A lot of times I will find students don’t succeed, not for lack of desire, but for the fact that they don’t find the methods or means to put their desire into action. To concretize it, to make it count for something. There are a lot of people with incredible passion and dreams and visions and all that. And it’s powerful but they don’t know how to channel it in to the actions that change who they are and how they live their lives so that they actually move from where they are to some different place.
—Process & Results
Basically a lot of times people think they’re struggling, but it’s merely with their thought processes not with any action that would carry them further. That is very, very, very important. Struggle doesn’t mean that you’ve got a war going in you mind. It’s that you commit to an action, to an action, that you feel a counter pull with. Something that you do. Some action. Something that is quantifiable. Something that is definite. Not “I want to open to other people”, but something as definite as “I’m going to touch people when the impulse is there to touch somebody.” Or “I’m going to, at the end of the day if there’s any left over criticisms or feedback or anger or whatever, I’m going to do such and such.” It’s a definite thing. And you know you don’t do it because of all the resistance in you to doing it, all the reasons that you feel the pain of it and the need to do it. Taking definite actions that you commit yourself to doing. And that you practice remembering. You have to have a system of remembering both your vision, and the things, the actions, you’re going to do in the moment, and through the day to carry that vision further along.
“When somebody gives me feedback so I don’t get reactive, I’m going to immediately when they’re starting to do that, I’m going to take a deep breath, I’m going to relax my hands because I notice that what happens to me is that I clench up and I start to spit words back and my fists start to go this way.” Study what happens in your body. Observe what happens in your body. You can break the spell of anger a lot of times by simply opening your hands. Or if you want to stop your mind, focus on the heel of your foot. If you can remember to do that, you’d be amazed at what it can do. It’s very, very difficult if you can put enough attention down in the base of your foot to think. If you open your eyes wide, smile at the sky, it makes it very, very difficult to think. And if it’s not a time to be thinking and the thoughts that you’re thinking are not ones that you would like to have, there are things to do. You have to observe the mechanisms. If you feel like you’re self absorbed, too self absorbed, you’re not with other people, you’ll notice there is a posturing that goes with that. You can break it by addressing it with an intention, of what specific concrete things you can do–and this becomes your daily work. You will feel the counter pull, but those specific concrete actions are the things that add up over the seconds, the minutes, the hours that create the days, the weeks, etc. You can have your strategy for where you want to be when and your time period for doing it but you’ve got to make definite commitments to action.
