Coaching Videos & Tips - February 6 2019 No.591
THE EXPERIENCE OF ACHIEVING
We experience the moment or, at least, in the rare moments that we find ourselves "in the zone" we experience pure experience. Success and happiness may be the product of doing but they are, in essence, an experience... this must inform how we set our goals and objectives.
A DECADE'S RESOURCES
My weekly videos, tips and articles have been published, every week, since Dec.2008. Take a look around The Archive - you'll find all kinds of interesting things!
You may wonder why today's Quick Tip is about the past... but bear with me because it's all about letting our positive mental resources inform our goal setting.
Make a little time today or over the coming days to think about, reflect upon and reminisce on some really good experiences you've had in the past. Reflect on how it felt, allow yourself that grin or smile... just bring that positive mental resources into focus.
Happiness, exhileration, annoyance, frustration... these are things that we experience or, should I say, think or believe we experience, for we really only fully experience something when our breath is, quite literally, taken away... be that by way of the natural high experienced through extreme sports or a beautiful sunset or, at the other end of the spectrum, by what psychology calls a "catastrophic event" - like witnessing the threat of loss of life, yours or someone in close proximity. Everything else cannot really be described as an experience - more like a quasi-experience, one which is "experienced" through the fog of thought and prejudice (meaning that we prejudge everything through our own thoughts).
And, yet, today's video talks of experience. Quite obviously, the first point that I need to make is that, the more we train our minds to pay attention to the here and now, the more we park our prejudicial thoughts, the more we actually experience the reality of the here and now. So, as we meditate, we inevitably and inexorably move from the mindlessness of thought-driven everyday existence to full-senory experience of the here and now. In short, we can train ourselves to fully experience. But, like much of what I talk about, this is just one piece of a two-piece equation.
The second piece is, indeed, that "natural high" that I mentioned above. We've all had those magic moments or, as a client recently described tham "happy moments" - because happiness (or joy) is probably one of the closest encounters we have with real experience. And we've all had these encounters - hence this morning's Quick Tip - which, in turn, enables us to describe the experience of a goal that is yet to be achieved to our own subconscious mind. We can, quite literally, take our own breath away.
We could focus on members of the US Administration, the carry on in the UK Parliament or, indeed, the weird and wonderful world of celebrity behaviour or screen actors this week... but this column is called Normal Crazy People - as distinct from Extraordinarily Crazy People!
So, let's stick with my good friend and neighbour, Jean-Robert, just across the road who I met, with his head buried in his car's engine no more than 100 metres from home. "I think she might be destroyed" he said lovingly about a car he's had and cared for, for over a decade...
Jean-Robert had lent his car to his best friend, Fred who had destroyed his own diesel car by filling it with petrol. As a thank you, Fred had filled Jean-Pierre's petrol car with... diesel!
Ah... mindlessness, where would I be without it!