I BELIEVE IN YOU

My friend and mentor Bill Cumming has lived what I consider to
be an extraordinary life. After over fifteen years campaigning
in the civil rights movement and creating a number of programs
for individual and team empowerment (including the pilot for
the program now known as 'Upward Bound'), his life changed
forever when his nine year old daughter Joy was raped just a few
hundred yards from his Ohio home.

In that moment, Bill realized he was fully capable of the kind
of violence he had spent so many years campaigning against, and
his work turned in a new direction - what are the true causes
of violence in our society and how can they be changed?

During the course of his research, he visited a prison in
Somers, Connecticut and spent time with a group of murderers,
rapists and other violent offenders who had been working with a
man named Dr. Nick Groth for over a year. To Bill's surprise,
rather than blaming what they had done on their often horrific
upbringings filled with abuse, violence and criminal neglect,
each of these men took full responsibility for their lives.
Towards the end of their time together, one man who had
committed three rape/murders and held no possibility of parole
took Bill to one side and expressed his heartfelt compassion and
sorrow for what had happened to Joy.

In that moment, Bill realized that if he was capable of murder
and a murderer was capable of that degree of compassion, the
capacity for all things must live inside all of us. As he wrote
in the course manual for 'What One Person Can Do':

"What I learned in this unusual laboratory is that it is
possible, given two critical factors, for even the most violent
people to develop meaningful, productive, contributory lives,
even within the confines of a maximum security prison. The fact
that this is so speaks volumes in terms of what we can do...

The critical factor...was getting these individuals to know that
they are loved (i.e. cared about, valued) and that they are
able to make choices...IF IT IS POSSIBLE IN THIS ENVIRONMENT,
WITH THESE MEN, IT IS POSSIBLE AT EVERY MOMENT IN EVERY
ENVIRONMENT WITH ANYONE."

In private conversation, Bill has told me on numerous occasions
that in nearly every instance he has seen where a person has
turned their life around, there was the presence of at least one
individual who loved (cared for, valued) them unconditionally
and believed in them and in their capacity to choose - to make
different choices and fundamentally change the direction,
quality and character of their lives.

At first, I felt that Bill's work was very important but not
terribly relevant to my own life. After all, nothing that
horrific has ever happened to me or the people I care about
most. But I soon came to realize that the same critical factors
were present any time I overcame a crisis in my own life.

My parents believed in my mental strength and capacity at a time
where I was so messed up I thought they were the ones who were
nuts for believing in me. Charlie Helfert and Dale Moffit,
professors at Southern Methodist University believed in me
enough to not only bring me in to their professional actor
training program but to refuse to let me be pushed out even when
some of their perhaps more 'sensible' colleagues were lobbying
for my expulsion.

Their belief in me forced me to question my own sense of
worthlessness. If they thought there was something inside me
worth spending time on and salvaging, maybe there really was. In
short, they believed in me long enough and consistently enough
that I began to search inside myself for the strength they
seemed to see so effortlessly inside me.

And since I found that strength and began to use it to create my
own wonderful life, I have felt equally committed to believing
in others - to making the choice to treat the people I come
into contact with as though they too have the power within them
to choose and to change. And miraculously, consistently, they
prove me right - again and again and again.

So I'd like to conclude today's tip not with an experiment, but
with an invitation - the invitation to become 'a believer'. A
believer is someone who chooses to believe in the capacity
inside each one of us to be more than we thought we were capable
of - to fly higher and travel harder and arrive triumphantly,
creating lives that make us (and often everyone around us) go
'Wow!'.

There's no movement to join, no manifesto to sign - just a
gentle reminder and open invitation to be the difference maker
in someone else's life and to be open to having that difference
made in your own. Tell someone you believe in them. Mean it.
Demonstrate it in the way you treat them. Then stand back and
watch their life begin to blossom and bloom.

I began today's tip with a quote from Richard Bach's wonderful
book 'Illusions' - "Argue for your limitations, and sure enough,
they're yours."

I'll put it somewhat less poetically, but hopefully with equal
strength:

"Argue for your possibilities, and sure enough, you will find so
much more capacity and ability inside you than you have ever
dreamed is possible."

With love,
michael

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