First Man In
Page 22
The moment you can achieve this level of honesty is the moment you can start accepting yourself for who you are and make those changes to become a better you. This level of honesty frees you. It also bulletproofs you against the criticism of everyone you’ll ever meet.
Step two. Blame yourself. I don’t care how many reasons you have for blaming other people or events from your past. Maybe your mother beat you. Maybe your father left home. Maybe you’re not as clever as you might want to be. Maybe you’re poor. Maybe you suffer from depression. Maybe you had polio and walk with a limp. I promise you, there’s not a man or woman on earth who can’t list a host of reasons that lie behind their failures. And guess what? They’re right. In reality there are usually multiple reasons for failure, and many of those reasons will be out of our control.
But I don’t care about any of that – and neither should you. Looking backwards will not take you forwards. So let’s say it’s true that some of your problems today have their roots in something that happened twenty years ago. What are you going to do about that, assuming you haven’t got a Tardis parked in your back garden? This kind of blameful, backwards thinking is a dead end. It will only lead to you feeling like a victim. It will demotivate you. It will leave you angry and resentful. It will take up valuable headspace. It will exhaust you.
Even if you’re completely convinced that all of your problems are someone else’s fault, find a reason why they’re your fault. Again, look yourself in the eye and say it out loud. Be relentless. Rip into yourself. By accepting and believing that you’re responsible for your life, you’ll find a way to process your weaknesses, accept them and move on. You’ll make progress, sometimes rapidly and dramatically.
Step three. Fix yourself. Stop doing those things you’ve identified as flaws. If you’re annoying when you drink too much, drink less. If you’re patronising or big-headed or talk too much, watch like a hawk for those behaviours. You won’t wipe them out immediately. Sometimes you’ll take three or four steps back. But see every step back as a new challenge to tackle. Keep focused on how much better your life will be when you’ve finally fixed those problems that have been grinding on you for so many years.
If you tackle this final step in a positive way, then you’ll soon start seeing real benefits. It starts with honesty because, as soon as you’re honest with yourself, you’ll stop fearing what other people think about you. You’ll be less afraid of criticism because you’ll have done all the criticising yourself. People might think I’m an arrogant twat, but that doesn’t bother me because I’ve looked in the mirror and I know that I’m not. The people that do think like that don’t know me.
Once you stop worrying about what’s in other people’s heads, you’ll stop desperately trying to please them. You’ll cease being the kind of person who’s running around like a puppy, trying to charm everyone into submission. Confidence will start to emanate from you like light from the sun, and it won’t be that horrible, chippy confidence that demands respect. It will be the true, positive, charismatic confidence that radiates from people who know themselves in all their glory and ugliness, and have accepted themselves as what they are.
Soon you’ll find improvements in most, if not all, areas of your life. Your relationships will improve, at home and at work. If you’ve spent your life blaming your boss, your partner or your father for all your shortcomings, you’ve been making your relationships work against you. Once this process is thrown into reverse, everyone’s going to like you more. They’re going to want to be closer to you, to work with you, to help you, and will cheer when you succeed.
The entire world will start to look brighter. You’ll have more mental energy. You’ll become smarter. Why? Because negativity is an obsessive distraction. You can only focus properly on one thing at a time, and negative people are often constantly preoccupied by thinking about all other people they resent and blame. This is how negative people do problem solving – they solve the problem of how bad they feel about themselves by projecting it outwards. Once you’ve gone positive, that same mental capacity is employed with solving the actual problem!
Your social world will also become transformed. We act our thoughts. If you fill your mind with hate, you’ll become a hateful person and you’ll therefore attract hate towards you. Turn it around and you’ll start drawing people in. When you’re brutally honest with yourself it allows you to be brutally honest with others. That doesn’t mean being disrespectful and shaming people, but it does mean being unafraid to identify people’s weak spots and voice them honestly and openly.
That’s the essence of good leadership. With your newfound positive charisma, more often than not, people will react positively and ask for help. Before you know it, people will begin to think of you as a leader. And then the most magic thing of all happens. You realise that they’re right. You have become that leader. You’ve turned into the person you always knew, deep down, you could be. The kind of individual who always wants to be first man in.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As you can tell from what you’ve just read, my life has had its fair share of ups and downs. Along the way, and through each challenge, there have been people who stood by me and helped me become the man I am today: my uncle Andy, Julia and Philip, my mother- and father-in-law, Mike Morris and my older brother Michael. And of course, my wife Emilie and my beautiful children, Oakley, Shyla, Gabriel, Priseïs and Bligh. Without you guys, none of this would ever have been possible. I love you all so much.
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