Winning the lottery – be careful what you wish for!
09 Sep 2013
Here are two stories of people with low self-worth, which proves that potential has no known limits except those we impose ourselves or choose or allow to be imposed upon us. There is no better example of this than two people who came into huge wealth...
In 1961 Viv Nicholson, a factory worker from Castleford, won £152,000 on the pools (which is equivalent today to about £3 million). She promised to 'spend, spend spend', and within four years she'd done just that. Later she admitted she found it difficult to cope with suddenly finding herself so rich. Being rich was totally at odds with her self-image, so she went about getting rid of it.
In 2002 bin man Michael Carroll won £9.7m on the National Lottery. Imagine, a 19 year old bin man coming into possession of amount of money it would take him 1000 years to earn! He immediately bought four homes, a villa in Spain, a fleet of cars, a stake in a football club, gave £400,000 away to friends, brought huge amount of heavy-duty gold jewellery, and spent £1 m on drugs. The self-proclaimed 'King of Chavs' has now spent the lot.
Viv and Michael didn’t have the self-image of multimillionaires and by getting rid of the money they were behaving in a manner that they thought would readdress the imbalance. Such self-destructive behaviour is not uncommon with celebrities who find it hard to come to terms with their sudden rise to fame and fortune. It's been named the Paradise Syndrome.
So if you win a million, you better start to think like a millionaire. And it follows that you need to start thinking you're a success if you want to become one. What is stopping you is you, and those things in the coaching world are called gremlins. More on gremlins in a later blog.
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