Illustration by *yannas
Success results from a series of wise choices. While that’s true, losing focus of what needs to be done now for everything required to reach your goals can lead you astray.
Every time I look back, unhappy with how I conducted myself, the cause has always been because of something I’ve chosen in the present moment, without exception!
The above realization teaches us that if we’re present enough, we’ll live in ways that when we look back, we’re proud of.
First figure out what you’re committed to doing and then focus your resources to doing it with only the present moment in mind.
The present moment is the base point from where all action emanates. The more your mind is centered in it, the greater the returns you’ll get from your efforts.
I’m not advocating relinquishing strategy that boosts motivation. I’m emphasizing that whatever strategy you use, realize you must take it with you wherever you go. If you’re not taking it with you, it makes its home somewhere other than the present moment, which won’t benefit you.
Look at the following strategy which I wrote about a while back in a post titled, Act as If You’ve Been Succeeding and You Will Succeed.
The premise of that post is that if you act as if you’ve been succeeding at something, even if you really haven’t, you’ll generate motivation to “continue on”.
Here’s an excerpt that explains it well:
Mistake: You’re on a diet, but slip up. You identify with your slip up, and subsequently return to old eating habits.
Use your mind: Pretend you’ve been successfully maintaining your diet for the past ten days [even right after the slip up]. Had you been successful for the past ten days, you would find it important to continue that success today, wouldn’t you?
It doesn’t matter that you really haven’t been succeeding for the past ten days. Pretend that you have, and you’ll generate powerful motivation to “keep the pace going” for your new day.
Why does this technique work? It works because you’re essentially not allowing your past to influence your present behavior. And at its core, this is what living in the present moment is. When you live in the present, your potential is limitless, because you choose how you want to be on the basis of who you want to be right now, independent of any other factor.
It’s the mental state of bad asses.
Of course, you can vary your strategies from one moment to the next or one day to the next. The most important underlying strategy of all, however, is that you shouldn’t go anywhere without having a clear understanding of what your chosen identity is.
Sometimes outside pressure doesn’t compel us to make choices we know are best for our lives. But, if we can create a clear understanding of who we want to be and realize that how we’re behaving isn’t consistent with that, this will cause ultimate pain. Pain so strong, we’ll be driven to change. Internal pressure is unbeatable when it comes to creating change.
“One of the strongest forces in the human personality is the drive to preserve the integrity of our own identity.” ~Anthony Robbins
Problem is, many of us don’t really think about who we want to be. It just doesn’t cross our minds, so we go on living in ways that are incongruent with our chosen identity, like a fish swept away by random ocean currents.
If we’d only take the time to cultivate full awareness of how we view ourselves and then asked whether our behavior’s in alignment with that vision or not: We’d make tremendous positive changes in our lives.
Go ahead and do the above now. But once you do, just take that knowledge with you and don’t think about the past or future, immerse yourself and your powers in the now.
Winston Churchill’s famous call to the Britons in WW II when going up against the Nazi’s was to make this their “finest hour”.
Well… let me, Bamboo Forest, make this admonition to you:
Let this be your finest moment. Every moment.
Illustration by stevecriado
