Introduction: 2 of 3

Counterfeiting: Defining Your Community


Counterfeiting refers to the mis-classification of your experiences. More than a mask you put on to deceive the world around you, counterfeiting is deception of yourself. You begin to define peak experiences in terms that lack the power and enduring quality of the genuine peak experience. You train yourself to be contented with an inferior quality of life that, in time, ceases to motivate you. Worse yet, I gain no motivation from your experience. You accept mediocrity as excellence. Depth of insight, genuineness of relationship, clarity of role is judged by how well it fits with your current understanding rather than the height of standard it calls you to obtain.

You begin to mistake counterfeited behavior as acceptable. You begin to display counterfeit behaviors because they look and feel positively reinforcing. But, often the short duration of your reinforcement and the lack of sustainability reveal that, in the long run, the behavior and relationships created on the basis of the counterfeit do not result in achievement of your goals.

The key is to genuine interaction is to risk what you have come to protect, your feelings, and to speak your truth without sparing the feelings of others. The mechanism is to live within the seeming contradiction of valuing others and their opinions and living as a captain, decisive. Knowing the difference between counterfeit and the genuine is to cultivate diverse sources of information. The potential harm of being wrong decreases with the amount of knowledge considered in the deliberation of a decision. And, in the end, the choice is yours to make and to live with…and to celebrate. No matter the outcome, you acted genuinely allowing me to make my decision in an atmosphere of genuineness.