Inception: Your mind is the scene of the crime

I have long since held onto the African adage “two heads are better than one.” A critical element of your success and ability to make well-crafted decisions for the long-term will come from getting as much advice and input from those around you. The idea of a personal board of directors to whom one can reach out to discuss career plans, personal life challenges, and even travel advice is appealing. Having quite a few friends, acquaintances and a professional coach helps in this regard as I secretly develop from their experiences and tailor the learnings to enhance myself. The thinking being that someone has already made the mistake I’m about to make or has already been through the ringer in a similar circumstance. It’s the proverbial way to look before you leap. This past week my frequent need to “table the matter” was rocked to its core and for this I am grateful. 

I was talking to an old college mate and we were sharing career stories – successes, failures, trials, jubilations, plans, managing life in the context of work (and vice versa) and what I thought were BHAGs (big, hairy, audacious goals). These are usually refreshing discussions but this one left me agitated and immediately defensive. Everything that I had dreamed of she told me was impossible, improbable and unlikely to result in actual happiness. She claimed her gut led her to believe my goals were too big for my reality and I should instead settle for the reduced scenarios she saw as reasonable and possible.

This got me thinking that I need to be more mindful of whom I open my inner self to. And so should you.

There are a number of people not equipped for a deep level of authenticity and hope, who moreover aren’t in the space to fill your cup much less to have it running over. Many are operating at a different stage of growth in their own journey's and will impart a value system or notion which isn’t true, is flawed or should be challenged. Someone can only give you advice from their place of knowledge and understanding. 

As I was mulling over the conversation and several others I’ve had in the recent past, I jotted down some notes but it’s important to establish whether the concept of “Inception” is clear. It’s from the excellent eponymous movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio in which his character accesses a persons historical dream like subconscious in order to change a real life outcome today by “planting” a notion or idea into their mind in the past such that the eventual outcome in the real world today changes. The magnificent power of inception goes beyond the cinema and A-list actors – it’s real. We have all been incepted (this I believe is a made-up word) several times in our lives and we are generally unaware. The benefit in the movie is the ability to time travel and unless you have that skill, you will need to watch out for Inceptors who can steal your future, unbeknownst to you, by denying you the belief, desire, appetite or impetus to pursue your destiny. You also need to make sure you are not an Inceptor as well.

The first instance of inception is generally perpetrated by our parents. They understand us intuitively at our basic level and are equipped with the knowledge of what/when/how to say things in order to manipulate a desired result. Most people who plant these inception ideas may not have a cruel plan in mind but ultimately they will alter your future without your conscious knowledge and this is why Inception has the potential to be dangerous.

My first recollection of being incepted is when I was around 13 years old. I was wickedly good in Maths, Chemistry and all the sciences. I loved numbers and the stories they told. They were intuitive to me. My teachers encouraged me to chose the Sciences track. In those days, you picked between the Sciences and the Arts and thus charted your course for your eventual career. One sunny afternoon in hot Lagos, I approached my mother and told her proudly that I was going to be an Engineer. It seemed like a perfectly logical step given my interests and academic talents and I had made one of my first decisions pertaining to my future leveraging advice from those in-the-know. My mother looked up at me and simply said “Rubbish, can you name one female engineer that you know? You will be a banker like me.” And the rest is history.

So with the inception lesson behind me, these are some of the points I jotted down this morning when I was reflecting on my conversation and wanted to share them with you in the hopes that you'll find them useful:

1. Avoid fear-mongers: When you are looking for career or business advice avoid people for whom the glass is half empty or worse completely empty. These are the people who take lemons and rather than make lemonade will leave them on the counter to rot complaining about their lot in life. They are running on fumes themselves and cannot provide the context necessary for you to leapfrog. This is fertile ground for inception particularly if they are in denial of their own deficit situation. Once someone starts to pick apart your thoughts, ideas, goals, dreams and doesn’t fill your cup with a better thought out plan, enhancement, constructive criticism or word of encouragement, immediately run away. The world is filled with too many negative themes and messages. Just switch on your TV and watch CNN for a nice run down of all things doom and gloom in the world. What you need when you seek guidance is not someone who will tell you why your idea is terrible and above your station but someone who will help you see that perhaps there could be a better or alternative route. You also don’t need someone who will always tell you that your ideas are brilliant. It’s a waste of time and doesn’t contribute to anything. Rubber stampers don't add value in my opinion. I never want to be one and don't need them in my advisory corner. That’s just intellectual laziness or a person without ingenuity. Fear-mongers stifle innovation and creativity and extinguish ambition. They feed into our innate sense of self-doubt and are killjoys. They show you all of the worts, bumps and mistakes rather than explore the possibility of the positive events that could emerge from your dreams. When you’ve got a great, new, risky idea whirling in your heart and you need someone to bounce it off, don’t go to someone who is afraid of taking risks! They are unlikely to feel your energy, much less fuel it, and will quickly kill your excitement with their cautious view of the world and life's possibilities.

2. Pick your tribe deliberately: Create concentric rings of relationships around you and decipher who qualifies to be in which ring. The ring closest to you is the one that you lay yourself bear to and that could constitute just one person. Grab a piece of paper (or your iPad in my case) and document what types of relationships you are in on the left-hand side and what types of relationships you want on the right-hand side. Focus on getting both sides to look the same. It might be a herculean task but it’ll be worth it. Be deliberate about your relationships and the proximity of the ring that each person sits in. Make sure that you mean the world to the people that mean the world to you. Be equally yoked. Tell them you’ve crafted this “concentric circle of friendships” and it’s important to you they know they are in the inner core and you expect X, Y, Z from them. Don’t be shy about this because it’s a responsibility to be in the inner caucus. You need to be willing to give them A, B, C as well. Another African adage (I think) says “show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are.” I’m not too sure that I entirely agree with that but there is some merit to it. Sometimes you pick friends because you are aspirational. You aren’t like them now but you want to be. Don’t be afraid to be deliberate when deciding who your tribe is because they will have the biggest opportunity for positive inception. They need to understand their responsibility to you and you to them. These days, the millennials call them their #Squad. Whatever the nomenclature ensure that your tribe/squad/posse is defined, mutually beneficial, healthy, non-competitive, and wise. In my case, I have a tribe and I have a personal "board of directors". Both groups value and respect me on a deep level and want what’s best for me (and I for them). They are my cheerleaders but my tribe will tell me when they see me going astray in life. My board will listen to my professional concerns and give me well-thought out, balanced, informed and rich advice. I’m blessed to have both. Suggest you get yours too.

3. It is ok to excise certain behaviors along with the people that perpetrate them: This is a tricky but necessary one. The power of inception in its altered outcomes is so strong that I believe you must kill it in its tracks. This is to insure your peace of mind today and your future ambitions. Guard it jealously and aggressively. There is a difference between constructive advice and goal destruction. Develop a sense of intuition that will allow you to feel when someone is trying to make you change your perspective without doing the work of caring about what you want or need in that moment. I’ve had to excise relationships because the power of inception was too strong for me to resist. When the replay of your mind contains negative notions from someone close to you, you must excise the words and potentially even the person from your life. Do not give someone the power over your view of yourself and your dreams because you will alter both and just might miss the opportunity to walk with The Greats.