NEWFANE — Robert Fritz is convinced that it doesn't matter what you think about yourself.
We may live in a world where everyone identifies themselves as something, whether it be a Democrat or Republican, Christian or Muslim, American or Asian, a fat or a thin person, or even a winner or a loser. In perhaps too many ways, an adherence to some kind of identity has become very pivotal.
Identities are only abstract ideals, and trying to live up to abstractions can cause problems. In fact, Fritz thinks that identity issues thwart our ability to create the lives we want.
“Most people have an identity issue,” Fritz says in a new book, Identity, co-written with Dr. Wayne Scott Andersen. “Most people are concerned with how they see themselves, or how others see them.”
Authors Andersen and Fritz make the case that what you think about yourself doesn't determine your prospects of accomplishment. Actually, the more you focus on yourself, the less you are able to learn, grow, develop needed skills, and create what matters most to you.
'This book will ruffle many feathers'
“This book will ruffle many feathers in the self-help world by revealing how some of the most common concepts are simply not true and even harmful,” Andersen and Fritz write of Identity, which will be published by Newfane Press this month. “On the other side of these concepts is freedom from illusions, dogma, and belief. The ideas in Identity will give readers the opportunity to become the dominant force and author of their lives' building process.”
Through workshops, trainings, and their writings, Fritz and Andersen have spent years developing their ideas about identity.
Fritz is a founder of Robert Fritz Inc: Home of the Creative Process. Based in Newfane, the company offers programs, services, and products designed to help individuals and organizations create the results they want. Fritz is also an organizational consultant for some of the largest companies in the world.
Fritz says that, during the past 25 years, more than 80,000 people in 27 countries have participated in trainings he created.
Fritz has written numerous books, including the classic The Path of Least Resistance.
An artist first
Nonetheless, first and foremost, Fritz considers himself an artist.
He is an accomplished composer, writer, and an award-winning filmmaker. Rather than being incongruous with his other work, Fritz contends that his experience in the arts has had the greatest influence on his approach to human and organizational development.
Fritz began his career playing music and studying and teaching musical composition. From that background, he began to see that the structural principles that are so much a part of the composer's art have profound importance when applied to human development.
At the same time, Fritz became aware that the very same process that creators use to create music, painting, sculpture, dance, drama, film, poetry and literature could be applied to the way people live their daily lives.
In other words, it is possible to approach the life-building process in exactly the same way - as if it were a work of art.
The latest extension of this line of thinking is Identity, which examines the underlying structures that constitute success and fulfillment in a person's life.
“Understanding our underlying structures is the most potent way to change your behavior,” Fritz says. “The underlying structure of anything will determine its behavior.”
Art and science
For more than 10 years, Fritz has developed these ideas with Andersen.
A frequent guest as a medical expert on such shows as “Good Morning America” and “Radio MD,” and featured in newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the New York Daily News, Andersen is the best-selling author of Dr. A's Habits of Health.
Fritz believes that he and Andersen made a great team for Identity.
“I brought to this collaboration the perspective of an artist, Andersen that of a scientist,” he says.
According to Fritz, Identity is a “monumental” book, unlike anything written before. “It's a stake in the ground for a different direction to the ways we can improve our lives,” he proclaims.
He feels that one of the most powerful inroads to true improvement is the ability to eliminate identity issues. Too often, he says, self-help drives people in the wrong direction: to more and more self-focus. How well one does is taken very personally, thereby escalating identity issues.
Targeting the self-esteem movement
Perhaps the main target in Identity is the ubiquitous self-esteem movement, which pioneered such classic works as Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale.
“There are over 114,500 books on self-esteem on Amazon, and most of them try to convince you that you shouldn't think what you actually think, or hold beliefs about yourself that you actually do,” write Andersen and Fritz.
Fritz contends that the self-esteem movement is about one thing, and one thing only: identity.
“The theory is rather simple.” Andersen and Fritz write. “If you don't think well of yourself, you won't think you deserve success. You would therefore somehow sabotage yourself, underachieve, thwart your best efforts, and live a miserable life.”
Fritz finds this kind of thinking troubling.
“It seems that people in this movement have never read one of the many biographies of successful people,” Fritz and Andersen write. “If they had, they would be shocked to learn that the majority of the most successful people in history have had low self esteem.”
They cite as examples “Einstein, Hemingway, Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, Elvis Presley, Robert Kennedy, Joe DiMaggio, Amelia Earhart, Cary Grant, Alfred Hitchcock, Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr., Beethoven, Walt Disney - and the list goes on and on.”
Fritz believes that “their success was not a factor of identity, but of something more powerful and enduring: the motivation to accomplish the outcomes they wished to create. In other words, they focused upon what they were creating, not upon themselves.”
Counterproductive
Fritz is willing to put it even more bluntly: Positive thinking is a form of lying to oneself, and weakens the ability to create what you want.
Psychologist Albert Ellis, widely considered one of the most influential psychotherapists in history, deemed the self-esteem movement essentially self-defeating and ultimately destructive, often doing more harm than good.
“Many new studies have shown how positive thinking backfires,” Andersen and Fritz write. “What you think of yourself is irrelevant in the creative process.”
The authors advise readers to forget everything they've heard about self-esteem being important.
“The most successful people in the world didn't have it,” they write. “You may or may not love yourself, but it's really not your choice. Either way, you want wonderful things for yourself. Refocus yourself from who you are to how well you are able to create what you want.”
In chapters on issues such as stereotypes, racial prejudices, and obesity, the authors explore how identity plays a destructive role in our lives. For instance, when identity is tied to obesity, it is harder to create better health.
“When you get the attention off of yourself and onto the health outcomes you want to create, you increase your possibilities of success,” Andersen and Fritz write.
Identity is a book that details the somewhat complex structures beneath the choices we make in our lives. However, the point of the work is very simple: Get your focus off of yourself and onto the outcomes you want to create.
”From this, new worlds can open for you,” Fritz and Andersen write. “You can experience new joy and involvement, and life can move from an ongoing struggle to a true creative process.”