”. Even when we succeed and produce an outstanding result, we may be tempted to take away some of the potential positive feelings with a comment like, “You were lucky there; you don’t usually do that well.” Now I don’t know how much of your 250,000-plus hours of conditioning have been positive, and how much has been negative, but I do know that if you come along to one of my motivational talks,
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