Staying in the Now

I had a great walk in the mountains yesterday. Wow, was it refreshing! I sure hope all my readers are taking their daily walks on the beach, in the mountains or just around the block, even if for just 5 minutes, to recharge your mental and physical battery!

Having said that (and, yes, I wrote about that not too long ago) you may wonder, as I have, why does even a 5 minute walk outside make such an impact on our minds and bodies? Well, I think I may have found the answer to that question. Let me go back a few days to explain how I came to what I think is the answer to that question.

On September 29th my daughter Cammy called and asked me to join her and her brother David for a so-called “restorative yoga” class on the night of September 30th (she also jokingly called it “advanced napping”.) You see, Cammy and all her brothers and sisters along with my wife see me every year on the 30th struggle through the day and sometimes have major melt downs. That’s because the 30th of September is the birthdate of my dear sweet daughter Kristin, who died at the tender age of 16. Cammy and David thought this yoga session might help me on this particular day. And man oh man, did it ever! But the reason it was so very helpful was basically the same reason my walks in the woods are helpful and, for that matter, even playing a good competitive game of tennis.

What is it? Well, let me explain what happened. When we arrived at the yoga center, my wife Kimberly, Cammy, David and I were led in to a darkened room where we sat down on our yoga mats and listened to the yoga instructor quietly and calmly give us direction to slowly position ourselves into some basic but relaxing yoga poses, adding in very gentle, alluring and peaceful far eastern type music.

I found myself going deep inside myself in both thoughts and emotions but the constant calm voice and direction of the instructor kept our minds, thoughts, and emotions in the present moment–in the great “right now”. She told us to not let our minds and thoughts get distracted by what we had done that day or what we were planning on doing later that night or the next day, but to focus only on the present moment.

She repeated these instructions many, many times to help us stay in the “now” and she did so in a very soft and gentle way. Yes, I followed every word and when I found my mind straying away from the present moment, I gently brought it back to “the now moment”. An hour and half later when we left the center I felt so high, so refreshed and content, and so lightened and lifted.

As I waked to the car it suddenly dawned on me why my mountain walks were so wonderful and mind boosting as were my real competitive games of tennis that get me so deeply involved on a mental level. I realized that it was these type of activities that tend to take us and keep us in the present moment, that great “in the now” moment. And that, my friends, gives our body, mind and soul that super boost that we feel during the experience and for minutes, hours and maybe even longer than that afterwards. And that is something that, in our super busy world, most of us just don’t get enough of! So how about putting that on your daily to-do list, each and every day, and see the difference it can make in your life.

The Key to a Great Life, At Every Age

When my wife Kimberly and I were riding on the Eurostar from London to Paris, (I highly recommend you ride that if you get the chance!) I overheard an American guy behind me telling a Frenchman how sad it’s going to be in a few years when, in his opinion, Social Security will be bankrupt and people won’t be able to retire or they may (God forbid) have to work till they’re 68 or 70 before they can retire. I heard that and thought, “Really? It would probably be a good thing!”

I started back in on this topic last week, I know, but it’s so important to realize that you get very little out of just sitting around, relaxing and doing nothing … at least not in the long term. A little downtime here and there and when on vacation is great but overall, work is what will keep you going and make you feel alive!

I was very impressed recently when my wife and I bumped into Robert Redford. He is so engaged and active and he still looks great to boot. He has just a few more wrinkles but at 77 years young he’s still working hard. He has a new movie coming out this year, “ALL IS LOST”, which struck me as a great phrase to add to this conversation. What I’m trying to say is, if you stay active and keep working then ‘All is NOT Lost’ but without work and goals and a really great reason to get up every morning, it might feel that way.

Having a purpose is critically important for every human being. A big driving purpose will keep us alive, active, and excited and can boost our self-esteem, keeping it up there where it should be. So don’t look at your Golden Years as the time to step back and do nothing. Think of it as a time to set new, huge goals, to renew your zest for life. That’s really what my book, How to Ignite Your Passion for Living, is all about—keeping that passion going by working on big goals with new challenges whether you’re 30 years or 50 years or 80 years young! An active life is a great life, at every age.

Just a little fun side comment about Robert Redford … as we were chatting I said to him “Oh, I see that my wife was kinda hitting on you,” and Redford quickly replied “Yes, and she missed.” A good and quick quip from a pro. I’m sure he’s had lots of practice!

Don’t Retire–Keep Engaged!

A few weeks ago my message was all about how critically important “Work” is for every human being on the planet. Well, I was waiting to catch a flight from Paris to Salt Lake City earlier this week and when I saw the cover story on Fortune Magazine. It really grabbed my attention. Why? Get this … the story is all about a 72 year old guy who is still working his buns off and risking huge amounts of money. Shouldn’t he be retired and taking it easy?

Ok you could assume that maybe he needs the money and can’t retire yet. But no, he’s a multi-billionaire! So why then is he still working and on top of that risking mega money to develop what Fortune calls “America’s Biggest Real Estate Project …Ever”.

I will tell you at least one very good reason why. Because he knows that to retire and just sit by the pool drinking Mai Tai’s–which he certainly can afford to do–will greatly diminish, if not totally destroy, his physical and mental health and at the same time it will do major damage to his sense of self-worth. So instead of letting himself wither away, Stephen Ross, the 72 year old I’m speaking of, is working on a 20 billion dollar project that is set to reinvent a huge swath of New York City. That would keep someone as sharp as they can be and certainly engaged!

As anyone who has been reading my blog knows I am closing in on the big 70 (only 200 days now), and I find myself, even though I don’t need the money, looking for and engaging myself in more and more projects and adventures (like these last 3 weeks in Europe.) I find that the harder I push myself towards social, physical, and financial goals the better I feel. However, because I don’t need to do anything at all I need to push very hard to stay active and keep on working! But I always see the result and I can tell you, it more than just a little worth it.

I think you can probably tell that I am trying to push any and all of my readers to do the same. Even if you are still young and not facing the 65 year old retirement number or are already pushing yourself towards big goals you can probably still be much more engaged and excited by setting even tougher goals. Plus you could encourage your parents, siblings, friends and neighbors who might be on the verge of retirement or already retired and give them a gentle nudge (or a kick in the butt!) to encourage them toward enhancing their lives by more fully engaging in work and staying super active in all parts of their lives. They will reap such huge rewards if they do.

 

Experience a Great Lesson

Most of the time the best way to learn the great lessons of life are through experience. And, wow, I sure saw the truth of that the last few days. What is kind of crazy is that just a handful of days before I had read about this exact same life lesson I recently experienced and skimmed right over it not learning a thing.

What lesson am I talking about? I’ll tell you but let me back up a bit first.

Right now, as I write this I am flying from Rome to the island country of Malta. It has taken this great getaway vacation, traveling from Paris to Rome to Brindisi to Malta and eventually to London, to learn what a few simple words in a book had just tried to tell me. This lesson is very simple but in our fast paced high tech world too many of us are forgetting about it, losing touch, and it is hurting us.

So what is the huge and simple great life lesson I learned or I should say relearned? Well, when you need a quick but solid mood boost, get up off your butt and go outdoors! See, I told you that it was simple. But it is no less important than any of the other great lessons in our lives. Just a bit of “green exercise” has been proven in ten different controlled studies to decrease stress, boost mood as well as self-control, and even enhance your ability to focus. All that from what might be just a 5 minute walk around the block.

I had read all this and agreed with it in my mind but it didn’t really hit home until I was cycling around the south of Italy. Then I felt it. And wow, it made such a huge difference in my mood and my mental clarity. I could sit here and just tell you about it but my own experience showed me that you really need to just get out and experience it for yourself. Remember the studies on this showed great improvement in the above categories with even very short outdoor time. So why don’t we all start adding this simple habit to our daily routines? Yes, take your kids cell phones and I pads from them and kick their butts out of the house too. It is a great experience for everyone.

 

The Self-Forgiveness Experiement

 

OK let’s explore the “What the Hell” effect I mentioned last week and the research that was done about self-forgiveness as it affects your future behavior and success or failure. The “What the Hell” effect was first coined by dieting researchers Janet Polivy and C. Peter Herman. Quoting from Kelly McGonigal’s book The Willpower Instinct, “These researchers noticed that many dieters would feel so bad about any lapse even if was just a piece of pizza or a bite of cake that they felt as if their whole diet was blown. Instead of minimizing the harm by not taking another bite, they would say, ‘What the hell, I already blew my diet. I might as well eat the whole thing.’”

Kelly goes on to recount the circumstances and outcome of an experiment on this behavior. “The two psychologists invited weight-watching women into the laboratory, then encouraged them to eat doughnuts and candy in the name of science. These researchers had an intriguing hypothesis about how to break the what-the-hell cycle. If guilt sabotages self-control, they thought, then maybe the opposite of guilt would support self-control. Their unlikely strategy: Make half these doughnut-eating dieters feel better about giving in.”

The women in the study were asked to finish off a doughnut then they had the women drink enough water to feel full. In the next step, the researchers divided the women into two groups giving the first group “a special message to relieve their guilt” while the second group were not told anything about going easy on themselves.

These same women were then served three large bowls of candy and asked to sample each candy and rate it. They could eat as much or as little as they liked. The idea was that if the women still felt guilty about eating the doughnut, they would likely say to themselves, ‘I already broke the diet, so what does it matter if I inhale these Skittles?’

After this taste test the candy bowls were all weighed to see what group ate the most. The results? “The women who received the special self-forgiving message ate only 28 grams of candy, compared with 70 grams by the women who were not encouraged to forgive themselves,” Kelly reports.

Wow, when you think about the overall implications of this experiment they are absolutely huge! Just forgiving yourself can be life changing. If you are paying attention and directing all or at least as most of that “self-talk” and “chatterbox” toward cutting yourself some slack, you would certainly be able to stay on track with your goals, even when you slip here and there. Just give yourself tons of forgiveness and watch your life get better and better by the day.

 

Moving Beyond Your Mistakes

So how have you been coming along with the self-compassion and forgiving of self?  Shortly after I wrote last week’s post on that subject I was playing doubles tennis with friends when I heard my partner chastising herself over a flubbed shot.  It didn’t stop there, though. She went on to berate herself on her over all  play even going back to several previous points and into mistakes she’d made in the previous game.  Wow, and that was just what she was saying out loud for everyone to hear.  I’m pretty sure her internal dialog was even more severe.

Suddenly, at that moment, I realized I was doing a bit of that “self-criticizing and beating myself up on my missed shots and mistakes, only I was doing it “inside my head”.  Yes my ol’ chatterbox was sabotaging my tennis game too.  Recognizing that, I immediately forgave myself for such thoughts and quickly started playing much, much better and we went on to win the set.

Strangely most of us are tough on ourselves but generous on others. Every time my partner made a mistake I would immediately tell her “Hey, no problem. We’ll get the next point.” Of course my positive words of forgiveness and encouragement should also be the words and thoughts that she should be saying internally and externally.

As I mentioned last week, studies have shown that self-criticism and beating up on yourself when you make a mistake leads to more mistakes and forgiving yourself leads to more success.   Kelly McGonigal makes that point over and over in her great book “The Willpower Instinct”. When she mentions self-forgiveness while she’s teaching a class she says “the arguments start pouring in. You would think I had just suggested that the secret to more will power was throwing kittens in front of speeding buses.” The students generally say “If I forgive myself, I’ll just do it again.” or “My problem isn’t that I’m too hard on myself–my problem is that I’m not self-critical enough!” But again the research pretty much proves that the more we forgive ourselves the more success we will have in the future.

What research was done and how it was done has a bit to do with the so called “What the Hell” effect. Come back and read next week’s blog and I will lay that out for you.

Beating Yourself Up vs. Forgiving Yourself

My daughter Cammy teaches yoga and has persuaded me to go a number of times–and yes my creaky body certainly benefits from all that posing and stretching–but her comments to the class at the end of each session finally got through to my brain. I’ve been over the top surprised about what a powerful and life enhancing message she was delivering all this time and it had totally passed me by.

Her simple statements didn’t sink in until I was re-reading Kelly McGonigal’s wonderful book The Willpower Instinct. My daughter would end all of her yoga classes saying “Thank yourself for putting forth the effort to come today and please cultivate more and more compassion for yourself–don’t be hard on yourself.” I’ve always thought her words were pretty good advice but WOW have I made a great discovery that puts those words in a category much, much greater than just “good advice”. Let me explain.

Anyone that reads my blogs knows I am a huge advocate of setting lots of goals, and tough ones, for yourself. I preach that all the time to anyone who will listen. My big time discovery is that I realized that when I fell short of my goals I’d been doing exactly the wrong thing to myself, the very thing that hurts me and makes it even more difficult to reach new goals in the future. What I’ve been doing (and you probably have been doing the same thing) is this: When I fail or fall short of a goal I beat myself up mentally and I certainly don’t have any compassion for myself. I, like most people, think that if I forgive myself for falling short of my goal, I’ll just do it again. However, that is simply not true.

As it turns out, research done by two psychologists from Louisiana State University and Duke University show that it’s forgiveness of self, not guilt and beating yourself up that increases your accountability. I was shocked. I read this in McGonigal’s book where she goes on to say “These findings fly in the face of our instincts. How can this be, when so many of us have a strong intuition that self-criticism is the cornerstone of self-control, and self-compassion is a slippery slope to self-indulgence?” But in this case our instinct is dead wrong!

This very smart and well-spoken author also mentions that “One reason forgiveness helps people recover from mistakes is that it takes away the shame and pain of thinking about what happened. The what-the-hell effect is an attempt to escape the bad feelings that follow a setback. Without the guilt and self-criticism, there’s nothing to escape. This means it’s easier to reflect on how the failure happened, and less tempting to repeat it.”

Isn’t that fascinating? We’ll talk more on this subject next week but in the meantime try forgiving yourself daily for any failure or falling short of what you have set out for yourself. Take time to give yourself great dosages of compassion and, yes, it’s okay to love yourself and a lot. Talk to yourself and give praise and love like you would to a kid that you love.

Live in the Now: Be Free of the Past and the Future

I hope you had a chance to read last week’s blog and have been practicing keeping aware of every moment and accepting it for what it is. Now here are a few hints that can help anyone to live in the moment or in the right now more readily and constantly. At least they have helped me and I hope they can do the same thing for you.

1. Be free of unease. Make a conscious effort to monitor your thoughts and feelings by constantly asking “What is going on in my mind right now?” Halt any worrying questions about the past or the future.

2. See if in those monitored moments you can catch yourself complaining in speech or thought. If so, you are probably “playing the victim”. Calmly silence that kind of chatter.

3. Always remember that to complain is not accepting of “what is” and it’s usually something that is in the past or something you anticipate that will happen in the future. Either do something about your complaint or accept it.

4. As you move, as you play or as you work, do it totally in the great “right now” as if this one moment is all there is and all you want.

It’s interesting to note that many times, even when a person is engaged in an activity that is meant to be fun and enjoyable, it can be ruined or at least diminished by what the brain is doing or not doing. I’ve noticed for example, that many times when I am playing a tennis match–especially in a tournament–that the more I think about a bad shot that I just made or wonder if I might be able to win this particular game or set I find myself not enjoying this game that I play in order to have fun. Plus I notice that when I am having thoughts about the recent past (the bad shot) or the future (if I can win this game, set, or match) I usually don’t play near as well as I know that I can. So I am losing in two ways—first, I am no longer having fun and second, I end up losing the match. That’s pretty dumb, don’t you agree? And it doesn’t have to be that way, not if I just work on training my brain to live “in the now” and I mean that “right this moment now”!

It’s certainly ok and even fun to recall and reminisce over good and fun times of the past and it’s quite necessary to do some planning and goal setting for the future but the key is, don’t spend the majority of your time in those two places. For maximum peace of mind, pleasure, and feeling of fulfillment, spends most of your life in the great “right now”. Make “the now” the primary focus of your life.

 

Revisiting “Living in the Now”

If you’ve been reading my blog for a little while, then you know how much I believe we need to re-read books and other information even when we think we know it well. You will be surprised how many things you pick up that you didn’t the first time. Plus, we often really need a reminder to get us refocused on the things we learned the first time we read that great book or article. Or blog post.

This week I’d like to re-visit an old but very critical and important subject I’ve written about before, one that brings so very much life to your years, and even years to your life. It’s the simple but very difficult daily habit of “living in the present moment” or more simply put “living in the now”. Let me just summarize a few key points that may help you (and me!) “Live In The Now”.

No. 1 Constantly remind yourself to direct your “inner chatter”. Focus on what you are doing and feeling at the given moment. Even when you are just walking to the mailbox or standing in line, be there in your mind with each step and each breath and keep your thoughts present and positive.

No. 2 Accept whatever the present moment contains–good or bad. Of course if it’s bad and you can change it, do so. But if you can’t change it then accept it and try to do so as if you’d chosen it. Always work with it not against it. Make your circumstances your friend.

No. 3 Remove wanting and craving and you end suffering. The Buddha taught that the root of all suffering is to be found in a state of constant wanting and craving. If you think about it you can see that “wanting and craving” is certainly opposite or, at minimum, much removed from truly living in the “NOW”.

Next week, I’ll give you a few tips on how to make this process and state of being easier to achieve. In the meantime, just work on being aware and mindful of everything you do at every moment and every thought that goes through your mind. It takes practice but it can be done and it will make you happier to be in the very moment you have right now.

The Biggest Leap is the Small Step of Getting Started

Last week I spoke about the key to reaching your goals–taking small but regular steps towards what you want. The reason this works is because the small steps seem so do-able while the big leaps can feel overwhelmingly huge. Giving yourself just one small step at a time makes your tasks less daunting and you are more likely not just to start them but complete them!

For example, I apply this concept to my daily work outs to push myself to get them done. On the many days that I don’t want to climb on the stair master or put time in on the elliptical machine or go on a challenging mountain hike, I make a little deal with myself. I say, “Ok, since I am very tired or in the wrong mood I am only going to work out for just 5 or 10 minutes” Then, with only that minimal time to cover, I begin, knowing in the back of my mind that just “starting” is sometimes the very hardest part and knowing from experience that when I get to 5 or 10 minutes I will almost always just keep going.

This approach works for just about anything. I put myself in this mindset of just starting with a small goal to get myself going on my daily business tasks (especially since I really don’t have to work if I don’t want to), to the writing of this blog, or even working on a new book. Always keep in mind that just the “starting” can push you to make that big breakthrough on any project or goal that you have. Take that first step and you will see that the next steps follow more easily not to mention you will have the momentum of already working on it to keep you moving forward.

So what are you dreading doing today? Just set a small goal to get you started and see where that takes you. Daily small steps, daily small goals, even daily small acts of kindness and charity tend to compound and grow to be huge successes and can change your history, your life, make you famous or make you a fortune and even change, for the better, the history of the world. You’ll just never know what you can affect until you start!

 

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