The Dickens Process works for Billions’ Wendy Rhoades, and in real life

Everyone’s favorite fictional performance coach, Wendy Rhoades, is back at it in the first episode of Showtime’s Billions, now in its third season. She has her work cut out for her — her boss, Bobby Axelrod, is banned from trading, and his employees at Axe Capital are struggling to find their way forward. For inspiration, she turns to another fictional character. Wendy offers to help Bobby deal with his dilemma by taking him through a technique created by real-life coach Tony Robbins called the Dickens Process. The Dickens Process is an interesting approach. The idea comes from the Charles Dickens tale A Christmas Carol. In the book the villain, Ebenezer Scrooge, is transformed overnight by visions of three ghosts: Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come.  The emotional impact of those three visions fundamentally changes how Scrooge sees himself and others, and enables him to become a better man.The Dickens technique is designed to trigger the same kind of transformative change. First, you must identify your “limiting beliefs” — ways of thinking and understanding the world that are holding you back from being as successful and fulfilled as possible. That’s important work for all of us, but the Dickens Process takes the work to the next level.

How the Dickens Process works

In the Dickens Process, you must emotionally connect with the weight and the pain your limiting beliefs are causing you. That means travelling back into the past to feel how those beliefs have damaged you and those around you. It means facing what those beliefs are costing you in the present — financially, interpersonally, spiritually. And it means experiencing what your future will be like — five years from now, ten years from now — if you continue to hold those beliefs. The goal is to “see it, hear it, feel it.” Transformative change rarely happens on the basis of thinking alone. It requires powerful emotional honesty to energize us to do the hard work of improving ourselves. The Dickens Process is designed to accelerate that journey.

A word of warning though. If you want to utilize the Dickens Process, I strongly recommend that you only do so with an experienced, qualified coach. This kind of exploration can trigger very powerful feelings, so you need a guide you respect and trust. As my father, an expert therapist, said, “Only spill your guts to someone when you are sure they know how to put them back in the right place.”

If you are interested in working with a real-life performance coach, email me.