Today’s question is whether this is really true. “No one can lift yourself up higher than yourself.”

when I was a kid in school I loved playing cricket. I played cricket before school and I played cricket after school and I played during school. All I wanted for Christmas was a cricket bat and a cricket ball a new one every year. For my school cricket team I opened the batting and was renowned for hitting the ball out of the field and I loved every minute of it. But then a very strange thing happened. I was elected captain of the team.

from the day I was elected captain of the team I couldn’t hit the ball straight, I couldn’t hit the ball over the fence, and I went out nearly every game in the first over. Nothing had changed except a well-meaning school teacher had intervened in what could have been a great cricketing career. The teacher had lifted me up to the status of Captain which was far higher than I could lift myself. I simply loved batting and wicket-keeping. The idea of captaincy had never entered my sense of self or ambition. The teacher had lifted me up higher than I could lift myself. Instead of being the worlds greatest batsmen, which I believed I was, I became what the teacher wanted me to be, the school captain. Parents do this all the time with the kids.

when we tried to be what somebody else wants us to be we create a conflict between what we really enjoy and what somebody else would enjoy us being.

between then and now we’ve invented the wheel, discovered electricity and renamed Australia. Yes those school days were a long time ago but the lesson has been learnt in my life 1000 times. And now it is one of the most important things in coaching when I work with people.

Because I am arm’s-length from what’s going on in a person’s life I see their potential very clearly. That gives me the ability to become that school teacher I had so many years ago and try to entice people to be greater than they perceive themselves to be. This is particularly true in family and relationships where I perceive the potential of a person far greater than they perceive themselves in the choice of partner and the acceptance of mediocrity at home. It really is very insulting when I see a greater potential for a person in their personal life than they do. And I’ve been very careful to accept that. Although I confess to slippage from time to time.

Another exceptional example of this is when I was working in the USA with a professional speaking colleague. He and his wife, an Australian woman, lived in New York City in trump Tara. They were both very sophisticated people and they welcomed me into their world both socially and professionally with open arms. They saw my potential even though I was operating on a different wavelength. But there was a massive problem. My social exposure had been at best the local pub and a few RSL clubs. My clothing was tailored to suit those environments somewhere between the beach, the bush and my self designed office environment. In other words cheap and shitty.

on the upper East side of New York the restaurants and evening bars where we went to socialise with their friends I must’ve looked as if I was the local bum and for them this was completely embarrassing. When they mentioned my requirement for an upgrade of clothing, I was 100% in support of their idea and went out and bought a complete wardrobe of more expensive clothes, from Gap. Of course, I just did what I thought was good. When I arrived dressed in my new Gap outfit, they asked and questioned me about where were my new wardrobe of clothes and of course we realised that we were talking different social definitions of good.

I took the clothes back and got a refund. With that entire refund I went to the shopping centre at Berghoff Goodman, and was able with the entire budget of that shopping spree at Gap to purchase one shirt. My friend who was two sizes smaller than me gave me one of his old suits which I took to a Taylor who with an incredible miracle of work adjusted it so at least I could get into it. Slowly but surely my closing began to look more like the social structure both professionally and socially of my friends. I felt fantastic. But again, just like my school teacher ruined my cricket career by promoting me above my station, above what I thought of myself, my friends in New York did the same. For the next six months I didn’t hit one ball out of the ballpark in my work in the US. I remember attending events and speaking engagements emulating my friend, dressed like him, trying to be like him but really being Chris.

the problem with this difference between what I perceived myself to be and how I was dressed was in the billing of my time. You see, I thought I was worth $5000 for a speaking engagement where as my friend was charging $15,000 for a speaking engagement. So I started charging $15,000 for a speaking engagement and nobody booked me. I couldn’t understand what was going on until I realised it was my own sense of worth that was holding me at $5000. When I started charging $5000 again the bookings flowed and my speaking engagements improved and slowly over a period of two years I increase my fee up to $15,000.

There was an alternative path to waiting two years to increase my fee. I could have increased my sense of my own value. The work to increase my sense of my own value was an internal process. It had nothing to do with waiting two years to increase it. What was needed was to break free of the past, re-evaluate what I was delivering in the keynote presentations and, change my brand both cosmetically with clothing and internally with my Innerwealth. Waiting two years to increase my value in keynotes had nothing to do with the quality of the presentation or the content. It was purely to do with my own perception of what I was worth and what value I added as a speaker. There was no way to do this emulating my friend because he was born into this value and have no idea of offering Services any less.

One of the things I do in offering support for clients is to promise that we can raise their income double every two years. I can’t guarantee it because of exactly this problem of self perceived value. We get paid what we think we are worth. It is very easy to ask for a 10% or a 15% pay rise because that value is, like my two years of professional speaking, completely comprehendible under the same perception of value that we have just slightly increasing with experience. If we take ourselves out onto the open market we will see that our job across many different industries can be worth anything from half to triple what we are paid. Now the question is going to be which job we apply for and will we get the super high paid job. The answer to this is conspicuous.

most people can’t comprehend that they could be paid double or triple what they’re currently getting, similar to me charging $5000 and then suddenly charging $15,000, and the reason is that nobody can lift us up higher than we lift ourselves up. So whether it’s a job, a relationship, a dynamic with family, a business we are running for a product we are delivering the value of it is completely in our own control and perception. The process of changing that control and perception is called self-worth, your Innerwealth.

with spirit

Super Chris.

End of Today’s I wish I’d known it. Wisdom.