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Using Your Brain

Our fifth offering from Empower U's new book, Becoming Your Dreams: Want It. Create It. Live It!

The new book, Becoming Your Dreams: Want It. Create It. Live It! gives you an inside look into Empower U's powerful Leadership Experience courses, Leadership Awakening and Leadership Adventure. You also get tons of practical tools you can use to help you Live It every day.

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In our Power Goal Setting class, I tell a story about how tribespeople in the Far East catch monkeys. According to tourists tales, when someone wants to celebrate you, they have a special dinner in your honor where they serve—and you are expected to eat—the infamous monkey brains!

The most interesting part of the story is the way the locals catch the monkeys. They clean out coconuts, leaving just shells with large holes in them. Then they fill the shells about a quarter full with rice and leave the coconuts lying around on the jungle floor. The monkeys come down from the trees, pick up the coconuts, put their hand inside, and grab a hand full of rice.

With their fists clenched around the rice, the holes are suddenly too small for them to pull their hands out of the coconuts. They frantically shake their hands, jump up and down, screech and strain to free themselves from the coconuts, to no avail. Then the monkeys run to a tree and attempt to escape—but they can’t climb because there are coconuts stuck on their hands! When they start banging the coconuts against the tree trunk to break free, the hunters hear them and come collect their “catch.”

You are probably thinking, “What a stupid animal! If the monkeys would just let go of the rice, they could escape. I’d never hold on to something that would cost me my life.”

As a child, Chris heard a similar story about a little boy who got his hand stuck in the opening of an antique vase worth thousands of dollars. Rescuers poured oil into the mouth of the vase, trying to slide his hand out. Finally, just as they were resigned to breaking the vase to rescue the panicked boy, his mother said, “Now, Tommy, let’s try one more time—open your fingers straight out, tuck in your thumb, and relax while Mommy pulls on the vase.” And Tommy shouted, “Mommy, I can’t do that! If I opened my fingers, I would drop my penny!”

What “pennies” are holding you back, keeping yourself from being as happy or successful as your desires and capabilities will allow?

We all hold onto things that could be slowly killing us or our dreams.

We all hold onto things that could be slowly killing us or our dreams. What have you been holding on to that is keeping you from being the “George Bernard Shaw” you could be? What doubts, what false images, what BS? In short, who or what has been making a monkey out of you?

While our Power Goal Setting students are focusing on obstacles that have been holding them back, we light a bonfire, and our clients release their obstacles into the fire and watch them go up in smoke. The coals represents obstacles that life throws at us: divorce, loss of a job, a bad economy, sickness, financial struggles. It’s a powerful image for their RAS to translate into Vision.

Over my years of working with thousands of people toward their personal growth, I’ve come to believe that no matter how successful someone is, they are using only a portion of their abilities. What will your life be like when you let go so you can reach 70 or 80 or even 90% of your God-given potential? When is “good nuff,” not?

February 2003

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