The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life Master Any Skill or Challenge by Learning to Love the Process

by Thomas M. Sterner

As the worker prepared a plate, my retailer friend asked him how many plates he finished in a day. The Japanese worker, confused, looked at him and answered, “As many as I can make perfect.” The retailer asked, “But don’t you have a supervisor to report to?” “What is a supervisor?” asked the worker. “Someone to make sure you do your job correctly,” answered the retailer. “Why would I need someone to make sure I do my job correctly?” answered the Japanese worker. “That’s my job.”

“There is no destination in life; life is the destination”

Do you think that a flower seed sits in the ground and says, “This is going to take forever. I have to push all this dirt out of my way just to get to the surface and see the sun. Every time it rains or somebody waters me, I’m soaking wet and surrounded by mud. When do I get to bloom? That’s when I’ll be happy; that’s when everybody will be impressed with me. I hope I’m an orchid and not some wildflower nobody notices.

If you watch carefully for triggers, you will see golfers’ subtle motions, such as tugging on the shoulders of their shirts, pulling on their earlobes, or spinning the golf club in their hands. These are all examples of the trigger for that golfer that says “my routine starts now.”

Thinking about a situation before you are in it only scatters your energy. “But,” you say, “I have a difficult meeting with someone tomorrow, and I want to have my thoughts together before I get into the situation.” Fine, then take half an hour to sit down in a chair and do nothing else but go through the meeting in your mind and be there completely, doing only that. In the calmness of that detached moment, when you are not emotional, think of what you will say, and anticipate the different combinations of responses the person might make. Decide on your responses and see how they feel to you. Will these responses have the desired effect? Now you are doing nothing else but what you are doing. You are in the present and in the process. You aren’t scattering your energy by trying to act out all this in your head while you are eating your lunch or driving to work.

I confess that teaching my daughters about reasons to practice is a learning process that I am far from completing. None of us learn anything except through our own direct experiences. Because of this, I try to teach in two ways. First, I remind my daughters of their past. They might not know where they are going, but they do know where they have been. I can talk about an event that was either a problem or a triumph in their lives and help them to understand which qualities they brought into that event that made it seem so. This helps them to shift into an alignment with the Observer within themselves. Second, I remember that they are most receptive to this conversation when they are not overwhelmed by the emotions that were present during the particular incident. I might talk with them when we’re alone in the car and their thought processes won’t be interrupted by outside distractions such as the TV or the telephone. I start the conversation with something like, “Hey, remember last week when you got upset about what happened at school?” I might ask them how they feel about it now. This gives me a chance to make them aware of how their emotions affect their perceptions of events. By delaying the discussion of an incident for several days or even a week after it happened, I give them a chance to settle into a more detached perspective, and I give myself a chance to decide how to best manage the discussion.