OUR X FACTOR: THE POWER TO ACHIEVE "EVERY DAY" SUCCESS AND HAPPINESS

By Xavier Van De Lanotte

Among the many things that people aspire for, one that most people have in common is to be happy. Some go to great lengths just so they can secure happiness for themselves, but they often mistake transient pleasures and lofty achievements for happiness, not realizing that being happy is more a choice and a process than an end product. Author Xavier Van de Lanotte takes on the noble task of guiding the perennial seeker of happiness or success to the right path, which is paved with moments of self

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781628388589

Book preview

FOREWORD

What makes you happy? What do you want to achieve in your life? How do you feel about the direction you are on? Are you confident with your choices and pleased with your success every day? Do you aspire to grow and be the best that you can be?

Inside each of us are stored all the moods and feelings endogenous to our human nature as we collect them throughout life. Our brains record everything that happens to us, along with the emotions we feel the moment it occurs. By the manners in which we were raised, the dynamics of the households we grew up in, and all our experiences since our births, our matrices of feelings and emotions develop differently from those of other humans. In that process, we are all the same. Yet because of that process, we are all different. We are all special, unique.

We may not recall what happened in our early years. We may forget about events that led us to moments of great joy or great pain alike. However, these somehow bear on our emotions and our choices as our brains have them on file and are imprinted with our detailed lives’ histories and, more importantly, with the way the chapters of our lives made us feel as they unfolded.

Our beliefs, our tastes, and our attitudes form patterns that distinguish us from one another. We may not always be cognizant of why we react to certain situations in life the way that we do; nevertheless, those reasons exist, finding their roots somewhere in our pasts, stored in our gray matters, conscious or unconscious. Lumped together, personal histories, emotional matrices, and patterns of behavior draw a picture of the human complexity more distinguishable than a sequence of DNA and more unique than the geometry of a snowflake.

No exception to the rules, I had my ups and downs, good days and bad ones, victories and downfalls, laughter and cries, and feelings of elation and sorrow. We all have felt similar emotions, and through life’s cycles of positives and negatives, we experience the same. We are alike, you and I. All of us.

Consequently, if we are the product of our upbringing or the result of our environments, you may wonder, Is it possible to improve the hands we were dealt? Furthermore, if we believe that for different folks, different strokes, given that we have unique psyches, tastes, and life goals, is there a point to a book with a common formula to achieving greater success and happiness in our lives? The answers are revealed in that we are all gifted with the capacity to develop awareness, guide our actions with free will, and raise our potential. In that, we are all equal.

For some people, success, or great achievement, is credited to a distinct feature they possess known as an X factor. This characteristic is said to be hard to describe mainly because it is deeply tied to the unique temperaments, perspectives, and qualities of these people.

Yet we all have an X factor, without exceptions.

Through the years, I have pondered life’s questions at great length. I observed, studied, and read up on the circumstances that allow us to feel good about ourselves, to grow confident about our choices and goals, and to connect with the world in ways that give our lives purpose. In the process of my research, I learned many valuable things, both from others and through my own experiences. Yet I could never find an information resource that could guide us to be on track with our lives, a source of knowledge that could foster our confidence to fulfill our potentials and experience lasting happiness all at once. Hence, I gathered and distilled my discoveries to develop, with this written collection, such a resource for us all to use.

Our X Factor is on our paths to unleashing our awareness of our environments and ourselves. It is a guide for our actions in fulfilling our lives with greater success and happiness. As we take stock in our lives, we awaken with a sense of urgency to make the most of each day of the one life that we were given.

Day after day, we can follow our path, live life to the fullest, grow into the best version of ourselves, and perform at the peak of our potential. On this journey, we develop a sense of purpose and connectedness, rise from the obscure recesses of our mind, and brighten our future and that of those around us.

INTRODUCTION

Our X Factor points us to the resources to live happily and be successful in everything that we do. It supports us in our search for answers about our lives and to gain insight about relationships and situations at work, home, or in the community. It is intended to help us work toward solutions and find the balance and serenity we need to grow, move forward, and achieve our goals with greater purpose and joy every day of our lives.

With a life expectancy of seventy years, each one of us disposes of 25,550 days (opportunities) to achieve something great. Each morning, as we wake up, we tune our compasses in a certain direction, and as a result of our actions, our day culminates as a good, a bad, or an average day. By nighttime, we go to bed feeling light, heavy, or oblivious—moods that, in all likelihood, influence the tone of our dispositions the next day.

To make every day a success, we must first become aware of how we feel. Our attitudes toward people and things, our moods, our ability to feel good and interact with others, and our actions must be in tune with the goals we want to achieve. The objectives covered in part 1 of Our X Factor, Awareness, provide us with opportunities to locate where we are currently situated on our life maps and where we actually want to find ourselves. Yet before establishing residence elsewhere, it is important that we acknowledge what is holding us back and what can propel us forward. That requires our awareness.

Like any journey, in life we must accept that each step precedes another. We need a road map that helps us stay the course, fuel that keeps our engines roaring (or purring for those who are more comfortable cruising at a gentler pace), and a compass that indicates the direction in which we are going. Those metaphors are analogous to the objectives of Making It Happen, part 2 of the book, which direct us on our chosen path and teach us how to reveal and engage our X factor to maximize our value chain of success and happiness. To steer our lives in a desired direction and achieve results, we are accountable for learning about the controls that guide our lives and responsible for operating them effectively every day. We make it happen.

Finally, if we are determined to take stock in our lives, we need to know how to collect dividends. We need a measure for our success. Some people want to be entrepreneurs or business owners, others choose to pursue corporate careers, some want to be artists or advocates, and others still wish to settle and raise a family. Although these are laudable goals, they do not guarantee happiness, success in life, or daily feelings of joy. In part 3 of Our X Factor, Making It Count, the focus turns toward discovering appropriate benchmarks for our success and happiness. Here, the objectives are to learn to discern the things that matter to us, develop behaviors that lead to greater success and happiness, and track our daily progress thereof. In this critical part, we are reminded that we have only so many opportunities (days) left to make good on the single lives we were granted. Let’s make the most of each one and make it count!

This book is not a biography, but it references scenes of people’s lives or stereotypes observed in society. However, much of what inspired me to write Our X Factor stems from my own experiences. Hence, in fairness to you, I wish to introduce myself and provide you some context and background information such that you can distinguish any bias I may have introduced.

I live in the United States, but I was born and raised elsewhere. At a crucial time of my upbringing and education (ages sixteen through twenty-four), I lived in yet another country, where my parents hoped to settle, run a small business for a few of their golden years, and then retire. Later in life, during my career, I travelled abroad extensively. Throughout, I adapted, learned many things, made friends, and appreciated cultural differences. I taught myself new languages, sometimes by necessity, sometimes for a deeper immersion into the cultures to which I was exposed. Close friends have called me Renaissance man or jack-of-all-trades. Though flattering, deep inside I felt different as I could not find an environment in which I felt totally included.

When I go on job interviews, I’m sometimes asked, Tell me/us, what distinguishes you that would make you a valuable addition to our organization? To which I reply that I am an out-of-the-box thinker who likes the challenge of finding new organizational and process solutions to serve customers better (I’ve worked mostly in marketing, sales, and strategy). Fantastic, is what I usually hear in response. We need people with fresh new ideas who aren’t afraid of coming forward.

That did not always get me the job in the end, but when it did, I soon found myself trapped working with people who like the status quo (even when they bitch about it), don’t really appreciate different ways of thinking (even when they ask for it), and don’t care much for the process of feedback (even though teamwork tops their lists of corporate cultural values, along with integrity, honesty, and innovation).

In the early 1990s, I managed an international training and development program for a DOW 30 Company. In a bout of raising ethnic awareness, the firm required that all of its employees attend a diversity workshop. Sharing such a session with about 150 coworkers, we were asked, for a specific exercise, to respectively arrange ourselves around the room in groups of people by gender, socioeconomic factors, ethnicity, and, lastly, region of ancestral origin. During the final round of the workshop, I found myself in the largest group: Europe. I was surrounded by descendants of Italian, Polish, Irish, and Spanish immigrants. One by one, I heard my colleagues talk about how their experiences were different from those of their peers at school, college, or work because of their cultural customs and affiliation, specific to their heritage. When asked where I was from, I simply stated, Europe (I was the only European-born in the group). They probed and insisted that I share my personal experiences and feelings on the subject of my cultural heritage. I could have provided a cliché answer but chose to answer how I felt instead: I am European and have affinities with several of its cultures. I avoid the trap of taking sides and prefer embracing many foreign cultural customs that I believe will enrich my life and broaden my views of the world.

I admit, it didn’t gain me much popularity with my group at first (as I implicitly declined to play along with the exercise), but it was better than declaring how I felt on a deeper level: I wish we weren’t so concerned about our associations with groups but, rather, valued to embrace everyone as we are: unique individuals, irrelevant of our creed, color, or cultural background. I recall a particular fantasy I’ve had since I took a civil law class in college and was introduced to the concept of statelessness. Wouldn’t it be great to have no nationality and be free to roam the world without impediments, not unlike what John Lennon implied in the song Imagine?

It is not so much that I have a need to fit in than I fear the alternative—feeling left out, shunned. When I entered elementary school (in my birth country), I was picked on because I had an accent. My parents had raised my four older siblings in Africa, and I had picked up their speech patterns. When I was sixteen, moving to another country came as a relief but not without its challenges: (1) I needed to communicate and study in a foreign language, and (2) in that country people liked to poke fun at my compatriots. My defense strategy was to become good (funny) at telling such and other jokes. In time, I studied that language and its many nuances and accents to a degree that it got me a scholarship teaching that language in college. I learned in the process that adversity can bring opportunity when one is not resigned to accepting defeat and living with its consequences, such as humiliation, being treated as inferior, and performing below one’s potential for lack of being given a chance. I began viewing our move abroad as a blessing. I stopped feeling like a loser or victim, gained the respect of my peers and teachers, and felt in control of my destiny.

Before that experience, when I was fourteen, my teachers recommended that my parents enroll me in a trade school. I was not inclined to do well with higher education, they said. Ten years later, I enrolled in an American university to go for my second master’s degree and spoke four languages fluently. I was blessed that my parents resisted the temptation to deal with a subpar-performing student as per my teachers’ urgings. Thanks to that change of environment, I lived, learned, and grew in ways they—or I, for that matter—never imagined were possible.

In America, I met the girl who would first give me her hand in marriage and, later on, three beautiful children. I made the deliberate decision to settle here as I thought the alternative—to expatriate her to Europe—would result in both sacrifices in our careers and strain on our relationship as she would feel exiled, far removed from her family, friends, and cultural ties. This was a feeling I had been subjected to on two occasions thus far. Over the years, my contact with family and friends had waned. The burden of the upkeep of my past relationships had become mine and mine alone. My absence, as a single person, affected their lives less than their collective lack of presence affected mine. A cousin closest to my age and childhood friend told me one day, Isn’t it good enough here for you? He could simply not relate to the choices that I had to make, but it stung, nonetheless. I began thinking that when you leave your birthplace for too long, perhaps you can never again experience what it feels like to come home. My perception of my friends’ and family’s attitudes was that, in their eyes, I had achieved something on my own and was happier elsewhere—that I didn’t need them anymore. If so, I thought they couldn’t have been more wrong. With few exceptions, everyone wants to preserve a sense of belonging, specifically one that ties us to our roots.

As I focused on my career, I worked hard, moved up the echelons of the company where I worked, and became entangled in its politics. I was ill prepared and made some wrong moves. I was inexperienced with the American corporate culture. I was impatient. I wanted to drive deep changes, incorporating ideas that I had gleaned in other countries where I had traveled or worked, which were met with great resistance. It came at the price of resentment by several of my peers and some superiors. I learned the hard way that people may share objectives yet differ in processes by which they aim at reaching a common goal.

"He wants to fix world hunger, one day one of my supervisors said about my exposé while at a strategic panel discussion with all our alliance partners in the room. He meant it as a joke, and I genuinely believe he thought my naïveté (or so his demeanor implied) was refreshing. I simply replied, If it doesn’t get fixed, it’s because no one is doing anything about it. I don’t intend to let that be the case here."

One night, a senior executive who had taken a personal interest in me confided, My [internal] clients are divided about you: half of them think you could be the next chairman of this company, the others want me to fire you. Thank you for the heads-up. I appreciated his candor and sentiment and regarded him as my role model for many years after that. However, his career with the company was coming to an end, and his ability to favor one vision for my future over the other soon waned. What was I to do? Abandon my ambition of becoming a crusader?

Without support, my career prospects with this company reached a stalling point. I changed jobs in the midst of the Internet boom, joining smaller startup firms. The boom quickly turned into bust, and most of my new employers went out of business. Like many of my former peers, I became a consultant. My income dropped dramatically. In between assignments, I studied business strategy to the highest degree and began to publish business articles. I travelled some more abroad for research and to raise awareness about my endeavors as a strategy and marketing specialist with my prospective clients. I taught myself a sixth language in the process. But business never picked up. This sounded depressing in all six languages.

Then, one day, I got served with divorce papers. My life had led me to an impasse. I never felt as lonely as on the evening the process server knocked on my door….

My bank accounts had been depleted. My wife was seeking full custody of my children and the possession of the house. With nothing to look forward to—I was in the midst of writing a novel, lack of finding anything else to do that could get me out of my professional rut—I felt lost, aimless. I was in hell!

Across the pond, my aging parents, whom I didn’t want to burden with my misery, offered little solace. My siblings, who had all gone through divorces, were of little help. My friends extended their sympathies, but then withdrew. I searched for answers, often to find I didn’t quite know the questions. I wrecked my brain for ideas. After all, I am the fixer!

Why me?

There has to be more to life than this, I thought as I reached bottom. Or had I?

There has to be a better, easier way…

PART I

AWARENESS

WHY WE FEEL WHAT WE FEEL

Imagine you getting to work one ordinary morning. You settle at your desk or workstation with a beverage or snack from your usual stop on your way to work. Suddenly, you realize that you forgot to lock the front door to your home. The other adult living with you forgot to take out the trash the night before, so you took care of that while rushing through breakfast. Your child forgot the lunch you prepared on the countertop for the third time this month, and you managed to drop it off at school. As you left for your commute, you remembered the forecast called for rain; you hurried back inside to collect an umbrella or raincoat.

A unique phenomenon occurred right then while you were reading this. As you read, you projected in your mind’s eye the sequence of events as it might have happened to you or someone close to you. You filled in the details of what was told with images of great familiarity to you: the workplace, the coffee shop or lounge, the door, the trash, the residence, the breakfast nook, the child, the school, the lunchbox or brown bag, the neighborhoods and faces of people you come across on any given morning on your way to work. Who was the adult in your mind that forgot to take out the trash?

For each of us, the imagery depicted will be different, yet the story remains the same. However, the implications of what hypothetically happened wouldn’t be the same, and what would follow would quite possibly be substantially different from one person to another. This is how the mind works: we set everything in context of what we know, are familiar with, and believe to be most plausible. This leads to how we feel.

Now, imagine it happened for real. How do you feel? Are you struck with panic, fear, or anger? What goes through your mind? Gosh! I’ll get robbed! I told John three times to take out the garbage! Luke will forget his head someday! or Why did I run back in? It’s not even going to rain!

Perhaps you will take this incident in stride, and you won’t let it affect the rest of your day at work.

I was raised on the outskirts of a small town. Though we were robbed one night (while sleeping at home) when I was about eight, not much ever occurred there of which we had to be fearful. I’ll be forever thankful for the opportunity to live out my youth with the fearlessness of an innocent child. As an adult, I became aware of what a precious gift that was and wanted the same for my children. My attitude toward the casualty of my property became I’d prefer to be the victim of a theft once in a while rather than be paranoid all my life, living in fear of being wronged. It did not feel good when, years later, my first car got stolen in front of my home in New Jersey, but I survived and adapted by being cautious relative to the environments I found myself in over the years.

The point is that our feelings and attitudes in situations like these are most likely dictated by a combination of (1) historical events and feelings we have experienced before, reacting with No, I won’t be victimized again! or Why me, again? and (2) assumptions and expectations regarding the situations or environments in which we find ourselves, with thoughts like Why do I always have to take care of things? or What do you think will happen in this neighborhood?

Certainly, there is a choice. To some extent, we can control feelings, emotions, attitudes, and actions resulting from otherwise unfortunate situations as this one. However, if options to choose from exist in the first place, it is because our ability to rationally decide what to do and how to feel is mitigated by data and emotions stored in our minds. We may or may not remember how or why we have that information tucked away in our memory banks, yet it affects us. In some cases, we’re not even conscious it is there at all. Things we experienced as infants, stories we heard our families talk about, or reactions our parents had to some situations are all there with us all of the time. Some memories are good, with feelings that brought us comfort, security, and hope, such as the warm embrace of a feeding mother or the anticipation of Santa’s visit. Others are less pleasant and caused us fear or disappointment, such as a parental reprimand or the loss of a cherished toy. Most likely, we forgot about the singular events. The feelings, however, left a trace in our memories, and because of the way we learned to assimilate (or digest) good and bad emotions, we try to either recreate them or avoid them all throughout our lives.

In the annals of psychiatry, much of this process has been researched, documented, and written about and led to what is known as Transactional Analysis (TA). This book is not about TA, but its underlying principles deserve some elaboration in that they explain why much of what we feel and what we do is our autopilot taking over rather than being guided by rational adult thought processes.

To put it simply, TA advances that each individual has three facets to his or her persona. They are commonly referred to as the Parent, the Adult, and the Child. The Parent (P) and the Child (C) stimulate feelings and responses in many of our transactions (stimuli–responses) and are rooted in two sets of data our brains recorded between ages of zero and five.

The Child (C) taps into our feelings and emotions and can claim much responsibility for the state of our moods. By definition, the Child is nearly always in need of something. It seeks to be stroked (emotionally and physically), validated, or rewarded and searches to fulfill our needs. When our needs are met, it makes us feel happy; if not, we’re sad or angry. The Child also controls much of our imagination (creativity) and our dreams (desires). When we clap our hands or laugh heartily, that’s our Child. When we feel like crying or throwing a fit, that’s our Child. But when we are on to something and are eager to complete an invention with anticipation, that’s also our Child.

The Parent (P), on the other hand, makes us recall responses and attitudes caregivers (commonly our parents) displayed while rearing us as infants. Often, the Parent’s influence is critical in nature as the caregivers’ roles are to approve and disapprove of our actions as innocent little children. When we hear ourselves say (or think) Atta boy! or Don’t let me ever catch you doing this again! that is our Parent in action. Our Parent also contains many of our preferences and deep-rooted beliefs, including prejudices. Saying or thinking You can’t trust these people! or That’s the government at work for you! indicates our Parent is likely at the helm again.

Both Parent and Child can come forward in verbal and nonverbal ways. Pouting, winking, crossing the arms, frowning and communicating with expressive hand gestures are some examples of nonverbal manifestations of our Parent and Child. Equally demonstrative of the dominance of either Parent or Child influencing our moods is our tone of voice, which could be authoritarian (sarcastic, tough, or angry) or childlike (playful, happy, defenseless, or angry).

When we are in precarious situations, our Parent often provides us with our default solutions. This is a natural course to follow as, in our minds, caregivers (parents) provide and enforce and are, ipso facto, always right. Thomas A. Harris states in his book I’m OK, You’re OK that a not OK feeling stems from our Child as it is filled with memories of helplessness and insecurity and constantly craves for nurturing care. Furthermore, the Child perceives the Parent as OK as caregivers typically provide for the needs of infants to bring them comfort and resolve problems. Hence, historically, we have thus validated our caregivers’ (parents’) actions, words, and attitudes as OK, and we made those our own, in our Parent.

The Adult (A), the third aspect of our personality, comes into play in the following manner. As of our tenth month after birth, our cognitive skills begin to develop, and so does our Adult. The Adult is simply our way of reconciling the archaic data stored within our Child and Parent with the real world environment. As we grow, our ability to reason grows with us, and our Adult plays an increasingly greater role in directing our actions, feelings, and emotions.

When a mother calls her child in to help with chores, a small child may react, But I wanna play some more! An older child may think, If I go in now and quickly do my chores, there may be time left to go out for an ice cream later. In both cases, the children want to extend their fun time. However, the older child already masters skills in forward-thinking and maximizing gratification—the work of the Adult.

Recognizing that we carry vestiges of our Parent and Child is a critical step in reaching awareness concerning our feelings, attitudes, and actions. Furthermore, understanding what part of us has the upper hand in determining our moods and triggering our responses is equally important in the development of our Adult, which leads us to making more rational decisions regarding what we do, say, or feel. Promoting our Adult to control our actions and emotions limits the rote, and often less appropriate, responses elicited by our Child or Parent operating on autopilot. This results in more effective and satisfying outcomes.

Note that Parent and Child provide great benefits in our daily lives as well. From our Child stems our drive and our ambition. It keeps us dreaming and curious about others, the world, and all of its marvels. Our spontaneity and desire to make things better and free of harm and fear are also to its credit. Likewise, our Parent holds a great deal of our moral compass, accounts for our nurturing qualities, and gives us a sense for practical solutions. It often reveals intuitive responses intended to protect us or make us choose wisely.

Together, Parent and Child may emerge as something we feel in our hearts or something we believe is our instinct telling us. Denying them access to the controls in managing some situations would be foolish, but so would be giving them free rein all of the time. Hence, our Adult is there to keep them in check and to enhance our awareness of who’s in charge. When Parent or Child trespasses its boundaries, then our Adult must take over and guide us back on track to making appropriate decisions and tempering our moods. Only the Adult has the full picture of what is going on with and around us. It alone is capable of reasoning and of reconciling the conflicts between the Child and the Parent. Finally, only our Adult can understand, communicate, and interact productively and effectively with others. It alone can make sense of the Child feelings and emotions and the archaic Parent data stored in other people’s memories, all of which, by definition, escape the grasp of our own Child and Parent.

Empathy and compassion, for instance, require that we extrapolate feelings and attitudes from our own Parent or Child databases, mitigate them by projecting them onto our mind’s eye while using someone else’s situation and circumstances (the other person’s story), and deduce therefrom that person’s emotional state. While Parent and Child data are invoked, to achieve these attitudes, it is incumbent to our Adult to objectively make sense of the story in its foreign setting (the other person’s situation) and guide our transactions with that other person