Admittedly, I am a gullible person, plus I’m a child of the 60’s, so through my late teens and twenties, I was marinated in the lore and memes of the New Age. Actually, I love being a child of the 60’s, for the late 60’s and 70’s were a wonderful time to come of age, even though we witnessed and were shaped by the tragic assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy in the short space of 5 years.

As part of my cultural inculcation, I have been exposed to, believed, and even practiced the principle of the Law of Attraction for 35 years.

Now just in case, you missed learning the Law of Attraction as part of your education, basically it states that “All forms of matter and energy are attracted to that which is of a like vibration”.

Personally, I do find the Law of Attraction to be extremely useful as a reminder that my mind does in fact have a very powerful effect on my mood, both of which affect my sense of power in the moment, and what kind of actions I am able to take.

[Except when I don’t, which is when I am mired and wallowing in my negative patterns, and I don’t want to take responsibility, for crissake, and get to a better space. No, thank you very much, I’d rather be mad or depressed and hope that someone else will come along and make things better for me. Fortunately, though not for my husband, only he is privileged enough to see this unrepentant aspect of me!]

So when the film, The Secret, came out in 2006, I initially fell hook, line, and sinker for it, and contributed to the viral phenomenon whereby the film swept the globe. Just in case it passed you by, it is a film of New Thought proponents and teachers, teaching “the secret”, in fact an ancient core of belief based on the tenets of “Ask, Believe, and Receive.”

Now the film IS and can be wonderfully inspiring at particular moments; it can offer hope, and help you press the reset button, some of the time. It can help you get unstuck and get to the next level that you are capable of.

The problem though is that faith and/or belief in The Secret isn’t going to do it for most people, it isn’t going to get them to their fullest expression of what success is for them.

For although we can learn new skills and ways of doing things, if they aren’t natural talents and strengths, we often do not use them when the moment requires us to.

Even if we’re pretty good at a lot of things, we will never get the same result, or bang for the buck, if we aren’t naturally wired for that strength, that is, if it isn’t coded into our DNA. The truth is that everything about who we are and what our potential is, is in our blueprint.

It is written, as they say.

Of course, there are a relatively few extremely gifted people who can and do practice The Secret, and have truly extraordinary success [though who knows what dark secrets lurk beneath the visible surface?].

What we’re missing in the public domain is the knowledge that our strengths are coded for in our DNA. Everything about who we are, our physical predispositions and susceptibilities, our cognitive complexity, our personality, our attention to detail, how we do or don’t take action, our emotional and neurologic sensitivity, how we make meaning about the world….you name it, it’s coded in your DNA.

So we’ve got whatever it is we’ve got, and we ain’t got what we ain’t got. And if we ain’t got it, The Secret Ain’t Gonna Allow Us To Get It, because we simply don’t have the means to do so.

[I’ve learned this the hard way more than once I'm embarrassed to say, as I invested sizable amounts of money in others’ people’s programs, who swore that if they could do it, so could we. That’s the biggest marketing swindle there is.]

Thus, the blank slate theory, the scaffolding on which The Secret rests, the theory that we can be anything we want to be, is dead. It’s kaput.

It’s a cultural meme but it’s a myth. And the longer we hold onto it, the longer we will keep running into walls, and then wondering why we’re not being as successful as we want to and as we know we could.

Why is this so?

It’s because we don’t fully know and understand our talents and strengths. A life that works is a life built around your talents and strengths, and the wisdom and strategy to understand how to maximize and optimize those.

There are loads of assessments out there to help you see and understand your talents and strengths. [Note that a strength is a combination of talent, skills, and knowledge, so many of us have talents that haven’t yet been fully developed.]

Of course, I have my favorites that I use with my clients. I love the assessment part of my work as a tool for facilitating self-knowledge, because people suddenly have all these light bulbs go off, and additionally, a new set of levers to pull in how they manage themselves and interact with the world [If of course, they really utilize the knowledge, and this is where coaching can be so useful.]

I really do think there should be an Eleventh Commandment: “KNOW THYSELF!”

If you’re curious to learn more about your talents and strengths, a great place to start is to buy yourself a copy of StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup’s Now, Discover Your Strengths , by Tom Rath. In the back of the book, there’s a code you can use to take their online assessment and get a cool report of your top five talents.

Now that I’ve been a professional coach for 10 years, a counselor and therapist for 30 years, and a seeker my whole life, I can unequivocally say that the gold does not lie in The Secret. It lies in knowing and optimizing your talents and strengths, and accepting that you can’t be everything.

What have you learned about strengths?

Medscape Psychiatry and Mental Health recently published an article on Saving Primary Care that certainly got my attention.

Trained as a primary care doc myself, I firmly believe that as a society, we’ve got our priorities screwed up and the value chain inverted. Primary care doctors are the gatekeepers and guides for how patients use the rest of the medical system, and therefore, they are the first line of defense.

The discovery of antibiotics was found to be a first line of defense, and it revolutionized the practice of medicine.  So would a robust, thriving, and reformulated practice of primary care.

Supporting and investing in primary care docs for the time they spend as PARTNERS with their patients would reap enormous benefits to everyone. The educating, guiding, coaching, and healing that can occur through a great relationship with your primary care doc should be the amongst the most highly compensated interventions, not at bottom of the heap. For those are the activities that result in people learning how to take care of themselves such that they avoid coming down with chronic, degenerative, costly diseases that over time eat up huge amounts of medical resources.

What’s emotional intelligence got to do with it? There’s got to be a fundamental shift in attitude that drives how our broken medical system is rebuilt.

Just as all of us individually need someone to give us primary care [after all, why do we seek intimate and primary relationships?], primary care practitioners should get our deepest respect, translated into status and monetary value.

[Isn't this a "duh" moment?  I mean, isn’t primary care called primary because that’s what it is? It’s PRIMARY. It’s IMPORTANT, listen up everyone! Yeah, I know I’m being repetitive and yelling, but it seems like the powers that be still don’t get it.  That's why I started Heart of Healthcare, to facilitate leaders in making these kinds of fundamental shifts.]

Healing requires compassion and empathy. And today, primary care in particular needs healing, if healing is to become a mainstay of health care. Truly, it needs resuscitation.  Soon. Healing, based in wholeness and compassionate caring, is what allows people to become healthier. Healthier people are what will drive health care costs down. I can’t make it any simpler than that, folks.

[I tell you, it really gets me, how the most important jobs in society get the lowest (or relative lowest) compensation, childcare workers, teachers, ministers of all denominations who tend to the Spirit, and primary care docs. This speaks poorly to how we measure success as a society and a culture, but this is a post for another time.]

Of course, we need the highly trained specialists who spend 12 years in training to come in as the knights in shining armor to save the day when needed [And yes, I also believe they should be well compensated.]

But when will we start to value that which society and healthcare system need to flourish – healthy people able to take care of themselves because they’ve been educated, guided, tended to, and cared for by physicians who are there specifically to provide that most fundamental connection, guidance, and education for health?

We each need someone to “stand by me”, always, always, always. Well, primary care docs are those folks in healthcare, whether they’re on active duty or on reserve. If we want them there, we need to stand by them.

And in that spirit, I invite you to take 5 minutes to watch and listen to this gorgeous video that was produced by the group “Playing For Change.” Listen to this every day, and your life will change!