درسنامه اصلی

Marvie – Coaching Lesson

Hello, this is AJ and welcome to the coaching video for the Marvie conversation. Now, this conversation, for me personally, was very, very powerful. And of course, it wasn’t me in the conversation. But the story of Marvie is just amazing. And I remember actually, because Kristin and Joe, after their Africa trip, they told me about this guy. And I just couldn’t believe this guy’s story. I mean, my first thought, honestly, was just how horrible, horrible…this poor guy’s father killed, his mother killed, his sister, it’s just…ugh. It’s just… it almost makes me feel sick when I think about the circumstances of this guy’s life.

And then the next was just, I was amazed. I was amazed because they told me how positive this guy was, how friendly, how, y’know, energetic and amazing that he was. How generous that he was, and he helped them so much. And he showed them around and he wasn’t trying to get money from them, and just smiling and happy, and this amazing guy. So, y’know, and I start thinking about these two things.

And I was just like, that is, it’s just…how does someone do that? It’s pretty amazing when you hear these stories, right? Of people who’ve had horrible things happen to them, horrible, and this guy, Marvie, had horrible, horrible, horrible things happen to him. Not just once but again and again and again.

And yet he was able to forgive and let go of that and become this incredibly super positive person, totally focused on making positive changes. It’s, it’s amazing. And I think, like my first reaction when I hear these kind of stories, and I think from most people, from what I have just observed, when most people hear these kind of stories, I think our first reaction tends to be, I couldn’t do that, right? Our first reaction is usually anger and probably a desire for some kind of revenge. I mean let’s face it. I think it’s natural. I don’t think we need to deny that that’s the case. Y’know, if I hear about someone who gets, whose family gets murdered, then, y’know, my first kind of reaction is, oh we need to catch the killers and chop their heads off. And, this is kind of natural. It’s sort of a defense, I think, in our brains and psychologically that that’s what we need to do.

However, the problem with that is that if you keep that feeling too long, that feeling of resentment, that feeling of wanting revenge, or just the feeling of being a victim, that something horrible has happened to you, then it can totally completely destroy the rest of your happiness for the rest of your life. And I have seen this. I have seen this with people I am close to. And I’ve certainly seen it in stories like Marvie’s. I mean I’ve seen it with small things and I’ve seen it with huge terrible things like his. And it’s a, it’s a dynamic, a psychological dynamic that can be super, super destructive.

And what happens is, the tragic part is, is that it multiplies the, the negativity and the destructiveness of the original events, right? So we have the original events, all the terrible things that happened to Marvie, for example. Him losing all these family members and watching them be killed in some cases. So that’s bad, we all agree, that’s horrible. But the thing is if he had chosen to just be enraged or sad or depressed or whatever, and never let go of that, well then he would have those terrible events. Plus multiply that by the tragedy of his own life, of his own life basically being destroyed, certainly his own happiness being destroyed for years, decades, perhaps his whole life.

See, that’s the part we forget. People hold on to resentments. They hold on to anger. And thinking, because, and really being right, that, that it’s justice, right? That they’re justified to be angry, they’re justified to be upset. They’re justified to be depressed. Maybe that’s true but they’re only fucking over their own life. And fucking over means to basically hurt or harm or cheat, it’s kind of…you get that idea.

So, it means they’re just destroying their own life. They’re not really hurting the other person.

Let me give you an example for my own family that I’ll share with you. My parents got divorced, my mother and my father, obviously, and they got divorced. And it was not a good divorce, as most divorces…that’s the case, right? Most divorces are not very positive. So it was a very negative divorce.

And especially for my mom it was devastating emotionally. It was very, very, very hard for her. And then, to make it even worse, my dad got remarried in about, I can’t remember what it was, within a year or two, he got remarried. Okay, so then this sort of made, hurt my mom even more. And so she just felt, she was super depressed, super, super sad and lonely. And, of course, that’s justified, normal and, y’know, in that case it’s what you would expect. And for a while it’s healthy, right? You don’t want to just pretend nothing happened. Oh yeah, nothing happened. I’m just going to pretend it’s fine, right? No, it was terrible and she felt horrible. That’s fine. The problem is with my mom is that she continued feeling horrible, year after year after year.

And, here’s the second part of the tragedy. My sister, seeing what happened to my mom, also was super upset by this whole situation. And so she got really angry. My mom got depressed. My sister got angry.

And the problem is, too, both of them held on to that year after year after year. It’s now been, let me think, 15, 17, 18…18 to 20 years since that divorce. My mom still feels like a victim, still feels sad about it and has not dated anyone ever again. My sister is still angry, to this day, almost 20 years later. She has no contact with my father, has not spoken to him in like 18 years. And at this point it’s likely that she will never speak to him again, that he’ll die, eventually, hopefully not soon, but that he’ll die and whenever he dies that she will have never spoken to him.

So you can see, okay, the original divorce, yes it was bad. And yes, did my dad do a lot of wrong things?

Yes, he did. Y’know, I’m sure he would say they weren’t great either. But the point is that they multiplied, they’ve made it 100 times worse by holding on to those feelings of sadness and being a victim and being angry. And it’s only hurt them. I’ve watched the effects on them. It’s only hurt them. It’s caused problems in many parts of their life and in many relationships, because they didn’t let go. Weren’t able to just, not just let go, but forgive, okay? You’ve got to really feel to forgive.

And that’s to come back to Marvie and back to the coaching video and lesson that we’re doing right now.

That’s the theme here, number one is to forgive. And that’s really what he did, right? He forgave those people, Marvie did. I mean, I don’t know how he did it. It must have taken incredible strength, and I’m sure a lot of persistence. He didn’t just wake up and do it one day. He had to really, again and again and again; make a big effort day after day after day, to let go and forgive those people who killed his family.

Because Marvie recognized, he saw, that if he didn’t do that that he would become a mean bitter super unhappy person the rest of his life. And that he probably would cause lost of problems for other people because of that.

The worst scenario, the worst-case we see so many times, is that people who have suffered turn around and then cause other people to suffer, right? We’ve seen a group of people, maybe from a war, who are killed and tortured and all kinds of terrible things. And then the war’s over and they become free and what happens? That group then goes and starts hurting and torturing and doing terrible things to another group, right? And so it just continues on and on and on.

So let’s get practical now, because that’s what the coaching is about. Let’s get practical and focus on us, our life, and what can we do and how can we use Marvie’s example to maybe get some benefits in our own life, benefits that will help us and benefits that will help people that we know and care about. So if I want to be really, really, really general, what I would say that Marvie did is he reframed the event or events. He reframed what happened. Reframing means, imagine a frame on a picture, right? So you’ve got a picture. That means you’ve changed the frame and you put on a new one. And what that means is, the event, whatever happened, it’s the same, you can’t change that.

But what he did is he changed the meaning of the event. He chose a different meaning. So he could have decided, one meaning, he could have decided about what happened to him, he could have decided that this shows that all people are evil and that he was totally weak and helpless. Now if he had chosen that meaning, the events that happened, that’s what it meant, what kind of life do you think he would have had? All people are terrible and he’s helpless. He would have had a miserable life.

Instead he kept looking for positive meanings. And that was really, really hard. But finally he found the meaning. And the meaning he found was that, y’know, people in his country were hurting and needed healing and needed people like him, positive people, to come back and rebuild that country and to change it so this would not happen again. That’s the meaning he found and created from those events.

And because of that he made different choices. He decided he needed to go to school. He needed to develop skills that he could learn and use to one day return to his country and use those skills to help rebuild it and create a more peaceful country, a more prosperous country. That’s what he decided.

He also decided on a meaning that instead of deciding all people are evil and he’s helpless, he decided rather that there are terrible people in the world and therefore it’s that much more important that people who are good must be strong and good and as generous as possible to balance those people out. So he decided to be as positive as he could, as helpful as he could, as generous and friendly and open as he could be. So he’s just choosing different meanings.

He could have decided that he was just a helpless victim. Or he could have decided that, y’know, another meaning he could have chosen from those events is that only the strong will win. And that you’ve got to be strong and dominate other people, it’s the only way to live. So he could have decided to become a really violent person and he could have one day killed other people’s families. And it would have just continued. So he reframed. He took this event that was really horrible and instead of choosing these really negative terrible meanings, he decided. He chose meanings that would give him a positive life and give him positive decisions and make him more powerful and good. That’s called reframing in psychology.

So that’s what we’re going to do. Here comes the homework now. You’ve been waiting for it, okay? The homework is this. I want you to identify two past events in your life that were negative, that were terrible.

That you still think of them now and you think, oh it was a tragedy, it was terrible. It could have been like the woman or man you loved so much broke up with you, broke your heart, cheated on you and left. Or somebody died. Or you failed out of school, or you lost that job, I don’t care what it is. But some event that still has all these negative feelings for you from the past, right? Somebody did something bad to you and you’re still upset about it. So I want you to choose two of them and write them down. So you could pause this now if you wanted to and think about it, or when it’s all over. Think about two things from your past that you still feel very negative about, that you feel were really terrible things. And write both of them down.

The next step is you’re going to reframe those. So you’ll take one of them, you’ll do it one by one. You’ll take one and then I want you to write down every possible positive purpose or meaning that that event could have.

I’ll give you another example from my own life. My first girlfriend, my first serious girlfriend, right, who I dated for several years. But eventually she actually, she found some other guy and just, I went off on a trip and then one day I came back to my apartment. She’d moved out and moved in with this other guy.

Oh…super broken heart, terrible, oh I was miserable. Now, after I got over being miserable, which took a couple of months, after I got over that, I had a choice about the meaning of that. I could have decided that she was a terrible person who cheated on me and lied to me. But I realized, number one, that she wasn’t a terrible person really, even though I was angry. And I also realized that if I thought that that I’m just going to be angry and I’m going to end up kind of like my sister did with my dad. And I’m just going to end up hating her my whole life. And it just seemed really stupid.

So instead I decided no, there had to be a reason. And I decided that the meaning of this is that, okay, I didn’t know enough about relationships and I didn’t make her very happy. And all that was true, by the way. And so the meaning I found was, okay, I don’t know much about…I didn’t know enough about relationships, and I needed to learn more. So then I started reading books about relationships and doing everything I could to try to be better so that in my next relationship that I would be much better.

And you can see, now this is a classic story, right? So many people, maybe you, I think most people, have been some kind of breakup like this where they feel like the other person did something bad to them and they’re going to hate that person for the rest of their life. And that’s just…it’s not good. It’s not hurting them. It’s definitely hurting you if you hold on to that. But that’s one small example and it could be anything.

So you’re going to write down, again, two events, maybe one at the top of each piece of paper. So one paper you write down the one negative event you still feel bad about. On the other piece of paper you write down the other one. And then under each one you’re going to write down all the positive possible interpretations, possible positive meanings that you could find from that event. For example, some people who are abused and beaten up and had horrible childhoods, some people let that destroy their whole life. Other people decide, okay, the meaning of this is to help me learn how to get over this so that I can help other people who have been abused, so that I can help lots of other people so that they can still have happy lives. Alright, you’ve got a choice. You can create your own meanings. You can’t change events but you absolutely can change the meaning you attach to events.

And then, of course, the final step, if there is a person involved who hurt you, if that’s one of your things, somebody hurt you, you’ve got to forgive them. This is your homework, you must do it. Your teacher’s telling you. You have to forgive them. Even if they’re a rotten bastard, and I’m sure they are, you’ve still got to forgive them. It doesn’t mean you have to be friends with them. It doesn’t mean you have to call them or anything. And you certainly don’t have to have anything to do with them, but you’ve got to forgive them. Forgiving them means you just emotionally let go of all the negative feelings.

It takes time, and I recommend, I don’t have enough time to tell you the whole process of how to forgive someone. There are tons of books out there about it. Go get on Google, get on Amazon, read a bunch of books about forgiveness if that’s something you need to do. If there’s somebody or some people that you just…you can’t forgive, then you need to do it. It will help your life so much. But if it’s not a forgiveness thing, it doesn’t matter.

So again the three steps of your homework, identify two things that really feel bad or negative in your life, past negative events that feel negative to you now. Step two, write down all the positive, possible positive meanings or interpretations of those events. And I guess step three would be really think about them deeply, again and again and again, and change the meaning of those events until you really feel it, until you really can see that as a positive.

Like I now, if I think about that first breakup with that first girlfriend, I see it as very, very, very positive. I have no negative feelings about it at all. I’m very happy that it happened. It changed who I became. I’m a different person because of that. If it hadn’t happened, I would have been the same stupid 20-year-old still. So I’m very happy that it happened. That’s the point you need to get to, where you can look at that event and say, oh man, I’m so glad that happened because it caused me to learn so much.

Okay, that’s your homework. It’s not easy homework, I know. But do it and it really will, it will free up so much positive emotion in your life by going through these steps. And, as always, go to our social site, our member site, and share your experiences. Tell us what you, the two things you chose, and tell us the new positive meaning that you gave to them.

Okay, I will see you next time. Have a great day. Bye-bye.