- Wanting, wishing, desiring are necessary but not enough. You must put in time and have the capacity to work. Form good habits to help you achieve your goals.
- Have a big picture vision of what you want and write it down. Focus on the more formless qualitative aspects—I want to move with ease and grace—as much or more than the more form-oriented desires such as being a particular weight.
- Assess what is available to help you achieve your vision. Think, study, explore, try things out preliminarily. Pretest. Don’t rush into it. Get feedback from select others. Once you know what you need to do you are duty-bound to act. (You don’t want to fall into the trap of people who know what they need to do but keep backing off and avoiding.)
- Make a big assessment of what you have going for you—knowledge, skills, capacities, qualities, supportive lifestyle aspects. Also assess what is in your way—your limitations. What you don’t have that you may need to get first. Make use of body sensing, self observing skills to do this as well as feedback from select people; consult experts if needed.
- Set goals. They should be concrete and do-able within a time frame.
For example: your vision is “I want to be healthy”, your goal is to exercise 3 times a week, your intention is to run specific workouts that will develop specific aspects of your abilities on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. - It is best to be precise so you can work systematically and hold yourself accountable. This will also help you determine how well your plan is working or not. You may find that sitting only once a day is not enough to help keep you centered, and for now 2 sits–one morning and one evening work much better. In this case a general intention to sit daily is too vague to yield the data to help you reach your goal.
- Set a specific time period for most goals—revise later if necessary.
- Break the process down enough so the steps are easy enough. This will engender confidence and belief in yourself rather than trying for too much at once, possibly failing and giving up in discouragement.
- Get going and use the momentum of that to help you keep going.
- Details are key. Study, observe, study. For example be willing to get very specific about how you are not open to people to obtain a deeper knowledge of exact mechanisms that operate to keep you closed—”I don’t look people in the eye,” “I think about what I am afraid of when I am introduced,” etc.
- Bodily reality and direct experience are key to motivation. Both your actual state and your potential can motivate. Strive to become what you are.
- Learn from your mistakes—also other’s mistakes—that will save you time.
- Don’t neglect internal for externals.
- Success in achieving goals—40% lies in the right relationship to process and results. (See your notes from OES Overview on process and results).
- Be neutral and clear with the facts of your situation—see what isn’t right and allow that to motivate you so you can change it, but DON’T judge or get down on yourself. That won’t help you change.
- Let yourself fully enjoy exploring and working on yourself, finding out how things affect you, and how you respond. It’s fun!!
—from OES I: Overview
