Being a victim is not just an individual activity. It can turn into a social gathering as well. In fact, nothing brings people together like complaining together. So it's not only addictive as an individual to tell the story of the victim, but it's also a way in which we are codependent. We help other people be victims, and we feel victimized, and they help us feel victimized and take compassion on us while we take compassion on them. And then we feel like friends. So I'm going to do something very dangerous here. I'm going to teach you the questions that will bring up the story of the victim in full force. I hope once you see the questions, you'll never ask them again. But the questions of the victim, even though they taste very good, will lead people down the path to destruction because they won't be able to do anything about that. And yet people will feel like you're a true friend. The person that's giving you these questions is not the real friend. The first one is, what happened to you? So it's the sense of something bad happened to you; tell me how things outside of yourself made it happen. The second is, who wronged you? Who did this? Because there's always someone, there's always a guilty party, someone that did something wrong and then they created the trouble for you. The third one is, what should they have done? See, victims live in the world of should. They shouldn't have done this, so what should they have done? And you'll see that if you ask this question, the other person will have a hundred answers, oh, they should have done this, da, da, da. It's always the other person who should change to stop the problem. The next one is, what should they do now? And that would be another barrage of answers because what they did was wrong, and they should have done something different, but now at least they should fix it doing this, this, this and this. And the last one could be, what punishment do they deserve? And then you'll see people's fangs coming out. They're (slurps) ooh now I get to take revenge because the sweetest thing of being a victim is you feel justified in being mean, in having malice and the desire to take revenge on those who created the problem for you. So it's very sweet; that's a really fun conversation. And if two of you are watching this together, I encourage you to just speak about any problem using these questions. Like who wronged you? What did they do wrong? What should they do now? And you'll see it's an easy flow. Everybody smiles; everybody's happy. I do this in my workshops and people love it. I mean, they can't get enough. But then stop and realize that by telling that story, you're going nowhere. It's really like a drug; it's disabling you. It feels good, but it totally disables you.

It's easy to see the victim story in very dramatic situations. One of my greatest heroes, Viktor Frankl, who was an inmate in Auschwitz. He wrote a book called, "Man in Search of Meaning" about how he discovered this notion of responsibility while he was in the most dire circumstances imaginable. Now, that calls our attention. But it doesn't have to be so dramatic. It could be something as simple as a colleague not responding a phone call and us feeling victimized, how could he not respond? Or our partner not doing the chores. Oh, she said she was going to wash the dishes and she didn't or he was going to take the trash out and he never, or he always gets late and never calls me before. There are so many things at home, at work, with friends, I mean anything that bothers us. Anything that bothers us. It's an occasion in which this choice is possible. Will we stop with the story of the victim. Feeling out of control and at the mercy of external circumstances or other people? Or are we going to see that as the context? That's the way it is. People don't respond to our phone calls or they just don't want to connect with us or they'll do things that we find hurtful. That is just the nature of things. We are not in control of everything that happens in life. But then in each one of these occasions we have a moment of choice. We have the moment where we can stop seeing only the part of story that pertains to external circumstances and we can add to the picture. We don't exclude that. That's there, it's true. Gravity exists, it rains, there's traffic, things like that. But we add the part of the story that's within our control. I started saying yes, the meeting ran over but I chose to stay. I was afraid to stand up and say, I'm sorry I have another meeting and I am going to leave. I did not want to say that to upset, to not upset the meeting manager. But the price of not saying that was that I was late to the other meeting. This other price I want to pay or not want to pay, I'm not suggesting you always leave the meetings. I'm saying, you have a choice. And if you choose to stay, you stay. And if you choose to leave, you stand up and you leave. But you see yourself in the driver's seat. That is the shift from being a victim to being a player. I call this being a player because you are in the game. As a victim you are watching the game from the outside. When I was a child, I go to watch soccer with my dad in Argentina. And people were euphoric and excited. Oh, we won, we won, we won! Goal, we score, everybody hugging themselves there at the stadium and then some bad days it was, they lost. We didn't lose, they lost. It's the players that lost. So in a sense, we all want to be players when things go well. But we don't want to be the player when we lose. It's they lost. Somebody else lost. And I see that pattern all the time. I'm suggesting to change that. It's absolutely the opposite. When you win, okay, it's fine, celebrate everything. But it is exactly when you lose that it's most important to say, how did I participate in the loss? How did I contribute? Because by making myself a part of the problem, I can make myself a part of the solution. By realizing how my behavior influenced an undesirable outcome I can say, okay I'll change my behavior so I can create a different outcome. But I have to see the link first between the behavior and the outcome. If I cut those two and say, I have nothing to do with this. Well, I can't have anything to do with changing this, either. And that's why the player is in the game. And that's what Viktor Frankl also found out. He was stuck in a concentration camp and he couldn't get out. But he realized that the last freedom, the ultimate dignity of a human being does not depend on where he is. It depends of where he or she puts him or herself. So this spiritual commitment to choose my response to difficulties is what creates pride, is what creates peace of mind. And it doesn't necessarily create success. I mean, well, it can contribute to success and in the case of Viktor Frankl, he survived but he says the best of us did not come back. Because many people who acted with full integrity and took the player position, they still were killed. There's no promise that the world is going to work out and things are going to go your way. What the promise is, is that by making this choice of being in the game you can play fairly. You can distinguish yourself. You can choose your behavior towards success but also with unconditional integrity. So you display your values, no matter what.

The confusion of thinking that being a player means to be a winner is terrible, because when people are not winners, they don't want to be players. Being a player means that in the moment when you realize that something is hurting you, you stop, you think, you take a breath, and say, "How do I want to respond to this?" And that's my call to action for you. Next time you're tempted to take the story of the victim, because something goes wrong, just listen to that story, listen to that story in your head, but don't let it come out. Stop it. That's like doing a diet. Now, next time you are tempted to eat the chocolate cake, just feel the temptation, but don't eat it. Choose something instead. And instead of the story of the victim, choose the story of the player. Find a way that you can say, "I want to ask myself, "I want to inquire within, how do I want to respond "to this situation in a way that maximizes the chances "that I will get what I want, is success, but also "guarantees that when I look back, when I look "in the mirror, I will be proud of how I chose to behave?"

A hero is not the person that accomplishes incredible physical things. Maybe we admire those people because they have the discipline to do it, but it's the discipline, it's not just the physical accomplishment, but it's the moral firework that enables these athletes to go wherever they need to go to reach beyond what has happened in the past. But you don't need to be a world-class athlete to be a hero. In fact, some of the most incredible acts of heroism are made by simple people like you and me. One story that really rocked me when I read it is the second part of an experiment. You may know the first part. Paul Milgram is a famous researcher from Stanford, and he had an experiment where he brought people in, normal people, but he went to test how these people would respond to authority. So let's say there were 10 people from the outside, but mixed with them, there was one person that was this confederate, was an artist, an actor, so they put 11 and appeared to randomly choose the actor to be, quote, the learner. So the actor was going to be the learner. They put the actor inside a lab and hooked him to some electric wires, and the experiment was for the people outside, which had to give feedback to the learner where he made a mistake with an electric jolt, and there was a dial that went from zero to 400 volt, and at 200, said danger, and there was a skull and bones, and 400 said dead, or something, I mean just horrible signs that said don't do this, and the experiment was with a man in a white lab coat that the only thing he was allowed to say, this is one of the experimenters, please continue with the experiment. He wasn't yelling at people, he wasn't punishing them, he wasn't threatening them, he only said, "Please continue with the experiment." So what happened is the first person would go there, the others were watching, and the experimenter would say, here's the experiment, if he makes a mistake, you give him a jolt with the button, and then we'll raise the dial every time. And people started getting uncomfortable, they didn't know that was the case, that that's what they were asked to do, but they started doing it, and then after 100 volts, the jolts became painful, and the actor started screaming. Now there was no real electricity, it was the guy screaming, but they didn't know. They actually thought they were giving the jolts. Well the question was how far would these people get, when after 300, the person would go unconscious? And the experimenter keeps saying, "Please continue with the experiment." Well they thought that there's a three percent of psychopaths in any population, so maybe one out of the 10, or they did this many times, they said maybe three, five percent of people would get to a dangerous level. Well it turns out that fully, two thirds of the people got all the way to a deadly discharge. It's shocking. Amazing that they couldn't believe how people would obey authority, and just do horrible things and have no sense of morality to stop that and say, "I'm not doing it." That's the bad part of the experiment. But they did it again with a change. They had two confederates. One was the actor, but the other was another actor which was chosen to be the first one. And this first actor, in front of everybody else, rebelled. So when the experimenter said, "Please continue with the experiment." Said, "No, I'm leaving." And stood up and walked. After that, 90 percent of the people walked. Only one person would continue. That's heroism. That's what a hero does, it says, I will stand for the truth, I will stand for what's right, I will walk away, and the example of that can change the world. To be a hero, you do the right thing. You choose to express your values in the face of difficult circumstances, and you give an example to other people that that is the way to live.

The first temptation is to be a victim. It feels so good. It's so easy to fall into that that most people live in that state. Hopefully by now you're aware that that's dangerous and you will have the discipline not to fall into that temptation because if it's so easy to say, "Oh, now I learned this, and now I'm going to be a zealot. "I'm going to teach the world not to be victims," and then you just go around pointing. "Oh, you're a victim, and you're a victim, "and you're a victim, that's a victim." And it's very, very damaging. Don't do it. That's insulting, it's not going to help anybody else, and you'll lose all your friends. It's not funny. There's some truth of the matter, and the truth is a person is hurt. When someone tells the story of the victim, they are in pain. They're suffering. Something bad happened to them. So before you say anything, you have to listen. You have to listen empathically. You have to understand what happened to them. You have to realize that they're in pain. And then the key question is how do you do that without creating this co-dependence, without colluding with them? They're saying, "Oh, wasn't that person terrible? "Look what they did to me." And you feel the desire to support them, but real support is not to fall into the temptation of being victims with them. Engage with them in a conversation that pivots from being a victim to being a player and from being a player to adding this dimension of heroism that we've talked about. How do you do that? Well, you have to decouple two things, the truth of the external situation and the truth of the internal pain from the untruth that that is all there is to it. That is not true. It's true that traffic is there. It's true that I'm anxious because I'm late. But it's not true that there's nothing I can do about that. You may not be able to do anything about traffic, and you may not be able to do anything about your anxiety in the moment, but you're able to pick up a phone and call and say, "Look, I'm late. "How can we deal with this?" There's always something you can do. So how do you do this with another person when they're telling a victim story? Well, you listen, and you ask them, "And how do you feel about that?" Then they'll be able to say, "Oh, I feel bad because of this," and then you generally express your empathy, your sorrow. But then after that, you ask a very simple question. It's just one pivotal question. "Would you like to do something about this?" And the person will be a little shocked. "Well, what do you mean?" Yeah, I mean, you've told me what happened to you, and I realize that it's painful, but is there something you would like to do to make it better? And most people say, "Yes, I don't know what to do." No, but I'm not asking you if you know what to do. I'm simply asking would you like to do something? And everybody I ask, the moment I ask the question, it's obvious the answer is yes. If you're suffering, you'd like to do something about it. And then the question is, well, let's think about it. How could you do something? What could you do? What's within your control to respond to this situation? And shifting to a future focus. So instead of looking back at what happened, shifting to what could you do to make it better in the future opens a whole new conversation. And then asking, "And what would you need to do "to be proud of yourself?" Even if you can't accomplish what you need or what you want, is it possible for you to feel strong and proud because you did the right thing? Everybody will say yes. So victim, player, and hero are for you and I. I mean, you and me, we can discuss this. We can talk about how we learned this. But let not take it out into the world as a way to beat people up. It's not a stick or just some sort of weapon to make people feel bad or chastise them. It's a distinction to open new possibilities, and the possibility requires empathy, understanding the pain, and then shifting the backward looking towards forward looking and creating a sense of empowerment in the person. When you can do that, you may not have as many friends as you'll get by distributing the drug of victimhood, but the friends you have will thank you for life.