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?