"How do you feel when you bite them," Erickson suggested he let one nail grow long so he could enjoy the pleasure of chewing on a long, juicy one. The man grew the nail long but refused to bite it. He then grew all his nails, stopped biting them, began playing the organ as a hobby, and completed law school.

            There was an institutionalized patient in a Midwestern psychiatric institution diagnosed as psychotic. He was given this label because the mental-health professionals didn't know how else to understand a man who stood all day making a back-and-forth movement with his arms and hands, uttering only: "I am Jesus Christ."

            A visiting consultant said to him, "I hear you're Jesus and that you're a carpenter. It looks like you're missing a saw. Let me see what we can do about that." He then arranged to place a saw in the man's hands and to have someone hold lumber so that the man's arm movements now became the action of sawing wood. As a carpenter who was once missing a saw, he was now engaged in resourceful conduct. This patient began making a bookcase and eventually was discharged from the hospital, pursuing a career as a cabinetmaker.

            In a similar fashion, the psychotherapist R. D. Laing was introduced to a young woman who had been diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic, meaning she would go into frozen postures for long periods of time. When he met her, he said, "I hear you have a talent for being still." He then persuaded her to use this ability to get a job as a model posing in an art studio. The same behavior that others used to impoverish the meaning of her life was transformed into a profitable resource, helping move her life toward a successful future.

            "Use what you have to work with" not only applies to coaching a sports team but directs how we can most gracefully play the game of life.

Constructing Your Reality

            The biologist John Lilly recorded the word 'cogitate" on a tape over and over again: cogitate, cogitate, cogitate, cogitate... After several moments of listening to this tape, people began hearing other words. At a conference of the American Society of Linguistics, Lilly played the tape, and the group heard some 2,361 different words and word combinations: agitate; arbitrate; artistry; back and forth; candidate; can't you stay; catch a tape; conscious state; count to ten; Cape Cod, you say; cut a steak; got a date; got to take; gurgitate; marmalade ...

            What we perceive is a consequence of how we participate in perceiving. With respect to Lilly's experiment, a person's report of what is heard reveals more about how the observer is observing than what is actually on the tape. For instance, when played to neurophysiologists, the most frequently heard word was "computate," whereas for therapists working in mental hospitals the most frequently heard word was "tragedy." Lilly remarked that when he presents the tape to an audience with which he hasn't achieved a good rapport, he himself hears "stop the tape."

            Life itself is like an endless tape that repeats the same sound. What we hear, see, and feel are therefore statements about our participation in life rather than any objective representation of what is really happening to us. We are not passive recipients of life but active constructors of our experience. When we see problems, trauma, and shortcomings, we are acting in such a way as to bring forth that realization through a self-fulfilling