The Most Important Steps are the Small Ones
Here’s a thought that’s been coming to the top of my mind a lot recently–it’s about taking seriously all the little things we have to do to reach our goals. I’ve put off some small things I need to do as I have been rather occupied lately traveling. I’ve had all these wonderful conversations with intriguing people and my mind and spirit are overflowing! I do love talking about BIG ideas and courageous goals but those grand visions aren’t realizable without all the individual steps you take in between.
In Chapter 6 of my book, How To Ignite Your Passion for Living, I talk about how to make a big dream do-able by breaking it down into all the smaller steps. But also consider that it’s the small steps and the individual decisions you make, not the big ideas you have, that determine if you are successful. If just a few of your small steps take you off the path, or you fail to take those small steps, your big, grand, genius ideas just aren’t going to happen.
So next time you put off the small things which you may not like to do, or for which you find other activities more pleasant, remember those are the building blocks of your dreams and every time you decide to do something else other than take a small necessary step, you are stepping away from your dream, not just an unpleasant task.
Gratefulness Takes Action
OK here is the $64,000 dollar question. What should you and I choose to do? Be mindful of what we have and be grateful most of the time, reaping the benefits from that attitude along the way or whine and complain and be ungrateful and end up unhappy and miserable?
Ok, I know that’s not to tough a question but isn’t it funny that regardless of the answer, we so often fall into an ungrateful mode in our daily life? So what do we do about that?
Well, maybe we just need to practice it more often, be mindful of our attitude and stop the complaining when we realize what we are doing. Let’s just go out and do it, maybe 3 or 4 times a day, and see the difference it makes in our lives and the people around us. But we just can’t think about it. We need to take action, make it important in our lives. Start now. Write or call someone or post to your favorite social network site–just put something out there, saying that you are grateful and want never to forget it. And start reaping the benefits.
The Measure of a Person–Action
Emotions ran high all over the country after the news of Bin Laden’s death. Words and sentiments were streaming across the net, reflecting the mixed emotions of joy, sadness, relief, and, most profoundly, the struggle we face, coming to terms with the violence of the act so many of us wanted to cheer and be thankful for. So many decisions we make come with consequences we find difficult to accept as our doing but we do need to take action so as to not miss out on opportunities or, in this case, help protect ourselves.
Our leaders faced an enormously difficult decision–securing our country but also actively seeking to end a life and potentially lose other lives in the process. You can see just how torturous this decision was for our president, a man who visited another victim of violence, Representative Gifford, before making the decision to order another form of violence. The decision was not made lightly or rashly. But it was made.
A great number of quotes are being repeated across the net as people look for ways to express their feelings about this event. Unfortunately, a number of them are incorrect, a quote attributable to Martin Luther King, Jr. being one of the most persistent. But here is one I haven’t seen that is attributable to that great and courageous man, and is one idea that I think we all would benefit from contemplating for a moment today:
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy–Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love, 1963
35 Years Is Enough
When you ‘retire’ it is not time to sit down and watch the world go by. It is time to go re-read your favorite 10, 20 or 100 books, to re-learn all those things that may have slipped slowly away over the years. It’s time to re-connect with old friends and make new friends. It’s time to start a new business or donate your time to a great cause. It’s time to visit a few 3rd world countries and see how many people you can help. It’s time to improve learn, and re-learn.
If you are thinking, “Hey, I don’t have enough energy to do some let alone all of the aboveâ€, well, then maybe you need to re-fire yourself by setting a goal to generate more energy. I am talking about rebuilding your body and mind through a regiment of physical exercise and a super-charged diet. Eat more and more fruits and veggies. Set a goal to stop sitting around just watching TV. Get up and move about. You’ll see that the movement itself, whether it’s walking, running, hiking, tennis, bowling even just playing pool, will energize and re-fires you all by itself.
Then once you have some of that renewed energy running through you, get back to living, not retiring. You have so many more years yet and so much to do.
Never retire–Re-fire!
Recently I got a phone call from a friend I knew when we were 20. As it turns out my friend, Keith Karren, has written a great book, “Boomer”, about the issues facing baby boomers as they head into retirement. Throughout the book Keith keeps saying, “Never retire–just re-fire”, a sentiment not very different from what I say in my book “How to Ignite Your Passion for Living”. However, Keith goes a little deeper when it comes to applying this to retirement.
We got to talking about this huge problem that most retired people face. They find themselves thinking “Who am I if I am no longer a business person, teacher, doctor, pilot or clerk?” Sure, at first it seems just wonderful not to have to go to work every day but after a while you miss the structure, camaraderie, goals, etc. You say “Oh, I’m retired now” when people ask what you do and you don’t even know what that means. If you think about it, retired is a terrible word. It comes across as a label that says your life is over, that it is worthless and has little or no meaning.
Well my old friend Keith writes all about this problem in his book. When I first read “Never retire–just re-fire” I was myself, fired up by this phrase. The idea of re-firing is to get you excited or re-excited about living. It means setting new goals and totally re-energizing yourself for this next phase of your life. And that’s a heck of a lot better than sitting around waiting to die. When you retire, you still have another 25-35 years of living yet to do. Just think of all you did in your last 35 years! That’s a lot of time to do a ton of exciting and productive things. Just trade in your retirement for a bit of re-fire-ment!
Repetition is the Best Teacher
My good friend Paul J. Meyer (who sadly passed away a while ago) used to always say “Don’t read 1,000 books but choose 100 of the very best books and read them over and over again.” Spaced repetition is how we remember and makes it easier for us to practice what we learn in our daily lives because the ideas become ingrained and natural.
This idea hit me hard recently when I realized that the basic concept also applied to other things such as my tennis game. I had mastered the best way to hit a forehand many years ago but over the years I stopped practicing that technique, just stopped doing what I knew I should do, and, sure enough, my forehand went to hell. When I got into competing, I had to relearn my forehand all over again. Relearning was hard but it did make a huge difference in my game (Watch out Roger Federer!) On the other hand (no pun was intended!) I could have skipped that whole trying process by simply revisiting the technique and practicing the points on a regular basis. Learning it once is never enough.
This idea is the same whether it’s repeatedly reading books that teach you how to better your life, keeping up on a skill, or revisiting places or people that inspire and energize your spirit. These are all opportunities for learning that if we come back to over and over, we will not forget and will make practicing what we’ve learned a natural and habitual action.
Change Your Scenery
It’s good to be back in the shadow of the Rockies. After being in Hawaii these last few months I can really appreciate the beautiful Utah landscape, arid and harsh as it appears sometimes. Hawaii is lush and breathtaking but Utah, has amazing color and spectacular formations. I’m always happy to get to either home after time in the previous.
In the same way, you don’t have to be stuck with just one goal, one hobby, or one set of tasks all the time. Being able to move between two items will give you a continued appreciation of both. So if you find yourself getting burned out on a particularly trying set of tasks, move to something else, something completely different if possible.
For instance, if you are starting a business and have been working on marketing plans for weeks, switch gears and work on development for a while. The change in “scenery” can give you’re a boost of inspiration and recharge your enthusiasm for the marketing that will get your newly developed products out there.
And if you’ve been holed up all winter, welcome the spring by getting out somewhere and waking up your senses. A literal change of scenery will do you good all the way around. Our minds crave novelty and novelty brings us mega satisfaction, as I am sure you have experienced many times. We just sometimes need a reminder to step out of the habitual.
Inspiration for Change from Across the Sea
Since December of last year, the Middle East has been in turmoil, unrest growing from grumbling to full scale rebellion all across the region. Protesters of these countries commonly cite the inspiring events that occurred in the small Mediterranean country of Tunisia whose citizens were the first to drive actual and dramatic governmental change in the region through demonstrations and protests.
I have to say it’s been impressive, as well as painful, to watch. But this is what change is. It causes pain as well as elation. It topples the familiar and even comfortable status quo while presenting all the wonderful possibilities it brings. It wrecks some, if not all of what was built previously to clear ground to build up for new lives, practices, and dreams.
I know the trials these people are going through in the Middle East make many of our struggles seem insignificant. But they are OUR struggles and if the people in Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain, Libya, and the many other countries all over the world fighting against oppression and corruption can bravely move forward with their momentous tasks, we really should be able to pull together enough courage to move forward with the goals we’ve set for ourselves. Tunisia’s circumstance may not relate to our own exactly, but their passion and determination can be an inspiration to enact the change we know we need in our own lives.
Battling Depression: It is not WHO you are
When asked who we are, we often reply with listing our common activities such as our job, hobbies, or position in the family, or we may list our physical characteristics such as hair color, stature, or ethnicity. However, this is not who we are just parts of what we are.
In the same and more detrimental manner, we tend to identify ourselves to ourselves by things we see as deficiencies such as being overweight, not smart enough, being a procrastinator or being pessimistic. The issue with this type of thinking is that it perpetuates the problem that lead us to identify ourselves as our struggles rather than seeing our issues as being separate from who we are.
Eckhart Tolle explains how these lead to perpetual cycles of disorder especially when it comes to psychological pain. He notes in his book, “The Power of Now”, that identifying the pain as you, your actual being, allows the pain to not only live as you but feed on this thought of it being your identity. If you think of yourself as a depressed person, you are giving the depression the authority to take over so that no matter what you try to do you do it as a depressed person, not the true self that exists separate from the mood disorder. In other words, you can’t get rid of your depression if you insist on carrying it with you everywhere you go.
The only way to start to heal is to detach your issues from who you are. You do this inside, in the mind. Closely and carefully observe your thoughts and the attachment that you have to “my depression” or “my pain”. Observe the compulsion to talk or think about it and consciously halt those thoughts. Remind yourself that this pain is but an item on your to-do list–probably on the top of the list in big, red letters–but it is something to be worked on, not be.
When you start to dis-identify with your pain and when you become a good “watcher of your thinking”, the depression, anger, etc. can and will eventually cease. It cannot exist without you tending to it and allowing it to take over who you are. A good or great life really is an “inside job” and you are the inside person for it!
Vigilance as the Key to Battling Depression
In my book “How to Ignite Your Passion for Living”, I touch upon some of the depressive episodes I have been through and some of the ways I have dealt with them. I have a whole list of simple but effective things you can do to combat depression. And although I still believe the items on that list to be important actions, I think Eckhart Tolle, in his book “The Power of Now”, has hit upon the true source and most effective ideas to combat depression as well as other mood disorders.
The first few ideas on his list are some of the most important, at least in my experience. They deal with becoming a watcher of one’s thoughts and redirecting the mind when we start to buy into the idea of “being a depressed person”:
• Vigilance is one of the first concepts he speaks to. Learning to recognize how your mind labels thoughts and sits in judgment so you know what ideas lie at the source of your pain.
• Secondly, Tolle believes that you need to accept whatever the present moment contains as if you had chosen it.
• Thirdly, you need to realize and understand that the pain or depression wants you to unconsciously identify with it, allowing it to survive in your mind. If you are not a careful watcher of your thoughts then you may come to believe that you are a depressed person and then this becomes your identity.
Letting your mind create this depression identity will make it very difficult to get past the dark feelings and the pain because you will then believe this is who you are. But if you start with these first few ideas of Tolle’s, recognizing how your mind is working and seeing the present moment as something under your control, you can avoid the mindset that makes you think of yourself as a “depressed person”.
These ideas are true for any issues of mood. I choose to talk about them in terms of depression because that has been a recent and difficult battle of mine. However, if you are dealing with anger, guilt, low self-esteem, fear, etc. watching your thoughts and taking control can help you with all types of painful moods and attitudes.
