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Imagine You Live in This Room

IMAGINE THAT you live your entire life in one room. Inside are all the people with whom you have ever had a relationship, including their temperaments, histories, and personalities. The room is infinitely large. You can update and expand your room to accommodate new people and new possibilities in your life. You can design your room any way you like.

Your room has a unique and permanent feature, however. It has only one door. It will only ever have one door. You may think that there is nothing unusual about that; lots of rooms have only one door. True, but this particular door is a one-way door. enter only, no exit. Whoever comes through this door, and whatever you let them bring in, cannot leave—ever. They and their baggage will be with you in your room for the rest of your life.

This concept matters to you because the quality of your life depends on who’s in your room.

One more time: the quality of your life depends on who’s in your room.

The person you become and whether or not you are happy and successful is profoundly influenced by who’s in your room. Whether you achieve harmony and fulfillment in your life depends on how you handle the people in your room.

Pause for a moment. How is this idea landing for you?

Who’s in your room? Close your eyes and look around with your mind. Take a quick inventory. You could start with your family and friends, your business partners, neighbors, and people who show up frequently in your social media feed. Who’s up close and personal? Who else is in there—people you work with, people you love having in your room, or people you wish weren’t there?

Based on what you’ve seen so far, ask yourself, Would I have made different choices about whom to let into my room, and whom to keep out, had I known that anybody who came in was going to be there forever? Almost everyone we’ve asked has said yes to this question.

Once you recognize this point, you have two important questions going forward: How are you going to select people you wish to have in your room now that you know they can never leave? And how will you deal with the people who are already there?

At this point, some folks push back on the original premise: “It can’t literally be true that once people get in my room they are in it forever!” they say. But even though you don’t physically live in a single room, the psychological truth is that they are in your metaphorical room forever. In fact, neurologists report that as far as your brain is concerned, the metaphor is quite real. According to Dr. Daniel Amen, founder of the Amen Clinics, significant input that is received in your brain triggers neural activity that cannot simply be erased or deleted as though it never happened.

If someone hurts you, is mean to you, or belittles you, they stay in your room, and their fingerprints are all over your brain. Their voice is in the voice-recognition parts of your brain’s temporal lobe, their face is in the facial-recognition parts, and their behavior is in your memory. When you meet someone and they get anchored in there, they don’t go away. Consciously or unconsciously, people may be out of your life, but they’re still in your head. The things they say and do affect your thinking, behavior, and experience—forever.

You might, for example, believe you have ended a relationship, terminated a project, or let a previous commitment go, but these events have left an indelible mark—affecting your future experience in myriad ways—for better or worse, whether you like it or not.

Do you have dreams about people who aren’t in your life anymore? According to your subconscious mind, they are in your life. When we say “That dream felt so real!” we’re stating a psychological fact of life. When you dream of being back at the lakeside with that grandparent you loved, the dreaming mind is telling you that they are in some way still alive and it’s always summer at that lakeside.

This realization is one of those good news/bad news deals because, to our good fortune, it’s not just about the troublemakers. This is also the case when someone genuinely loves you, praises you, or skillfully mentors you. Your mean sibling is in there, but so is your loving grandparent.

Your past is archived in your psyche, just as your future will also be when it unfolds to become a part of your past. What’s done is done. The events of the past cannot be undone. An action taken is final. A word uttered cannot be unsaid.

Start with a Look Around

In her influential book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, psychologist Carol Dweck posed the essential finding that individuals who have a “growth mindset” are better able to overcome setbacks than those with a “fixed mindset.” In Dweck’s framing, a growth mindset means a belief that intelligence can be developed over time, and a fixed mindset is the belief that intelligence is predetermined. To simplify her insight, these points of view shape whether someone views setbacks and failures as a challenge to be overcome (growth mindset) or as an innate and unchanging lack of ability (fixed mindset).

Your room is a way to adopt a growth mindset with relationships you might think will never change. However much it seems that your present is predetermined by all the people you’ve known and the baggage they’ve brought into your room, you can decide today how much that limits your ability to grow and change and become more conscious of the choices you make for living your life.

The best place to start is the here and now. Putting the transformative power of “Who’s in your room?” to work begins with an inquiry rather than a rush to action. For this review of how your daily experience is being shaped by the people in your room, we’re going to ask you to engage your imagination and play along a little—maybe more than a little. You can start with something familiar you say about your life.

For example, perhaps your life is chaotic. Every day seems to bring a new crisis, and you want to change that. But is chaos a cause or an effect? In other words, does chaos name the disease, or is it merely a symptom? (Disease might seem too strong a word. However, when you remember that disease derives from the absence of ease, then it surely applies to this state of affairs.)

Looking around the room that is your life, you will likely see people who gained entry carrying the curse of chaos with them. You know who we’re talking about—people who don’t feel they are alive unless they’re immersed in drama. When you look around your room, do you see people spray-painting graffiti on your walls? Are they pushing others out of the way as they jockey for the best position? You might even have become one of those people, which can happen when you stay too long around such energy. The chaotic life has you living in an overcrowded room. Too many people, too much stuff, too many obligations, too little time—and all of it feels very urgent.

What if those people were a bit farther away in your room, say, toward the back where they can’t nudge you constantly with their Very Important Issue? You don’t hear them demanding your attention quite so much, and even though they can never leave, their example of chaos looks less compelling from a distance.

Does your life seem harsh and angry, perhaps not all the time but sometimes? Recall a specific time when you experienced harshness and anger. It helps to recount a memory that comes up a lot. Put yourself back in that moment. Who’s in your room with you? Notice whether you have a harsh and angry person in your presence—perhaps several harsh and angry people or even a mob.

On the other hand, imagine your life is filled with love and kindness. Next, recall a time when your experience felt like a flood of human warmth and positivity swirling around you and washing over you and your room was filled with light. Notice who’s in your room with you.

Your experience in each of these examples is driven by either resonance or dissonance.

Who’s Plucking Your Strings?

In physics, resonance is a phenomenon that occurs when a vibrating system or external force drives another system to oscillate at a specific preferential frequency. Imagine two pianos side by side in a room. If you hit the middle C key on one piano while someone presses the sustain pedal on the other one, the middle C string will vibrate on the second piano without its key being struck. The second piano’s string picks up sound waves from the air that have its natural frequency, and it responds. This is resonance at work.

Carry that over to the human mind and spirit and you understand why we say we resonate with certain people. Some of their qualities and behaviors cause us to respond positively, often with the same qualities.

In contrast, there’s dissonance. An example of dissonance almost all of us have experienced is the harsh, disagreeable sound fingernails can make when scratching a chalkboard. Our ears and brains are predisposed to dislike that frequency (two thousand to four thousand hertz). Emotionally, we experience dissonance when we become subjected to inconsistencies between a person’s actions and their stated values. Our minds and emotions crave consistency. (Another example most of us have experienced is being hurt by the behavior of a person who professed to love us.)

We human beings are like those piano strings. Some of us are even described as being high-strung. Resonance is an agreeable sensation, but dissonance is not. You’ve heard of someone’s buttons being pushed; that would be a moment of dissonance. When you experienced this yourself, you probably showed signs that certain people and situations were pushing your buttons and that you’d rather avoid them.

Your buttons aren’t exactly being pushed but rather your emotional strings are picking up energy from others’ emotional strings—sometimes intensely. Sometimes this feels good (resonance) and other times not so much (dissonance).

The point here is that you are, metaphorically speaking, a multistringed work of art in progress. Who’s in your room has everything to do with the emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual strings resonating within you. You will probably express many of these vibrations externally, such as when you see someone you love, you light up and welcome them warmly. On the other hand, if you see a person you don’t care for or trust, you are likely to avoid them and the unpleasant inner experience of dissonance.

Waking Up to Your Inner Reality

Sometimes we are unaware of the internal experience that triggers our behavior. This is particularly the case when we suddenly become angry. It can happen abruptly, and we are in reaction mode before being conscious of what triggered that feeling. What can be unconscious to us can be blindingly obvious to other people, which can be a catalyst for all kinds of misunderstandings and grief. Developing self-awareness can help significantly. You can become skilled at identifying the inner experiences of resonance and dissonance and then consciously choose how to behave in any given moment.

If you take the time to contemplate your life, you will notice themes as you identify the relationships you have with the people in your room and all the obligations that came in with them. Allow yourself to become aware of how all these aspects influence you and your daily experience. This process is not about establishing blame or fault—doing so serves no useful purpose—but rather noticing resonance and dissonance as a guide to where you can invest more time and how you can manage your room. Resonance and dissonance tip you off to those relationships in which you are living authentically, resonating with people, and those in which you are enduring that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard feeling.

Hospice nurse Bronnie Ware witnessed the last days of dying patients with compassion and kindness for years. In her bestseller The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, she observed that the number one regret people have when death is closing in on them is “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

Why do so many people come to the end of their lives carrying this regret? Their attention was focused for a lifetime on other people’s expectations, demands, needs, cravings, dreams, frustrations, and desires. To return to the string metaphor, they spent their lives trying to resonate with other instruments without playing their own.

Your room is filled with people from your past and present. Some are sources of resonance, and some create only dissonance. Most do some of both. If your conscious and unconscious attention is focused most of the time on fulfilling those expectations and needs, you’ll end up with that number one regret Ware identified.

The theologian and social critic Howard Thurman counseled, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.”

One cautionary note as you explore and take control of your room in the following chapters: we are in no way suggesting you don’t share yourself with and extend yourself to others. That’s the essence of love. We believe that your life will change for the better as you see your room more and more clearly and make conscious choices about who you let in.

As for the metaphorical versus actual idea of a room, instead of asking whether the room is a physical or mental construct, ask yourself, What if I were willing, from this moment on, to live as though it were true? You are the architect of your emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical room. You need to craft an environment filled with resonance rather than dissonance. Build a room that makes you come alive because the room always wins.

Visualize Your Room

➨ This exercise can be done in stages. If you’re familiar with other visualization techniques, feel free to adapt to your preferred method. We suggest a combination of visualizing with your eyes closed and writing down what you “see” afterward. As you proceed through the exercises in this book, you might return to this visualization to understand how your room changes over time. This room is infinitely adjustable, so you don’t have to get it “right” the first time!

Here’s one other detail that might help you visualize this fascinating room that is your life: your room is not yet full. Your room has no maximum capacity. There’s room for more people in it—such as people who can mentor you to achieve the life you want. The question for you is, Who do you want to attract into your room?

You can do this visualization more than once, and have some fun with it. Ivan is often asked in live presentations where the room is. He points to one side of his head and says, “It starts here,” then points to the other side and says, “And it ends here!” Stewart tells people that, if they like, their room can be sitting on a magic carpet that takes them to Times Square; Aspen, Colorado; or a tropical island. It’s up to you.

1. Choose a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed for at least twenty minutes. Close your eyes and relax. If you know relaxation exercises or meditation, take a few minutes to center yourself. Pay attention to your breath moving in and out of your body.

2. Imagine your room. Make it as clear as possible and see yourself there. You might think of it as a simple empty room, a beach, or a canyon that can be accessed through only one door. Your room might change physically over time, but—whatever its physical appearance—the basic principles will never change: one door, and once people are in, they never leave.

3. Then imagine the people in your room. See the people with whom you have a meaningful relationship today. See the people with whom you’ve had a strong relationship in the past. Give this some time; who is nearby and who is far away? You don’t have to remember everyone in this first visualization. People have a way of showing up later. Remember, there’s room for everyone.

4. Choose one or two people who are most important to you. They might be a life partner, parent, grandparent, sibling, or business partner. They might be close friends from the present or past. Think about them as vividly as possible—their faces, the clothes they wear, the sound of their voices.

5. For each person, consider your relationship. Think more deeply than simple words. How does this person make you feel when they are nearby? Take your time to explore your feelings fully. What is the resonance or dissonance you feel?

6. At the end of the visualization, write the names of as many people in your room as you wish. Note where they were in the room—close or far, in light or shadow. Note their demeanor and whether they told you anything. If you like, draw your room or write down its physical characteristics. You might want to use a notebook or binder because you’ll return to this room many times.

Actually, you won’t “return” to this room—because nobody leaves, including you.

The room idea can be transforming, self-nurturing, and even healing. This can be especially true when not all the people you let into your room turn out to be the nice ones. Joanie tells another story about the joys and pitfalls of her room in chapter 8.