You won’t feel that you’re getting addicted to social media when you scroll through feeds on your smartphone every day. But you are.
You also won’t feel that you’re becoming a writer when you write just 1 minute a day. But you are.
You’re always on track to doing something or becoming someone. But rarely will it feel that way in the day to day.
Choose wisely.
The other day, I talked about changing your focus to change how you feel about the events in your day.
But something strange happened when I first had that realization.
It didn’t feel like a relief.
Do I even want that responsibility? To choose how events affect me?
After all, that would take away my right to complain about how poorly life treats me.
I couldn’t ascribe any successes or achievements to “sheer luck” anymore.
And wouldn’t it be silly to say I don’t deserve happiness, luck, or anything good if I knew I could change my focus and be lucky this very moment?
What a burden.
I’m still deciding if I am strong enough to carry it.
But one thing’s for sure: the days I have the presence of mind to direct my focus are the days I feel best.
I wonder if it’d be like that for you, too.
Maybe you could try it out? Even if it’s to indulge me.
See how it feels.
And let me know how it goes. I’m curious about you.
A daily insight from Tony Robbins:
Wherever focus goes, energy flows.
Tony Robbins, https://www.tonyrobbins.com/career-business/where-focus-goes-energy-flows/
We’re always ignoring and highlighting parts of our experience to make sense of the world – and it determines the way we feel.
To feel bad, you (temporarily) have to ignore all the events and things you consider positive.
To feel good, you (temporarily) have to ignore events and circumstances that can be challenging.
It all depends on context.
Sometimes, just to function, it’s necessary to ignore.
Sometimes you’re better off highlighting a bit more.
The big challenge: most of the time, we’re not aware of where our focus goes – so we let old habits and patterns decide how we feel – even if they don’t serve us at all.
Here’s an exercise I found useful: Tomorrow, focus on something that’s important for you once an hour (a post-it on your desk or a reminder on your phone can be useful). That way, it remains top of mind (and your energy will flow toward it).
Every hour, also take a moment to become aware of what you’re deleting from your experience, and what you’re highlighting.
You may not always know Why. Or How. Or What exactly.
And yet, you know that it Must happen.
Maybe that’s enough.
Lick your wounds.
Learn the lessons.
Stop yourself from going astray.
Stay the course.
Come what may.
Tomorrow is another day.
A memory is what we decide to remember from an experience – and what we decide to delete and forget.
Intuition is the instant hunch we get after we’ve repeatedly created memories from experiences; the moment we don’t need the conscious memory anymore.
A small (or unrepresentative) sample size leads to inaccurate intuition.
If I’m betrayed three times in my life and have created strong memories around that, my intuition whenever meeting anyone else may be that they’ll betray me too. Three bad experiences have shaped, and skewed, my relationship to billions of others.
How to develop accurate intuition?
The more memories we create, the bigger the “sample size” for our intuition to emerge from, and the smaller the weight of “outlier events” (like being betrayed).
The more deliberately we create these memories, the more deliberately we hone intuition.
Create more memories. And create them deliberately.
Go slow, slow, slow
Until all the friction has dissolved
Life is back in flow
Then let go.
