Love that.
This is a theme we come back to in these Notes—specifically in John Eliot’s Overachievement and The Now Habit.
In Overachievement, Eliot tells us: “I have found that the top players in every field think differently when all the marbles are on the line. Great performers focus on what they are doing, and nothing else… They are able to engage in a task so completely that there is no room left for self- criticism, judgment, or doubt; to stay loose and supremely, even irrationally, self-confident; to just step up and do what they’re good at, concentrating only on the simplest nature of their performance.”
Neil Fiore’s The Now Habit is an extraordinary book. If you experience challenges with procrastination, I highly recommend it. He uses the same metaphor of walking over the board. Fact is, if you’re focused on all the things that can go WRONG with a project, odds are you’re going to be paralyzed.
Here’s how Fiore puts it: “To better understand how you learned to procrastinate, I invite you to use your imagination and to accept for a few minutes a metaphor in which the test, job, or task in your life is to walk a board. Situation A. The task before you is to walk a solid board that is thirty feet long, four inches thick, and one foot wide. You have all the physical, mental, and emotional abilities necessary to perform this task. You can carefully place one foot in front of the other, or you can dance, skip, or leap across the board. You can do it. No problem. Take a minute to close your eyes, relax, and imagine yourself in that situation. Notice how you feel about this task. Are you scared or blocked in any way? Do you feel any need to procrastinate? Fear of failing or making a mistake cannot be an issue here, but you might find that you delay starting out of a need to assert your independence and to resist being asked to do even a simple task such as walking a board. Situation B. Now imagine that the task is just the same, to walk a board thirty feet long and one foot wide, and you have the same abilities; only now the board is suspended between two buildings 100 feet above the pavement. Look across to the other end of the board and contemplate beginning your assignment. What do you feel? What are you thinking about? What are you saying to yourself? Take a moment to notice how your reactions in this situation differ from those you had in situation A. Notice how rapidly your feelings about the task change when the height of the board changes and the consequences of falling are greater.”
So… What are you focused on?
If you’re finding yourself all freaked out and procrastinating, see if you can change your focus from the *results* of your project to simply being fully engaged in what you’re up to!
As we learned in our Notes on the Bhagavad Gita, “The awakened sages call a person wise when all his undertakings are free from anxiety about results.”