Henry Cloud - 9 Things You Simply Must Do to Succeed in Love and Life: A Psychologist Learns from His Patients What Really Works and What Doesnt

I DO NOT REMEMBER WHEN IT FIRST HAPPENED, but I do remember the feeling. It was like being in an episode of The X-Files. Or, more accurately, a strong dj vu. I would be talking with someone, either in therapy or a consulting role, or even in a business situation, and I would think, Wait a minute... Ive metthis person before. I would try to remember where, and quickly I would realize that I could never have met that person in any other context. The feeling was an illusion. I would chalk it up to lack of sleep and move on.

But the experience kept repeating itself. And each time it had the same feel. It seemed like a moment in which time almost stopped. It always had that ring of I know you from somewhere.

As this sort of thing kept happening, I began to pay more attention to it. I had to know what was going on. I did not believe in people living past lives, but at certain times, certain people would seem so familiar that I was all but convinced that I knew them from somewherea different time and place. At least they reminded me of someone I had known before. But who could it be?

Then one day I noticed something. I was working on a business deal, and a particular situation came up. One of my friends in the deal said he would take care of the thing we were all discussing. He offered a way of handling it, and we moved on to the next issue. Everyone else at the table paid little attention, except to notice the fact that he had a good idea. But I had that same feeling again. Whydoes this seem so familiar? I asked myself. Then I realized that I did not know this man from somewhere else, nor did he remind me of anyone from my past. I had no familiarity with him other than what I had acquired during the time we had been friends and partners in this deal. What I felt had nothing to do with him as a person, or with anyone else for that matter. It had to do with what he did. It was the way he handled that situation. That was what I had seen before! It was what he did that seemed to stand out as familiar.

I had seen someone else do that same thing only a week before. I thought back to the previous situation. It was true: the man I was with at the moment and the person I had been with the week before, in similar circumstances and facing a similar dilemma, had responded in exactly the same way.

It was not who they were that gave me the sense of dj vu. In fact, it was not really even the specifics of the actions they took and the solutions they proposed. Such details were unimportant to the larger principle I was observing. My feelings of dj vu came from my growing sense that certain kinds of people, given certain circumstances, always face and resolve situations in the same way.

Then, I went on a little memory trip, and the mystery started to unravel a bit. The previous week was not the first time I had seen someone do what this business partner had done. I had seen other people in similar situations who had done exactly what my friend had done. And they had done it in a very similar manner. It was asif all these people were the same person, in a way.

But here is the interesting thing, and the thing that added to the confusion: all these people were very different from one another. They had different backgrounds, different personalities, different kinds of lives, different economic circumstances, and different abilities. But, they were the same in that they shared this particular way of handling life. And that commonality, I realized, was the dj vu I kept experiencing. I was not encountering the same person over and over again; I was encountering a way of performinga way of doing things that was so profound, and at the same time so simple and subtle, that it both stood out and was concealed at the same time.

As I reflected upon the people who possessed this one pattern in common, something else became evident: they were all successful inlife.

Now, admittedly, there are a lot of definitions of success, and I am not trying to tell you which definition you should adopt. What I am saying here is that all of these people in my dj vu experience tended to accomplish success in love and life in the ways that theydefined success. They moved forward. They did not stay stuck, repeating the same mistakes over and over again. They reached their goals and found what they were looking for in life. There must be a connection, I thought, with their success and this particular pattern of behavior that I kept observing.

I realized that I was not looking at a person; I was looking at a pattern. A way of behaving. Now that I recognized the pattern, I decided to look for it even more. A path that successful people took, given a certain set of choices.

This was realization number one for me:

The answer to Who is this person?
was not a person at all. It was a way.