Planning

In their Law of Attraction books, Esther and Jerry Hicks talk about segmenting. The idea is you break your day into discrete portions of time or “segments” as a means to focus your attention during that time on something that you want done.

This is a brilliant concept.  Why?  Because my biggest challenge is managing my Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) - see post on 17 April 2008.  I can get distracted at a frightening pace.  In going to write this post, I think of three other ideas and start writing them first. I happen to glance at my left and see an article that catches my eye and I read it, and while reading it I remember to respond to someone regarding some semi-urgent matter, and so I go to my email and read four or five mails before it occurs to me that I was supposed to be doing something else, except I can’t remember what.  Wish I could blame this on age, but I don’t have that excuse plus I do remember always being like this.

If I’m not careful I can be the prima donna in the chaos ballet, plie (ing), pirouette (ing) and fouette (ing) my way across the cluttered stage of my life.  Not graceful and a tad painful, but at least it’s not as bad as I portray …, at least not anymore.

The idea of segmenting is a great and simple practice to incorporate in your life practice.  All you do is stop and ask yourself what will I focus on now. Choose something and do that to the extent that you intend or until its done, and then stop, and ask yourself the question again.  Give yourself a time period - no more than 2 hours - and then stop. It can also be a very useful form of meditation.  You could say for example, that in the next 30 minutes I’m going to wash the dishes.  Giving the dishes your full and undivided attention can be very calming and can be a very powerful form of meditation.

This is a great way to give yourself some direction and focus.  Be careful though.  This is no substitute for planning.  If you don’t cultivate a practice of planning then you’ll find that this practice will have limited value.   A practice of planning will give some purpose to the things that you choose in your segments.  Without an overall context of planning you will find yourself still very stressed even though you’ve been VEEEERY busy.

If productivity is your challenge make sure to read David Allen’s books especially the classic “Getting things done.”

I have noticed something about many people who have found success in their true calling. Before they found their passion, or became famous they had already either excelled in business success, or they hit the dregs of existence and were homeless addicts on the verge of suicide, (or heading in that direction).  Wayne Dyer the famous author was an orphan and an alcoholic, Rhonda Byrne the producer of the Secret claims to have been bankrupt and suicidal. Eckhart Tolle was suicidal when he had the experience that led him to write the power of now. Louise Hey almost died of cancer. On the other end of the scale we have people like Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Bob Parsons, Jerry Jones and Mark Cuban – people that seemed to have lived lives being outliers even before they became famous or successful. My point is that these people weren’t normal to begin with. In the degree of their prior success or failure they were two or three standard deviations away from the average.

Makes me wonder:  What about the rest of us?  Those of us who haven’t, and will probably never excel at the heights of corporate success, and who have never and likely will never sink to the depths of despair, wandering the streets homeless or suicidal. Who speaks for those secretly suffering within the crowded confines of averageness, trapped in the bounds of normalcy … languishing within the limits of mediocrity?   Who will be our hero?

Those of us living lives of quiet desperation, who will represent us?

Yes, I do include myself amongst the middling masses - at least for this post.    It’s odd to admit to being ordinary.  Many people would prefer to lie, rather than say how they really feel about this. It would truly be extra-ordinary to hear someone boast, “Yes Sir, I put the bell in the bell curve.  If it wasn’t for people like me, people like you couldn’t stand out.”

If we want true evidence that it is possible for anyone to achieve what they want in life, don’t we need some examples, some breakaways from the height of that bell curve?   If our only examples come from the outliers, one, two, even three standard deviations from the norm … then what makes me believe that it’s possible for someone like me to have the life of my dreams, what evidence do I have that I can have what I want?

Downright depressing indeed.  For I don’t believe that at this point in my life that it’s realistic for me to become a captain of industry.   No, there is little chance of me becoming a Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet etc. at this point in my life.

So what options do I have?   If the route to my greatness is not through a life history of the Midas touch, does this mean that at this point of my life, my only course to greatness is an unpleasant detour through homelessness and addiction? To let things get so bad that I attempt suicide?  What if I succeed?   That would be the icing on the cake wouldn’t it?

Here he lays a testament to the irony of his ability. The first thing he really put his mind to he succeeded at. Imagine what he could have achieved if only he put the clarity, focus and determination he put into his suicide into his life - imagine what Peter Anthony could have achieved. As it stands, here he lays: the ultimate non-starter; procrastinator extraordinaire. A martyr to mediocrity.

I think it’s necessary for some new deviants, some real life “Joe the plumbers”, that really invent themselves not through the near death breakdowns of hopelessness and despair, but from an invented breakdown of mediocrity and an epiphany. What I mean by an invented breakdown is that you create a breakdown, or declare a breakdown that may not physically exist before you declare it.  The italicized paragraph above is an example.

I want some heroes to begin his/her story with, “I was average. Not the top of my class; don’t have a slew of successful companies or business successes behind me, nor was I ever psychological road kill. What made the difference for me was I saw the impact of my mediocrity ten, twenty, thirty years down the road. I projected myself into the future I was living into and saw myself unable to retire, broken relationships and not being able to say I had left any positive impact on the world. And that was enough to scare me off the curve.”

Yes, I know that crisis is the necessary medium of change, but does it have to be an actual crisis? Is it possible to act out of the anticipation of the oncoming train wreck that may be twenty or thirty years away? Wouldn’t it be great if we could teach people to think that way? Wouldn’t the country, the world be in a lot better shape if this type of thinking was more the norm than the exception?

Until we are able to teach our young people the skill of assessing the present value of future consequences, the skill to see long-distant consequences of their current choices, today’s flock of the mediocre can only hope to escape via an epiphany of an invented breakdown.

Then again, maybe I should just head down to the local bar.

Know the song?   I remember the Doris Day original, and lately it seems the song is making a comeback by someone or a band called Pink Martini.   I’ve heard it quite a few times in Starbucks and it brings back memories of a time gone by when things were easy, sweet and innocent.  And as I sat listening to the song today it occurred to me - I hate this song.

“When I was just a little girl
I asked my mother
What will I be?
Will I be pretty?
Will I be rich?
Here’s what she said to me:

Que sera, sera.
Whatever will be, will be.
The future’s not ours to see.
Que sera, sera.
What will be, will be.”

No seizing the day or climbing the corporate ladder for this young lass.   She’ll be living her life waiting for it (life) to happen to her.

Living your life as a practice requires completely the opposite perspective.  A carpe diem approach where you invent your future and spend your days in the pursuit of making it happen.  The song of course has a very peaceful and even helpful message of acceptance for what occurs, and this is fine.   Sung as an unconscious refrain though, it comes across as complete and final, like there is nothing else to it, and I think that’s why I find it irritating.

I could practice acceptance for this song and let go of my irritation - I could, but I won’t.  I don’t like it.  So there.  ;-)   I never said I was perfect.

“The future is not someplace we’re going, but someplace we’re creating, and the paths to it are not found, but made; and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.”   Peter Ellyard.

So I’m writing a book, and after explaining what the book is about to a good friend, he asks me why am I writing it?  I gave the obvious answer of course, “Because I’ve always wanted to write a book.”  And then comes the predictable question, “Why?”

And then my mind produces a deluge of possible answers:

Because I have something to say, that is important?  Because I want to be famous/rich/acknowledged?  Because I want people to get how smart I am?

Note the question marks.  It’s just amazing to me that I had not thought of why I wanted to do this.  I then began really thinking and writing about the purpose of the book.  What would it mean to me, my readers, to people that I would mention in the book, to the world?  What value would it provide?   This it turns out has become quite a revealing and productive exercise.  Because in thinking about the why I wanted to write the book, it is affecting what I want to say in the book and how I’m going to say it.   The thinking about the why, to what purpose should I undertake this effort has created an entirely new space for the “doing” of the book.

I was reminded of this at a business workshop I attended this last weekend where an organization got it’s employees and customers together to share their thinking about the why and what of their enterprise.  What an exercise.  Instead of mindlessly going about the doing of their existing business until a crisis hit, they were asking themselves very tough questions about why they exist, and in answering that question coming up with new possibilities for the business.

And this got me thinking.  Every day people do a whole slew of activities that they don’t think about.  No idea as to the purpose or the history of the activity.  They watch certain TV shows, read certain magazines, go to work, argue with their kids or tuck them into beds, all with no purpose in mind. They just do them.   I wonder how many of the activities you would stop doing or modify if you were to stop and ask why you were doing them?  How many of your current activities would you continue if you became present to the consequence of continuing those activities?

Kind of heavy eh?  Some people may find that asking questions like these will lead to the really big question: What is my life for?

Happy trails. 

I posted before about our ability to create a space between stimulus and response. This is of course not Nobel Prize submission material, yet it’s one of those truisms that is so often taken for granted.

What I want to say here is that a practice of creating that Space will be a difficult one to implement, or maybe even impossible without a context for your life.  By context I mean a story about you, who you are, what your values are, and what you’re creating with your life.  If you’re not clear on what your goals are in life and therefore how your colleagues at work, your family at home, your neighbors and members in your communities all fit into your life, you’ll have difficulty making the proper choices about the many possible reactions you could make to any stimulus from a person or situation.

Consider this example:

Mary is a deeply religious person and has created her main goal in life to save as many souls as possible. This is the context within which she lives her daily life.   In any interaction with people Mary gets to choose responses that further her goal.  So when an angry man pushes her on the bus, Mary suppresses her knee jerk reaction to say something angrily in response, and considers the man.

Space.

Since she is very clear on what her life purpose is, she can immediately place this man in that context and assess that he is a candidate to be saved.  She can make the man’s push mean that it was a signal from God to have her intervene in his life and take action.  Her response is then based on the meaning that she chose to give to what happened, and the meaning she gave it came from her context, her story about what she’s up to in life.

Sam, who has no such clarity around his life’s purpose and has no goals for his life, might have taken the push personally, said something nasty and an argument or fight might have ensued.

No Space.

So this comes full circle back to the examined life.  What are you up to in life?  Who are you?  What are your personal ethics?  What are you creating with your life?  Great questions for the life practitioner.  It might take you years to evolve the answers that work for you, and it is essential to have at least some work-in-progress answers now if you’re going to make good use of the Space.

What is it about last minute that focuses the mind?

I recently had the experience of planning for a move and I gave myself sufficient time. However, two weeks before the move it dawns on me that for a whole host of reasons a later moving date would be preferable to the one I chose. By then of course the original date was locked in with at least one of the players involved and this caused upset and breakdown. Angry people.

Why is it that I only really focus my mind on an important event when it’s too late to make any changes? Or the changes then come at great cost. What causes this and how to deal with it?

Can it be avoided?

Probably not completely. Information becomes richer the closer to a deadline, and things always become clearer. Also, new and unforeseen situations arise the closer to the deadline.

Nice to know, but how to deal with it?

I would say that the process of making changes to a plan/agreement should be agreed by all parties involved. A period of “tentativeness” should be agreed to, and a “point-of-no-return” should be stuck in the ground. In my particular moving story, this point-of-no-return was two weeks out, but because this was never discussed all parties (including me) felt that the date communicated six weeks out was the firm date.

Changing it because “Ooops, I just realized it’s my cat’s birthday,” just doesn’t cut it with people who have made their own arrangements.

What’s my point? Well, living your life as a practice involves practices of planning, as well as exercising integrity. If you don’t plan well, you’re going to pay a price. While breaking your word may be expedient, in the long run it will ruin people’s willingness to work or even play with you. Better you suck it up, and stick to your original agreement. Let the pain be a reminder to you of the importance of bringing your FULL attention to planning.