Boggles - Mindfulness Videos Articles and Tips

Coaching Videos & Tips - June 18 2020 No.657

DON'T GET AHEAD OF YOURSELF

It's a common roadblock to action, an everyday curse, a deep well of worry and one of the best ways we have to tie our shoe laces together just as we gear up to run life's great race... what-iffery! And you need to stop it.

You can download the audio of today's video - simply right click and save to your device - Download Today's Audio! And, if you really want to put an end to the endless loops of thought that your mind throws at you, why not look over soem of the 656 previous editions in The Archive!

 

Today's Quick Tip

Set yourself two or three tasks for this week... things you want to do or achieve that somehow relate to your grander goals, your big objectives - things that you have more than a fighting chance of actually doing!

Write them down, handwrite them. And keep the piece of paper handy so that, when you do do them, you can give yourself the pleasure of ticking them off as done.

Your mind needs recognition for your achievements and who better to give you that recognition than you, yourself.

All too often, we are our own harshest critics... why not take a turn at giving yourself that pat on the back that you deserve... it's one of the key steps towards bringing flow into your life.

In business it's an integral part of strategic planning... they call it scenario planning - a fancy name for what if this, what if that, what if the other.

When I started working for myself fist in February 1996, I created a number of strategic plans for a variety of organisations on a couple of different continents. After a couple of years, I realised that I was doing work that never bore fruit... like every other strategic plan on the face of the earth, my creations were never implemented as designed. How could they be - things keep changing and we've no idea what's around the corner. How many businesses had a strategic contingency for a pandemic that closed down most of the world overnight? Can't imagine Airbus or Boeing, Quantas or Air France had built no business at all into their strategy for 2020! OK, it's an extreme - but very real - example of the waste of thinking that you've got all your bases covered.

In our personal life it's even worse... our scenario planning is almost always negative - it's the way we're wired. As a result, it is a source of worry and inaction. Whilst we should be immersing ourselves in the here and now of life, we're frozen on the spot by thought... some future spot, some useless thought.

Do not get ahead of yourself. Never allow your mind take you down future dark alleys that only exist in your mind. Only the now exists and the future nows you'd love to experience, the objectives you'd like to achieve, the intentions you have for you and yours on this great adventure we call life will only ever come to pass if you get with where you are: the reality of the here and now where it's all actually happening, right now, for real.

You may recollect my video a few weeks ago where I did my very best to explain the concept of mindfulness... over the increasingly loud strimming going on just across the road...

What you don't know is that my friend, the man with the strimmer, had thought about strimming the edges of his field for about three weeks. He'd emerge from his farmhouse and consider the length of the edges - rubbing his chin in vague astonishment that the grass had grown so much: "The grass is growing really quickly this Spring" he explained to me.

After about a week, he started taking the strimmer out of the shed. He'd lie it on the ground and comtemplate it - sometimes for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. This went on for four days.

The day finally arrived. With the strimmer strapped to his back he embarked on mowing down the first seven or eight meters of roadside... and then the rains came - he should have seen them coming - the sky was black as night!

It was two days later - after another day of contemplation - that I made that video!

   

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