Relationship Breakthroughs: Transcending the “Upper Limit Problem”
Have you considered that the reason your relationships crash and burn might be your fear of your own greatness?
Have you ever been on the verge of a breakthrough in relationship, an opportunity for even greater levels of shared love, abundance and creativity, when suddenly, out of the blue, you found yourself engaged in a senseless squabble, shattering the newly emerged space of possibility with shrieks of righteous indignant demands, blame and criticism?
One minute you are flying free, nothing but blue sky and open space, and the next, you crash landed yourself in an argument over who was the bigger victim!
Seems insane, doesn’t it, but apparently eighty per cent of successful people have unsuccessful relationships!
Allan Hunkin, in his book, “Finding the Elegant Solution in any Situation,” www.http://ElegantSolution.net, calls this hitting the limit called, “How Good You can Stand It?”
Hendricks refers to it as an Upper Limit Problem. In his book, The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks outlines the reasons why he believes EVERY problem is an Upper Limit Problem. Hendricks calls this ULP. (Yes, it sounds like GULP!)
Every breakdown, he contends, comes from being confronted by a limiting belief from your past.
He outlines the four main ones:
1. “I’m fundamentally flawed, there is something wrong with me, with my brain, with my body, with me, as I am, and I must mess this opportunity up, because good things can’t happen to bad people.”
2. “If I succeed, I will be leaving people behind from the past that I should be loyal to.”
3. “I am a burden in the world, and I must sabotage this success so I won’t be a bigger burden.”
4. “I must dim my brilliance, so I won’t outshine someone from my past.”
Hendricks says that whenever we are confronted by the possibility of our true greatness, we sabotage ourselves. We start an argument, have an accident, or start worrying. This, he calls an Upper Limit Problem.
He looks at how we sabotage ourselves in all areas of our lives, financial, emotional, creative, to avoid our true genius, and invites us into a conspiracy to defeat this upper limit within ourselves and those we love.
And therein lies the rub.
Those we love seem to be in a conspiracy not to break through the Upper Limit, as Allan Hunkin points out in his book, “Finding the Elegant Solution in any Situation,
” We seem hell bent on discovering not, “How good we can stand it,” but “How low can we go?”
Hunkin refers to the Upper Limit as the Worthiness Set Point.
He says we spiral up and down, between these two limiting beliefs, “How good can we stand it and “How low can you go,” trying to find stability.
Each time we hit bottom, we try to raise our sense of self worth and allow more abundance, creativity, and success in.
The trick, of course, is to avoid heading downward, and creating the self sabotage in the first place, by recognizing the symptoms that you have hit the top, Hendrick’s Upper Limit Problem.
Hendricks says we are on a constant spiral upwards, achieving excellence, until we reach our invisible Upper Limit, which we use to sabotage ourselves from moving into our Zone of Genius, rather than staying in the safe, predictable, comfortable Zone of Excellence which most successful people know.
He says that the more successful you are in danger of becoming, the more predictable it is that you will create one of the following breakdowns to prevent a breakthrough:
Worrying
Blame and criticism
Squabbling
Accidents
Illness
Hiding significant feelings
Not keeping agreements
Not speaking significant truths to the relevant people.
Deflecting compliments
All of these show up significantly, in the area of relationship in our lives.
“No matter how brilliant we may be at making money or making music, or making soup,” states Hendricks, we are all amateurs when it comes to feeling and expressing love.”
He says that relationship is the ultimate spiritual path because it constantly presents us with the challenge to love and embrace in the very situations in which we’re most prone to shun and reject. Hendricks says that the Universe will teach us our lessons with the tickle of a feather, or the whomp of a sledgehammer, depending on how open we are to learning that particular lesson.
To prevent such “humiliating collisions with the universe,” he suggests we all adopt an attitude of learning in every moment of our relationships.
Here is the poem he translated, by the fourteenth century mystic, Hafiz
“Your Divine Invitation
You’re invited to meet the Divine.
Nobody can resist an invitation like that!
Now your choices narrow to two:
You can come to the Divine ready to dance.
Or
Be carried on a stretcher to the Divine Emergency Room.”
He offers a mantra to solves the Upper Limit Problem or ULP (sounds like Gulp!) and he invites us into an ULP conspiracy. Conspiracy: meaning to breathe with. I invite you to join me in this conspiracy.
Here is the mantra:
“I expand in abundance, success and love every day, as I inspire those around me to do the same.”
I have recently experienced the problem of resistance to the possibility of unbounded love and creativity in relationship.
Both of us, instead of embracing the expansion of opportunity that confronted us, isntead started a squabble about who was responsible for whom, and we both ended up dragged into the Divine Emergency Room, kicking and screaming!
Surely there is a better way to fly, and I believe it lies in discovering your true greatness, and being willing to step into it, removing any limiting beliefs we might hold that stop us from achieving the bliss of living in the “Zone of Genius” rather than settling for the Zone of Excellence.
And how do we make that magical, elegant solution practical?
I would appreciate any thoughts, comments, feedback or experiences you wish to share about reaching the upper limit of possibility of love, peace, and creative harmony in relationship.
Does any of this resonate for you?
How have you stopped yourself?
How have you broken through your limits and raised your Worthiness Set Point?
How has this impacted your sense of abundance, creativity and success in the world?
What miracles have you experienced by realizing every problem is an Upper Limit Problem?
I invite you to share your stories here.
Read my latest blog entry and see what you think.
AConversationforTransformation.com
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