Is there some aspect of you or your life with which you’re not happy? Are you having difficulty achieving the kind of success you would really like to achieve – whether that’s in business, your career or your personal or sporting life? In other words, would you like to be e bigger success than you are at present? Well, if you want to be successful and happy, you’re going to have to change your behaviour. You’re going to have to take new action. As a client said to me recently, “I decided that, if I wanted to change my life, I had to change my life!”
Let me explain. I first met Billy three years ago. At the time, he was seriously stressed about his job, he suffered from chronic lower back pain, was constantly tired and, as a result, his home life was, to say the very least, less than satisfactory. More recently, Billy spent three days with me in my part of the world, the French Alps. It was the fourth time we’d worked together in three years. In those three years, he’d been promoted to what would potentially be an even more stressful job – right at the very top of his organization. His back problems had vanished and, in fact, he told me he could now do thirty minutes on his local gym’s rowing machine, a couple of times a week – beforehand, he couldn’t even bend down to sit on the rowing machine. He’d also just booked a three week holiday for himself and his family, having spent ten days on holiday at Easter – he, his wife and children were having a great time.
When we first met, I had explained to Billy that the normal adult mind is in constant turmoil – it is “entertained” by roughly 50,000 random thoughts each day. You know the kind of useless stuff – “I wish this guy would hurry up or I’ll be late for my next meeting!” “I wish I was on the beach, instead of the office, it’s such a lovely day!” “I don’t know if I unplugged the toaster!” “I really am too shy to walk up to that guy and say what I feel!” And, the ones that wake you at four o’clock in the morning “What if I don’t get that sale, will I be out of a job, will I lose my house, what will happen the kids?” (‘Cos the ones at four o’clock in the morning often take us on a train of thought to imaginary ruin – more like an express train to hell!).
I also explained that Billy’s subconscious mind was even more distracted – it’s just that, because it’s subconscious, he’d never be aware of the fact that, like all normal adults, his subconscious mind was incapable of paying attention to the here and now, the task in hand, obsessed, as it was, by his childhood conditioning, the snapshots of his formative years which all normal minds dwell on subconsciously. As a result, it was little wonder that he was stressed – the World Health Organization believes stress will be the biggest killer of the 21st century. It was little wonder that he’d been crucified by lower back pain for years – your mental state is at the root of most, if not all, physical illness. And, certainly, you wouldn’t have to be a genius to work out why his home life was spinning out of control.
But Billy not only understood, as most of my clients do, the importance of changing his mind – he actually put it into daily practice – hence, the results that he could so excitedly tell me about. Billy and I worked together to enable him stop the random noise in his head, to enable him calm his mind. Most importantly, Billy practiced and learned how to pay more of his attention to the here and now, dragging his subconscious mind’s attention away from the past and enabling him be more focused on the task in hand. Billy understood that, when you’re more present, you have more presence and that makes you more impressive to the normal people around you. As a result, he’d been handpicked for his new corporate role – without even realising that he might have been in the running – he was more focused on doing just what he was supposed to be doing.
In short, Billy learned how to meditate. And it made such a practical difference in his life that he committed not just to doing it every day – but to doing it for one hour solid every morning. He told me that he realised that if he wanted to change his life, he needed to change his daily life first – get up at six o’clock instead of seven – go to bed at ten o’clock instead of eleven.
If you’re not the success you want to be, your life is not going to change without you doing something practical about it. If your life doesn’t turn you on, you’re doing something wrong – you’re going to have to do something right instead. You’re going to have to find a way to turn yourself on – to focus your attention in the here and now – so that you will stop paying attention to useless thought and so that your subconscious will stop tripping up your today by focusing on your yesterdays. Your success – your effortless success – is entirely within your own control – but you’re going to have to act.
Copyright © 2009 Willie Horton
Myself and my family recently spent an evening on our balcony star-gazing – watching the annual Perseid Meteor Shower – when the earth passes through a band of wayward comet grit. Many people might just see one shooting star in their lifetime – but, in the space of about twenty minutes, we counted a dozen. It was a humbling experience. Here we were, five insignificant dots on the balcony of a house – no more than a dot on this planet which, in itself is no more than a tiny pebble spinning at high speed through a vast space. That evening, we watched pieces of rock – undoubtedly billions of years old (comets are leftovers from the Big Bang) – spend the last seconds on their existence as they burned up on entering our atmosphere.
Anyone out there got the guts to do it? I mean, is anyone “brave” enough to create and lead a team of like-minded people towards the kind of exceptional business success that one only sees, if one is lucky, once in a career?