Interview with John Demartini: we talk about why it is some people seem to achieve their goals and others don’t, values, and the world financial & environmental crises, and the important of being true to yourself.

02 Mar 2012, Posted by Cape Town Girl in interviews, 1 Comments

Dr Demartini, it’s great to be here. Tell me, you’ve worked with people for nearly 40 years now. What have you learnt about human nature in your years of teaching and coaching?

I’ve learnt that every human being desires to fulfill what is truly most important to them. This could be in any area of life, because each of us has different values and priorities. Achievement or fulfillment for everyone is varied, because a person who wants to create a happy, beautiful family and achieves that is just as successful as a person who runs a company. so what is most meaningful to you will define what success is for you.

Would you say that happiness is about finding and carrying out your purpose then?

I’d use the word fulfillment rather than happiness, because happy and sad are opposite words that both merge into fulfillment. Everyone, no matter what age, colour, creed or sex, has something that they want to fulfill. When they identify what is most meaningful and supportive to them and they set sail and chart a navigational course to get there, with a strategy that’s reasonable, and if they’re willing to pursue and not give up on that, as long as it’s congruent and truly meaningful to them they have a high chance of succeeding at it.

Do people all want the same things, in your experience? Do we all have similar basic yearnings?

I believe all people have a spiritual mission, a desire to awaken their mind to its fullest capacity, they want to achieve in business, even if that business is having a family, they want to have enough money at the end of their life, instead of life at the end of their money, they want fulfillment with love and intimacy, they want fulfillment with social influence, to somehow feel they’ve made a difference, and they want to have vitality and youth and beauty. I think that everybody deserves that, and there are methods and principles that have been proven to help people get there.

What do you believe prevents most people from getting what they want out of life? why do some people not manage to achieve their goals?

There are a number of reasons, but one of the primary reasons is that people tend to minimize themselves for the sake of the people around them. They adopt the values and ideals from other people, rather than focusing on establishing their own. They do set goals, but those goals are not really theirs. These ‘goals’ are actually fantasies and unrealistic expectations that are not really aligned with their highest values. As a result, they end of frustrating themselves, because you can’t make good decisions if you don’t understand what is important to you, or what your values are.

Most people don’t know what’s really important to them. Instead, they become subordinates to the values of others, and live theirs lives for others and trying to be like others. When they don’t measure up, they’ll beat themselves up and they get into a vicious thought cycle and create what I call the ABCDs of negativity: Anger & Aggression, Blame & Betrayal, Criticism & Challenge, Despair & Depression. Instead of taking the negative feedback on their activities as a sign that they are not doing what they should be doing, people get sucked into it and it becomes self-perpetuating.

So people fail at achieving what they want because they try to please other people?

They try to be someone they’re not. Emerson said ‘Envy is ignorance, Imitation is suicide’. As long as we’re not being ourselves, we won’t be fulfilled. The most magnificent experiences we will ever have is when we are true to ourselves. Every person is already magnificent. We don’t need to do anything to ourselves. We might as well expand on it and pursue it. When we compare ourselves to others, we minimise our magnificence. Its wiser to compare our actions to our own dreams.

Do you think people minimize because they feel compelled to follow paths that society expects of them?

Anytime you minimize yourself to someone you think has something more than you in any particular area, you think they’ve got a life I deserve, if you don’t have the values inside you that will lead you to those outcomes, you’re setting yourself up for self-defeat. Now self-defeat is not a bad thing. It’s a feedback mechanism to let you know that you’re setting unrealistic expectations. So either you have to set your goals to match your values to feel fulfilled, or you need to change your values to match those goals if you want them fulfilled.

I’d imagine it’s pretty hard to change your values.

Well, there’s a science to changing both your values and your goals. There’s a way to set up strategic objectives that align with your values, and there’s a science to changing your values to achieve goals that reflect what you really want out of life.

You mean often we say we want one thing but our values actually differ from that, preventing us from achieving them?

Yes. When I ask who wants to be financially independent, everyone puts their hand up. But when I say who’s actually done it, less than 1% can put their hands up because their values lie in material things, in spending money and keeping up with appearances. So most people live with fantasies, which are pretty much goals that are not aligned with your values. What I do is help what they say and what they do to become congruent. That’s when fulfillment starts to happen.

You speak a lot about values. They seem to be one of the cornerstones of your work.

Axiology, which is the study of values and worth, is a discipline that is rarely studied but one of the most important that I have studied. It underlies the drive in human behaviour. So if you don’t understand what’s really important to you, and you’re clouded on that, then you’re going to set all sorts of unrealistic expectations and delusions for yourself, and most people live that way. When you live without values, you doubt yourself, you live without certainty. You don’t awake the natural born leader we all have within, because you’re comparing instead of living true to yourself.

The world is in a bit of a state. We’re starting to finally accept we’ve made mistakes… the environment is in a state of crisis. the financial disaster… as someone with a marketing background, I see a lot of new products being developed and a lot of these are rooted in some kind of consciousness and awareness of the need to make things right. Do you think we’re moving closer towards a solution, or a better world?

That’s a great question. When I see things, I usually see both sides of things. I don’t see a crisis with an opportunity. With a negative comes a positive, I see both of them. So the economic and the global warming issue, I don’t see them really as crises, but more of awakenings, a greater awareness of the obvious. The economic crisis is now birthing entrepreneurship, making people more effective and efficient, the savings ratio has gone up as people go back to basics… I don’t see crisis without blessings. I’m not interested in a bipolar perspective. I’m interested in integration. We have to have problems and solutions to keep us advancing, or we stagnate. We’re on the verge of transcending a recent set of challenges.

There will always be challenges. No matter what you do or who you are in life. I always say that if you don’t go after challenges that inspire you, you’ll keep attracting challenges that don’t. Norman Vincent once said that if you wake up one morning and don’t have any challenges, get on your hands and knees and pray, because you’ve died. So you have to have something to work on. These challenges are what we, as the world together, have to work on.

You were quoted in The Secret book and DVD, which tipped the conscious thought movement into the mainstream. I have heard that there is a ’secret that was left out of the secret’. Can you tell me more about that?

The Secret gave birth to the idea that you have impact on your destiny, and your thoughts become your things. The details they left out from my contribution was congruency. If you set goals that are not aligned with your true self, with who you really are, then you will probably still struggle to achieve what you want. You will not see opportunities, and you will not act on opportunities efficiently, because your thoughts and desires are not authentic. You won’t be able to persist with your goals, because they’re not authentic. You can discover more about it in the Conscious Intention DVD that I produced with the footage the filmed of my contribution that was never used in The Secret.

Dr Demartini, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for your time.

If you’re interested in attending a Dr Demartini workshop, he’s holding a Breakthrough Experience 2-day seminar this weekend. Click here to find out more.