WHEN THE COUPLE CAME INTO MY OFFICE FOR THE FIRST of a series of visits, they chose seats on the couch that placed them as far apart from one another as possible. It was obvious that neither liked the other, at least at the moment. And yet the agenda was the saving of their marriage.
She was asking him to leave the home, I was told. When I asked her why, she said it was the only possible way there would be any peace or normal life for the rest of the family. There was no infidelity, no single issue. She simply wasn't prepared to live with him for the rest of his life, given his temperament and value system.
But he didn't want to leave. In fact he was shocked that she should have come to this conclusion, he said. After all, he was a faithful provider; their home was quite large and located in an affluent neighbourhood. The kids had everything they wanted. It was hard to figure out, he went on, why she would want to end the marriage. Besides, weren't they Christians? He'd thought all along that Christians didn't believe in divorce or separation. Would I please solve their problem?
The story slowly emerged. It became clear that I was visiting with one of those driven men and his wife. His drivenness was costing him a marriage, a family, and, additionally, his physical health. That the marriage was virtually dead I could see in their body language. That the family was in ruins I could deduce from their descriptions of the attitudes of the children. That his health was precarious was obvious when he told me of a bundle of ulcers, migraine headaches, and occasional chest pains. The story continued to unfold.
Because he owned his business, he had the freedom to work his own hours: twelve to fifteen per day was all. And because he bore a lot of responsibility, he was rarely at any function important to his children. He usually left the home before anyone was out of bed in the morning, and he rarely came home until the youngest of the children was already back in bed for the night. If he was present at a family meal, he tended to be sullen and preoccupied. It was not a rare occurrence for him to be called to the phone in the middle of dinner and remain there for the remainder of the hour solving some problem or closing a sale.
In moments of conflict, he admitted, he was given to explosive anger; in relationships he could be abrasive and intimidating. Put into a social situation he was usually bored with casual conversation and tended to withdraw and drink too much. When asked who his friends were, he could name no one except business associates. And when challenged as to things of importance apart from his work, he could think only of his sports car, his boat, and his skybox season tickets to the Red Sox - things, not people all of which, ironically, he was usually too busy to enjoy anyway.
This was a man with almost no order at all in his private world. Everything was external. His life was, by his own admission, a bundle of activity and accumulation. He could never do enough; he could ii ever earn enough to be satisfied. Everything had to get bigger, better, and more impressive. What was driving him? Could there ever be order to his private world?
After a number of conversations, I began to gain some insight into the seemingly bottomless energy source that drove this man into a way of life that was destroying everything around him. In the midst of one of our talks, I asked him about his father. Suddenly his mood dramatically altered. Clearly my question had exposed a deeply sensitive matter.
What slowly unfolded was a tale of extreme relational pain. His father, I learned, was a man given to extreme sarcasm and ridicule. He had regularly told his son, "You're a bum; you will always be a bum, nothing better!" He had heard this so many times that the words had become emblazoned as if on a neon sign in the centre of his private world.
Here was a man, now in his mid-forties, who had unconsciously made a lifelong commitment. He had committed himself to proving his father wrong. Somehow he would demonstrate with unimpeachable evidence that he was not a bum. It became a core preoccupation of his life, and he was not even aware of it.
Since a state of "un-bumness" was equated, in his mind, with hard work, high income, and the status of wealth, these things formed the cluster of objectives for this driven man. He would show that he was a hard worker by owning a business and making it the best in that section of the Yellow Pages. He would make sure that it produced large sums of money for him, even if some of the money was "dirtied" by the way it was obtained. The large house, the sports car, the season tickets among the finest boxes at Fenway would all be measurable disclaimers of the paternal charge of "bumness." And thus it was that my visitor became a driven man, driven to earn his father's respect and love.
Because his goals were all basically external, there was no need to cultivate an inner world. Relationships were not important; winning was. Spiritual health was not significant; physical strength was. Rest was not necessary; available time for more work was. And the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom was not a matter of value; sales technique and product innovation were.
He claimed that it was all part of his desire to provide for his family. Slowly we began to discover together that he was really trying to gain his father's affirmation and acceptance. He wanted to hear his father finally say, "Son, you're not a bum; I was really, really wrong."
What made this matter all the more bizarre was that the unpleasable father had been dead for several years. Yet the son, now in midlife, continued to work to gain an imagined approval. What had started as an objective became a habit of living, an addiction you could say, which he could not break.
WHY ARE PEOPLE DRIVEN?
Why do so many people appear to be driven? My friend is an extreme example of one reason. He typifies those who grew up in environments where "well done" was never heard. When such acceptance and affirmation is lacking, it is by no means unusual for the respect-starved person to conclude that more work, greater accumulation of symbols of success, or worldly praise will finally convince some significant person (a parent, for example) who has withheld approval to finally say, "Son (Daughter), you are not a bum after all. I'm terribly proud to be your father."
Many people in leadership positions share this sort of background and this sort of insecurity. Some leaders appear to be highly benevolent people, doing good things, and are praised for dedicated, selfless actions; the fact may be that they are pushed toward the hope of gaining the acceptance and approval of just one significant person in their past. And if they cannot gain that, then they develop an insatiable appetite for applause, wealth, or power from other sources in an attempt to compensate for the loss. Rarely, however, is satisfaction reached. This is because their pursuit is in the public world; the private world is left empty and wanting. And that is where the real ache lies.
Another source of drivenness is an early experience of serious deprivation or shame. In his book Creative Suffering, Paul Tournier points out that an enormous number of world political leaders over the past several centuries have been orphans. Having grown up in a context of personal loss in terms of intimate parental love and emotional closeness, they may have sought a compensatory experience in the embrace of the crowds. Behind their great drive for power may be the simple need for love. Rather than meeting this need through the ordering of the private world within, they have chosen to pursue it on the external level.
In a revelatory essay Susan Erikson Bloland, daughter of the great twentieth-century psychologist, Erik Erikson, wrote of the drivenness of her father to become a famous and influential man. Erikson, his daughter wrote, never knew who his father was. His mother had refused to disclose his identity. Throughout his lifetime, Erik Erikson drove himself from one achievement to another, imagining that if he did well enough, his father would appear and express admiration to his son.
Driven people can also come from backgrounds in which there has been a sense of great shame or embarrassment. My library includes a remarkably candid book, The Man Who Could Do No Wrong, by now-retired pastor Charles Blair. In it he describes his own childhood during the Depression days in Oklahoma. With pain he recalls his daily task of hauling the free government-issue milk from the local firehouse to home. As he carried the milk pail down the street, he had to endure what he felt was raw scorn from boys his own age. Out of the agony of such moments came the resolve that the day would come when he would never again carry a symbolic milk pail, which signified a feeling of worthlessness.
Blair tells the story of an unforgettable walk home from school in the company of a girl for whom he had strong feelings. Suddenly a boy with a shiny new bicycle came up beside them and offered the girl a ride. Without hesitation she hopped on to the back fender, leaving Blair behind as she and the other boy rode off together. The humiliation of that moment caused Blair to quietly resolve that someday he would have the equivalent of a shiny bicycle, that he would have the wherewithal to make impressions that would command the attentions and loyalties of others.
And those resolves burned their way into his life. They became a source of the drive that subsequently, by his own account, betrayed him. He would later need to own the most attractive automobile, lead the most beautiful and largest church, and wear the most stylish of men's fashions. These things would prove that he had made it out of the Oklahoma Depression. He was not worthless; he was not poor. He could prove it. Look!
Charles Blair was running from something, and that meant that he had to run toward something. Although his drive was clothed in all sorts of impressive spiritual motives, and although his ministry was remarkably effective, down at the centre were unresolved hurts of the past. Because these hurts remained a point of disorder in his private world, they came back to haunt him. They affected his choices and values and blinded him to what was really happening at a crucial moment of his life. The result? Serious disaster. Failure, embarrassment, and public humiliation.
But it must be added that he rebounded. That alone suggests hope for the driven man. Charles Blair, the driven man of earlier years, running from shame, is now a called man, and he deserves the admiration of his friends. I consider his book to be one of the most significant I have ever read. It ought to be required reading for any man or woman who is in leadership.
Finally, some people are simply raised in an environment where drivenness is a way of life. In a book called Wealth Addiction, Philip Slater details the backgrounds of several living billionaires. In almost every account there is indication that as children these billionaires made the accumulation of things and the conquest of people their amusement. There was little if any play for the purpose of pure fun or exercise. They only knew how to win, how to accumulate. It was what they saw their parents doing, and they assumed that it was the only way to live. Thus the drive to grow rich and powerful began in the earliest days.
To such people an ordered private world has little meaning. The only thing worth giving attention to is the public world, where things can be measured, admired, and used.
Of course, driven people come out of many other backgrounds, and these are but a few samples. But one thing is sure in all cases: Driven people will never enjoy the tranquillity of an ordered private world. Their prime targets are all external, material, and measurable. Nothing else seems real; nothing else makes much sense. And it all must be held on to, as it was with Saul,who found that power was more important than the integrity of a friendship with David.
Let us be sure we understand that when we speak of driven people, we are not merely thinking of a highly competitive businessperson or a professional athlete. We are considering something much more pervasive than workaholism. Any of us can look within and suddenly discover that drivenness is our way of life. We can be driven toward a superior Christian reputation, toward a desire for some dramatic spiritual experience, or toward a form of leadership that is really more a quest for domination of people than servanthood. A homemaker can be a driven person; so can a student. A driven person can be any of us.
HOPE FOR THE DRIVEN PERSON
Can the driven person be changed? Most certainly. It begins when such a person faces up to the fact that he is operating according to drives and not calls. That discovery is usually made in the blinding, searching light of an encounter with Christ. As the twelve disciples discovered, an audience with Jesus over a period of time exposes all the roots and expressions of drivenness.
To deal with drivenness, one must begin to ruthlessly appraise one's own motives and values, just as Peter was forced to do in his periodic confrontations with Jesus. The person seeking relief from drivenness will find it wise to listen to mentors and critics who speak Christ's words to us today.
He may have some humbling acts of renunciation, some disciplined gestures of surrender of things. Things that are not necessarily bad, but that have been important for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps the driven person will have to grant forgiveness to some of those who in the past never offered the proper kind of affection and affirmation. And all of that may be just the beginning.
Paul the apostle in his pre-Christian days was driven. As a driven man, he studied, he joined, he attained, he defended, and he was applauded. The pace at which he was operating shortly before his conversion was almost manic. He was driven toward some illusive goal, and later, when he could look back at that lifestyle with all of its compulsions, he would say, "It was all worthless."
Paul was driven until Christ called him. One gets the feeling that when Paul fell to his knees before the Lord while on the road to Damascus, there was an explosion of relief within his private world. What a change from the drivenness that had pushed him toward Damascus in an attempt to stamp out Christianity to that dramatic moment when, in complete submission, he asked Jesus Christ, "What shall I do, Lord?" A driven man was converted into a called one.
I could have wished this for the man who came to talk with me about his wife's demand that he leave their house. Time after time we talked about his insatiable drive to win, to earn, to impress. There were a few occasions when I thought he was catching the message, when I allowed myself to be convinced we were making progress. I actually believed that he was going to move the centre of his life from the public aspect of his world to the private side.
I could almost see him kneeling before Christ, offering up his drivenness, being washed clean of all the old, terribly painful memories of a father who had flung a sense of "bumness" into his private world.
How much I wanted my friend, the successful bum, to see himself a disciple called by Christ, and not one driven to achieve in order to prove something. But it never happened. And eventually we lost contact. The last I heard, his drivenness cost him everything: family, marriage, business. For it drove him right to his grave.
Extracted from Gordon MacDonald's Ordering Your Private World.
She was asking him to leave the home, I was told. When I asked her why, she said it was the only possible way there would be any peace or normal life for the rest of the family. There was no infidelity, no single issue. She simply wasn't prepared to live with him for the rest of his life, given his temperament and value system.
But he didn't want to leave. In fact he was shocked that she should have come to this conclusion, he said. After all, he was a faithful provider; their home was quite large and located in an affluent neighbourhood. The kids had everything they wanted. It was hard to figure out, he went on, why she would want to end the marriage. Besides, weren't they Christians? He'd thought all along that Christians didn't believe in divorce or separation. Would I please solve their problem?
The story slowly emerged. It became clear that I was visiting with one of those driven men and his wife. His drivenness was costing him a marriage, a family, and, additionally, his physical health. That the marriage was virtually dead I could see in their body language. That the family was in ruins I could deduce from their descriptions of the attitudes of the children. That his health was precarious was obvious when he told me of a bundle of ulcers, migraine headaches, and occasional chest pains. The story continued to unfold.
Because he owned his business, he had the freedom to work his own hours: twelve to fifteen per day was all. And because he bore a lot of responsibility, he was rarely at any function important to his children. He usually left the home before anyone was out of bed in the morning, and he rarely came home until the youngest of the children was already back in bed for the night. If he was present at a family meal, he tended to be sullen and preoccupied. It was not a rare occurrence for him to be called to the phone in the middle of dinner and remain there for the remainder of the hour solving some problem or closing a sale.
In moments of conflict, he admitted, he was given to explosive anger; in relationships he could be abrasive and intimidating. Put into a social situation he was usually bored with casual conversation and tended to withdraw and drink too much. When asked who his friends were, he could name no one except business associates. And when challenged as to things of importance apart from his work, he could think only of his sports car, his boat, and his skybox season tickets to the Red Sox - things, not people all of which, ironically, he was usually too busy to enjoy anyway.
This was a man with almost no order at all in his private world. Everything was external. His life was, by his own admission, a bundle of activity and accumulation. He could never do enough; he could ii ever earn enough to be satisfied. Everything had to get bigger, better, and more impressive. What was driving him? Could there ever be order to his private world?
After a number of conversations, I began to gain some insight into the seemingly bottomless energy source that drove this man into a way of life that was destroying everything around him. In the midst of one of our talks, I asked him about his father. Suddenly his mood dramatically altered. Clearly my question had exposed a deeply sensitive matter.
What slowly unfolded was a tale of extreme relational pain. His father, I learned, was a man given to extreme sarcasm and ridicule. He had regularly told his son, "You're a bum; you will always be a bum, nothing better!" He had heard this so many times that the words had become emblazoned as if on a neon sign in the centre of his private world.
Here was a man, now in his mid-forties, who had unconsciously made a lifelong commitment. He had committed himself to proving his father wrong. Somehow he would demonstrate with unimpeachable evidence that he was not a bum. It became a core preoccupation of his life, and he was not even aware of it.
Since a state of "un-bumness" was equated, in his mind, with hard work, high income, and the status of wealth, these things formed the cluster of objectives for this driven man. He would show that he was a hard worker by owning a business and making it the best in that section of the Yellow Pages. He would make sure that it produced large sums of money for him, even if some of the money was "dirtied" by the way it was obtained. The large house, the sports car, the season tickets among the finest boxes at Fenway would all be measurable disclaimers of the paternal charge of "bumness." And thus it was that my visitor became a driven man, driven to earn his father's respect and love.
Because his goals were all basically external, there was no need to cultivate an inner world. Relationships were not important; winning was. Spiritual health was not significant; physical strength was. Rest was not necessary; available time for more work was. And the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom was not a matter of value; sales technique and product innovation were.
He claimed that it was all part of his desire to provide for his family. Slowly we began to discover together that he was really trying to gain his father's affirmation and acceptance. He wanted to hear his father finally say, "Son, you're not a bum; I was really, really wrong."
What made this matter all the more bizarre was that the unpleasable father had been dead for several years. Yet the son, now in midlife, continued to work to gain an imagined approval. What had started as an objective became a habit of living, an addiction you could say, which he could not break.
WHY ARE PEOPLE DRIVEN?
Why do so many people appear to be driven? My friend is an extreme example of one reason. He typifies those who grew up in environments where "well done" was never heard. When such acceptance and affirmation is lacking, it is by no means unusual for the respect-starved person to conclude that more work, greater accumulation of symbols of success, or worldly praise will finally convince some significant person (a parent, for example) who has withheld approval to finally say, "Son (Daughter), you are not a bum after all. I'm terribly proud to be your father."
Many people in leadership positions share this sort of background and this sort of insecurity. Some leaders appear to be highly benevolent people, doing good things, and are praised for dedicated, selfless actions; the fact may be that they are pushed toward the hope of gaining the acceptance and approval of just one significant person in their past. And if they cannot gain that, then they develop an insatiable appetite for applause, wealth, or power from other sources in an attempt to compensate for the loss. Rarely, however, is satisfaction reached. This is because their pursuit is in the public world; the private world is left empty and wanting. And that is where the real ache lies.
Another source of drivenness is an early experience of serious deprivation or shame. In his book Creative Suffering, Paul Tournier points out that an enormous number of world political leaders over the past several centuries have been orphans. Having grown up in a context of personal loss in terms of intimate parental love and emotional closeness, they may have sought a compensatory experience in the embrace of the crowds. Behind their great drive for power may be the simple need for love. Rather than meeting this need through the ordering of the private world within, they have chosen to pursue it on the external level.
In a revelatory essay Susan Erikson Bloland, daughter of the great twentieth-century psychologist, Erik Erikson, wrote of the drivenness of her father to become a famous and influential man. Erikson, his daughter wrote, never knew who his father was. His mother had refused to disclose his identity. Throughout his lifetime, Erik Erikson drove himself from one achievement to another, imagining that if he did well enough, his father would appear and express admiration to his son.
Driven people can also come from backgrounds in which there has been a sense of great shame or embarrassment. My library includes a remarkably candid book, The Man Who Could Do No Wrong, by now-retired pastor Charles Blair. In it he describes his own childhood during the Depression days in Oklahoma. With pain he recalls his daily task of hauling the free government-issue milk from the local firehouse to home. As he carried the milk pail down the street, he had to endure what he felt was raw scorn from boys his own age. Out of the agony of such moments came the resolve that the day would come when he would never again carry a symbolic milk pail, which signified a feeling of worthlessness.
Blair tells the story of an unforgettable walk home from school in the company of a girl for whom he had strong feelings. Suddenly a boy with a shiny new bicycle came up beside them and offered the girl a ride. Without hesitation she hopped on to the back fender, leaving Blair behind as she and the other boy rode off together. The humiliation of that moment caused Blair to quietly resolve that someday he would have the equivalent of a shiny bicycle, that he would have the wherewithal to make impressions that would command the attentions and loyalties of others.
And those resolves burned their way into his life. They became a source of the drive that subsequently, by his own account, betrayed him. He would later need to own the most attractive automobile, lead the most beautiful and largest church, and wear the most stylish of men's fashions. These things would prove that he had made it out of the Oklahoma Depression. He was not worthless; he was not poor. He could prove it. Look!
Charles Blair was running from something, and that meant that he had to run toward something. Although his drive was clothed in all sorts of impressive spiritual motives, and although his ministry was remarkably effective, down at the centre were unresolved hurts of the past. Because these hurts remained a point of disorder in his private world, they came back to haunt him. They affected his choices and values and blinded him to what was really happening at a crucial moment of his life. The result? Serious disaster. Failure, embarrassment, and public humiliation.
But it must be added that he rebounded. That alone suggests hope for the driven man. Charles Blair, the driven man of earlier years, running from shame, is now a called man, and he deserves the admiration of his friends. I consider his book to be one of the most significant I have ever read. It ought to be required reading for any man or woman who is in leadership.
Finally, some people are simply raised in an environment where drivenness is a way of life. In a book called Wealth Addiction, Philip Slater details the backgrounds of several living billionaires. In almost every account there is indication that as children these billionaires made the accumulation of things and the conquest of people their amusement. There was little if any play for the purpose of pure fun or exercise. They only knew how to win, how to accumulate. It was what they saw their parents doing, and they assumed that it was the only way to live. Thus the drive to grow rich and powerful began in the earliest days.
To such people an ordered private world has little meaning. The only thing worth giving attention to is the public world, where things can be measured, admired, and used.
Of course, driven people come out of many other backgrounds, and these are but a few samples. But one thing is sure in all cases: Driven people will never enjoy the tranquillity of an ordered private world. Their prime targets are all external, material, and measurable. Nothing else seems real; nothing else makes much sense. And it all must be held on to, as it was with Saul,who found that power was more important than the integrity of a friendship with David.
Let us be sure we understand that when we speak of driven people, we are not merely thinking of a highly competitive businessperson or a professional athlete. We are considering something much more pervasive than workaholism. Any of us can look within and suddenly discover that drivenness is our way of life. We can be driven toward a superior Christian reputation, toward a desire for some dramatic spiritual experience, or toward a form of leadership that is really more a quest for domination of people than servanthood. A homemaker can be a driven person; so can a student. A driven person can be any of us.
HOPE FOR THE DRIVEN PERSON
Can the driven person be changed? Most certainly. It begins when such a person faces up to the fact that he is operating according to drives and not calls. That discovery is usually made in the blinding, searching light of an encounter with Christ. As the twelve disciples discovered, an audience with Jesus over a period of time exposes all the roots and expressions of drivenness.
To deal with drivenness, one must begin to ruthlessly appraise one's own motives and values, just as Peter was forced to do in his periodic confrontations with Jesus. The person seeking relief from drivenness will find it wise to listen to mentors and critics who speak Christ's words to us today.
He may have some humbling acts of renunciation, some disciplined gestures of surrender of things. Things that are not necessarily bad, but that have been important for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps the driven person will have to grant forgiveness to some of those who in the past never offered the proper kind of affection and affirmation. And all of that may be just the beginning.
Paul the apostle in his pre-Christian days was driven. As a driven man, he studied, he joined, he attained, he defended, and he was applauded. The pace at which he was operating shortly before his conversion was almost manic. He was driven toward some illusive goal, and later, when he could look back at that lifestyle with all of its compulsions, he would say, "It was all worthless."
Paul was driven until Christ called him. One gets the feeling that when Paul fell to his knees before the Lord while on the road to Damascus, there was an explosion of relief within his private world. What a change from the drivenness that had pushed him toward Damascus in an attempt to stamp out Christianity to that dramatic moment when, in complete submission, he asked Jesus Christ, "What shall I do, Lord?" A driven man was converted into a called one.
I could have wished this for the man who came to talk with me about his wife's demand that he leave their house. Time after time we talked about his insatiable drive to win, to earn, to impress. There were a few occasions when I thought he was catching the message, when I allowed myself to be convinced we were making progress. I actually believed that he was going to move the centre of his life from the public aspect of his world to the private side.
I could almost see him kneeling before Christ, offering up his drivenness, being washed clean of all the old, terribly painful memories of a father who had flung a sense of "bumness" into his private world.
How much I wanted my friend, the successful bum, to see himself a disciple called by Christ, and not one driven to achieve in order to prove something. But it never happened. And eventually we lost contact. The last I heard, his drivenness cost him everything: family, marriage, business. For it drove him right to his grave.
Extracted from Gordon MacDonald's Ordering Your Private World.
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