Fully Engaged Quotes

“You cannot master difficult situations without practice. You cannot practice mastery without being in the situation. When you know this, difficulty becomes an opportunity to push past your thresholds.”
― Thomas M. Sterner, Fully Engaged: Using the Practicing Mind in Daily Life

“Change equals growth.”
― Thomas M. Sterner, Fully Engaged: Using the Practicing Mind in Daily Life

“If you say to yourself, “I want to be fully engaged in my life in every moment. Then I know I will be happy,” you have missed the point and are setting yourself up to constantly feel like a failure. As you work at refining the practicing mind and being fully engaged in your life, you will constantly improve but you will not be able to do it all the time. It is an infinite challenge, and to think otherwise would be to set a goal with incorrect data. If, however, you can self-correct, if you can just notice when you are not being fully engaged, without any sense of judgment, without saying, for example, “I should be better at this by this point in time,” and bring yourself back into this moment, then you are completely successful, just in that act.”
― Thomas M. Sterner, Fully Engaged: Using the Practicing Mind in Daily Life

“As we were walking down the fairway, tracking down her errant shot, I asked her why she had asked me to work with her. Her response was simple. “I asked you to work with me so I could figure out what to do in a situation like this when nothing is going right.” Her response gave me an opening, and so I posed this question to her: “How do you think you do that?” Staring straight ahead, she responded, “Tom, I honestly have no idea. I have tried everything I know, and nothing is working.” After waiting a moment I said, “I think you’re missing the intent of my question. You asked me to help you learn how to deal with yourself on the course when everything is going wrong. We can talk about all kinds of strategies to help you deal with that situation, but in order to execute them you have to be in the situation. If you want to learn how to play in the rain, it has to be raining. If you want to learn how to play in gusty conditions, the wind has to be gusting, and if you want to learn how to deal with yourself when the wheels have come completely off, you have to be in that situation, and guess what, you’re there. This is what you have been training for. So let go of winning the tournament or even placing. This tournament isn’t going to determine whether you get a college scholarship or if you go on to become a professional golfer. But it is giving you an opportunity to prove to yourself that you can turn it around. Focus on that, and show me what you’ve got.”
― Thomas M. Sterner, Fully Engaged: Using the Practicing Mind in Daily Life

“We are working at the threshold of our abilities, pushing forward into new space. But as we push forward, our threshold also moves forward with us. If we keep this in mind and let go of our expectations, we can fully enjoy this process of expansion. We can stop interpreting the experience of change, of learning, as unpleasant. The trick is to be totally present, to be fully engaged in the process of the change. If we are judging the experience as this or that, we are not fully present because a portion of our consciousness is taken up in the judgment process. When I’m feeling a very strong polarity about a particular change in my life, it’s a tip-off that I am not in the present moment, not fully engaged in my experience.”
― Thomas M. Sterner, Fully Engaged: Using the Practicing Mind in Daily Life