LESSON THREE: Fake It ‘Til You Make it

Brad Cullen

Hi there, this is “just” me …with “my” comments which will be the third lesson. If you’re wondering …yes, I’m being instructed to write this from the Brad Cullen perspective. I’m aware of the appearance of utter audacity of some of the things I’m given to write at times.

I was in the training business for many years, way back in the 1960s – developing custom training programs for employees of client companies, some notably large, such as Allied Van Lines and a division of ITT.

I was surprised to get the “green light” to go down my own memory lane for LESSON THREE …after all, this is supposed to be what Jesus is teaching – and then he gently admonished me that it is!

Can you still be connected when your broken?

A true story I often inserted in home-study manuals for both management and sales staff training was an incident that happened at a large V.A. hospital located, I believe, near Albuquerque, New Mexico. It had an extremely powerful effect on me and how I think – I didn’t realize until just now how it prepared for me for what has become an important ancillary adjunct to my purpose in life – which is to be continually aware of my connection to the SOURCE of everything and to share those things that come out of inspirational moments with our SPIRIT-PARENT with people via books and articles that “I” write.

The referenced story had a lot of significance for me because one of my partners in the training business was not only a close friend, but a psychiatrist – one of those “shrink” types with an M.D. after his name. I don’t remember where I first read the story, but Jim, the aforementioned shrink, had come across it somewhere in his training and was surprised that I knew about it.

The essence was simply that a decision had been made to put about one hundred severely mentally disabled veterans through a psychological testing series. All one hundred were totally non-functioning and thus confined to the mental wards of the hospital. They were gathered into a large meeting room on the hospital grounds and seated at tables and given instructions that they had ninety minutes to complete the written tests; no acknowledgment of their mental incapacity was given – they were introduced to the testing just as if they were “normal.”

Testing for what?

When the ninety minutes had elapsed and the tests were gathered – only a few had been completed and those few showed no indication that they were even bordering on what would be considered in the range of “normal.”

The next day the same one hundred or so were brought back …to go through the very same test. This time, those issuing the instructions told the patients they had ninety minutes to complete the tests …the only difference was they were instructed to write their answers to the questions just the way they would if they were normal.

The results were amazing. Several indicated superior intelligence which was not surprising, but what was surprising was the high percentage that indicated in the “normal” range of emotional and mental stability. Where the percentage of completion had been zero the previous day, now over fifty percent completed the test in the allotted time most of them scoring in the upper end of the scale of what is considered normal.

What does Genius look like? How can we test for it?

One of my all-time favorite quotes: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”  –Albert Einstein

In this series of lessons, Jesus is telling us to put aside our preconceived ideas about him and to not only do what he did as a man, but actually become him. That’s a stretch for anyone, but if we think about it for a moment, we will realize the importance of putting his instructions into the frame of stop acting like we are limited when we are not.

Personal and sport coaches have long used motivational slogans such as “fake it ‘til you make it.” William James, the reputed father of psychology as taught and practiced around much of the world, said, basically, that we will become whatever it is we determine to act like.

One more quote …and with this I close (LESSON THREE): “Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footprints on the moon.” –Michael Jordan
In Freedom,

Brad

This entry was posted on January 10, 2013 at 9:28 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Jesus teaching Perspective by Ryan Bruce No Comments Yet