Point #1 – Deciding

You identify something external you want to change, create, or eliminate. You are now intensely focused. You had better be, if you truly want what you say you want. You have known about this thing way before now. You had seen it coming, thought about it, let it sneak up on you over the years. But you were too busy. Your old internal programming has been running the show. You hadn’t decided to figure out how to do anything differently.

Point #2– Peace

You are intrigued by the idea of living in absolute internal peace. You don’t 100% get that one. Sounds nice, but how do you do it? Of course you want it. Who wouldn’t?

Point #3 – Inside/ Outside

There are now two big driving goals. As well there should be. Using my iceberg metaphor, one is likely on the upper part, above the surface of life. The second, living in true peace and clarity, can only be created from beneath the surface.

Point #4 – Internal first

Achievement of both of these internal and external objectives must happen in tandem. However, the one that needs to lead is the internal.

Point #5 – Conditional living

“If I can get my external lined up, my internal will be happy and fulfilled”. That cannot work, and it never will for any extended period. You can be sometimes happy because you can manage those external circumstances part of the time. The other part of the time you will be worried, sad, mad, hurt, etc. That is what most people do because they don’t know any better. They settle for partial success because as far as they know that is all there is.

Point #6 – Unconditional living

You find your peace and happiness inside. You get to a place where it doesn’t much matter what is going on outside. Really hear this. You will always create way more, bigger, better, faster externally without the internal noise. From that place of internal peace and clarity, you can have and do just about anything.

Point #7 – Acceptance

The key, the only way to full and continuous internal peace and joy, is in learning not to judge. That is acceptance. You don’t have to like a thing. You don’t have to avoid it, nor should you. You just don’t need the internal judgment. You don’t need to bring the trash inside. You don’t need to harm yourself and work against everything you want. What has happened on the outside has already happened. You cannot control that. But you can learn a dramatically better way to be with it. The inside is your territory.

Point #8 – Outside projects

A project could be more wealth, a new job, a new house, a better relationship, more time, or anything you want to create. Your priorities and projects change as you move along. Some may be ongoing, more or less. Others, you are able to deal with, close out, and then off to the next.

Point #9 – Inside work

This is ongoing. It involves a new way of thinking. It is quite literally unlearning and relearning. Learning to walk through life very differently. This is worth the price of admission. The outside creation becomes easy.

Point #10 – Week in, week out

It is time to put your Self first. If you are going to try to do this on your own, you first have to figure out what to do. Then, you must do the work. Do you want to crawl along or move at a nice clip? Will you decide to grab on to this and run with it? Among other things, you will have to figure out how to support yourself. How to increase your knowledge as you move through the process. You will want to be doing the right things, in the right ways.

Point #11 – Dropping old stories

A huge part of moving forward is simply dropping the old. I am talking about both categories – those connected with your external projects, and the ones embedded in your internal way of being. The tendency is to spin in those old stories. I make no judgments about that, nor should you. These are simply your powerful habits. You will likely be well-served to eradicate them. Your brain is practiced into a pattern of over-analyzing, over-thinking, and replaying. You think through the facts, what the other person must be thinking, what you should do, etc. Over and over you spin. You hang on to old stories about who you are. You say, I am unorganized, I am not good at X, whatever. It is critically important that you start to catch yourself. That you simply drop it. It’s not that different from breaking any other habit.

Flesh out the Questions

Now, you are moving towards your own creativity. You see, it’s not just a simple question. There are a whole bunch of questions inside, around, behind, and in front of that one. Maybe start with why this is important in the first place. It may be related to taking business to a higher level. It may be for your own peace and sanity. It may be because you care about someone. It will be because you believe you will feel better in the having of it. It could be because of a sense of obligation, guilt, or who knows what.

Of course, the problem solver’s brain wants to skip all that and go straight to: What should I do? Odds are you would be starting to bypass your creative opportunity. That is probably what you have been doing already. Is that working as well as you would like it to?

The fact is, you may not be ready for the solutions. You may need to sit back and listen a good bit more first. Listen to what is inside. Listen for the noise so you can begin to filter it out. That means asking the inner part of you a whole lot of questions and listening for answers.

Filtering out the Noise

So, let’s say you are ready to take this relationship project on. In a way you never have before. Presumably, this is really, really important. Better slow down and “open in” enough to get that straight from the gitgo.

The energy our words and actions are riding on is always most important. Let’s say I am trying to clarify my questions. And, find some answers. From a place filled with internal noise, what should one expect? I ask people what they’d like to achieve or what their questions is. And they want to start telling me a whole lot of things like what the other person must be thinking. That wasn’t the question. It becomes clear they are filled with frustration, often anger, hurt, desperation, feelings of being unappreciated or disrespected.

That is what I am calling noise. Feelings aren’t bad or wrong. They simply are. The primary value in them, at least in this context, is that they are a direct pipeline to what we are thinking. Feelings indicate thoughts.

So, let me get this straight. (A little dialog with myself here to make the point.) I am sitting here spewing my frustrations, disbelief, hopelessness, hurt, whatever it is. I mean, I am not screaming in anger, but my temperature is up. All that judgment, all of those thoughts – those are what I am carrying around with me pretty much all the time. It is in my face more sometimes than others, but I am carrying it around inside of me all the time. That’s the noise. So, I am supposed to stop in the middle of the spewing and find all the questions and answers around: How do I create the relationship I would like with X? That just won’t work.

High-End Mediocrity

I’m being a little harsh here, but intentionally. Consider someone who has financial success, a couple of nice homes, a good life, many $ millions, whatever. But it’s incomplete. Their life experience includes a good deal of the sorts of things described above. They would like to be a certain way, have a certain impact, have a certain experience, but they don’t really know how to get there. So, their life is like a Ferrari with two bad sparkplugs.

Why not have it all? Why not have the truly rich and juicy life? And, most certainly enhance leadership, business, career, and financial success?

Too Busy

When I run into people who have found their way into some sort of crisis, they never seem to be too busy. When people begin to feel exhausted, beaten up, when the unhappy portion begins to aggressively encroach on the happy, they find the time. They get to a place where they have to decide.

When you aren’t broken, but are simply overwhelmed. After all, you have broad shoulders. When it really gets busy. When you are charging the hill under the weight of the pandemic circumstances. It is very hard to stop and think about how it could be better. How you could be better. Yet, that is exactly when you might want to carve out a little time. This is the time when you need to be at your best. It is probably the best time to really get your own attention. You have trouble doing that.

Cooped up and going crazy

That heading is not much of an overstatement. It has been really interesting to observe how people think and feel about what is happening. For some, it feels like the sky is falling. For others, it’s like intense cabin fever. (What is the right emotion when the little people you love are driving you up the wall?) Then there’s the fear, the anxiety about how the world is changing, and all the rest. Some people are very distressed, and some not as much.

Where we are inside is what matters most. My reaction to the problem is the problem! I do not mean to take the coronavirus lightly, nor the market crash, economic impact, cabin fever, or any of the outside consequences. The point is though, all of that has happened. Query: How do you want to be with it? You probably do need to react to it and take certain actions. But we are better served by making decisions and taking action from the uncluttered mind. Not to mention getting to feel better while going through whatever it is we are going through.

Decision-making. Impaired decision-making necessarily creates sub-optimized results. Everyone can decide if they want to buy or sell equities right now. I am not getting into investment advice here, but the example is so opportune. Fear, panic, judging self, judging others, judging past decisions – all of those are a result of real outside circumstances. I get that. But the outside event has happened. Does the internal noise help or hurt decision-making? I can only hurt. It is no doubt driving millions of people to be making investment decisions right now that will not serve their best interests.

Impact. Let’s consider the business owner or executive who has allowed a place for all of these counter-productive thoughts to rest. He or she can know such thoughts are hanging out because of the presence of negative emotions. That’s what I call generically “upset”. I am upset because_______. The market is crashing. My income is going down. My business is stressed and the future is uncertain. On and on. Those may be true. They are certainly understandable. But do we want to center on those thoughts and emotions?

Many business leaders have their own little panic, or “this is really bad”, internal judgments going on. Let’s assume this leader is filled with internal judgment. He steels himself or for a tough conversation. He is careful to project words of encouragement. The problem is, words don’t matter so much. The energy they ride on matters a lot. That energy simply cannot be factored out.

Might this be the time to advance and serve from a place of creating rather than a place of retreating? The business leader with the uncluttered mind, she is the one who can truly appreciate, evaluate, and execute from that point of view.

Slowing Down is Creating More

Slowing down is nothing about being a slacker. Not about being lazy. Of course, I have to remind myself of that every now and then. I spent about 25 years chasing as hard and fast as I could chase. I am still working the last bits of that out of my own programing. Slowing down is about making different choices. It is about being different.

I work with CEOs of middle-market companies, family business owners, and others. For the most part, they have one thing in common. They are chargers! They are busy. They think fast. They never have enough time.

There are reasons, I get that. This is your programming. You probably had to run fast in the beginning just to keep your nose above the surface of the water. Your programing didn’t start there, but it was definitely supercharged during those years. I am thinking back to one CEO client who told me about his “three-page to do list”. He said he never got past page one in the first place. Then, he’d go off to their weekend place to hammer through the to do list for the things to be done there. (An interesting notion of a weekend recharge.) All so he could get back and start on the company list again on Monday. I recall him telling me a little later about how his company would “pretty much run itself”. We got a good chuckle out of that one!

More Time to Think

What a novel idea. I can recommend a good book here called More Time to Think, by Nancy Kline. Query: If you truly got excited about creating something way beyond the success you have had so far. If you wanted that additional 20%. If you wanted to ferret out the 20% that wasn’t working for you and replace it. Would you need more time to think? Would you need some space to do that?

The answer is yes. If you are going to shift some things and you are busy all the time, how is that going to happen? It will feel like you are adding in more to do. Busy people are loath to add more. They first need to subtract something. You want to create some space.

Sub-optimized. It goes without saying that when someone is running a thousand miles an hour he or she is missing out on opportunity. If you could sit and dream about what an optimized you would look like, what would that be? What are you leaving on the table? What would happen if you took 20% of your time from your lowest yielding categories and reallocated that to “time to think” and to your other highest yielding opportunities?

Life is supposed to be fun. Of course, we have jobs, businesses and things we “must do”. But it really doesn’t need to be such a grind. I used to live in what I call “event happiness”. Certain parts of life were really good. Some was a lot of fun. Events or circumstance, like vacations, my daughters, getting career recognition. Those were fun and happy. On the other hand, a lot of life and career was frustrating, boring, stressful, etc. I was always running faster and faster to try to find a solution on the outside. Thinking that if I could create the right external circumstances, I’d be there.

Not a High Bar?

Creators can create. Imagine playing basketball with ankle weights on. You’re a pretty good player even then. But what happens when you take those weights off? You soar. Playing with those ankle weights – that’s exactly what most people are doing in their businesses, careers, and lives. Just consider the weight you carry around. Consider the complexity of business, your job, employees, relationships, children, and all the rest. Consider the noise.

Most people do not operate much of the time from the uncluttered mind. They don’t even know what that truly is or what it might feel like. They are too busy achieving. Much of what they are doing, they are doing the hard way. So, let me expand slightly and clarify on the point of +20% being realistic.

20% better doing the same things you’ve always done, in the same way. Yeah, that’s probably a high bar. 20% more, on the other hand, after shifting to the uncluttered mind becomes a real possibility.

How Would 20% Just Show Up?

It won’t. The questions become: Can you make 20% better decisions? Can you discover 20% better solutions? Can you find 20% of your time that has been going to things that don’t fully serve you? That is, if you get radical with it. Could you somehow, some way, re-allocate that to your very highest value-generating activities?

And too, these are compounding. Moving 20% of one’s time and energy around is a good example. I see that all the time. Last week, I had a conversation with someone who has been a high-end professional for 40 years. We estimated that 30% of his total time is going to the “wrong” places. So, what value can you generate when you move that to the right places? In his case, health is a big concern. What is the value of a new life focus that creates health, fitness, and better sleep? If that is not exactly you, nonetheless, what would it mean to be less stressed and more rested and energetic? What positive things could you create with that energy?