[New Year, New You] Day 10: Life Goes Where Attention Flows
We’ve hit the halfway mark of our 21-Day New Year, New You Challenge. Today’s message is a wake up call to the worriers out there, and a word of caution to the overly cautious. Sometimes the more you stress and avoid and fear something happening, the more likely it is to actually happen. On the other hand, as long as you keep your eyes on the prize, no matter what obstacles and surprises come up for you in life, chances are very good you’ll get there.
Life really does go where attention flows, and today’s podcast and blog article prove it.
Your Most Powerful Asset
Your attention really is your most powerful asset. Marketing companies invest billions of dollars trying to capture a few moments of it, and people yearn for some of it from each other. Your life and where it’s going will be determined much more by your attention and where you put it than by the sum of your biochemical bits and pieces.
Based on what we’ve been talking about creativity in previous posts in this series, I want you to understand that sometimes it can be more helpful to put your attention on things “outside” of the box of “the way things are.” Your dreams and goals can be wild and impossible to some degree, and the more you lose your attention in imagining it and seeing it and feeling it–not as a pipe dream, but as something so real you can almost feel it when you connect with your thoughts about it. When you do that, the richness of putting your attention there is almost as rewarding as actually achieving it.
The more you get dragged down into believing “the way things are” the harder life feels, the harder life is.
The following is an except from a blog I wrote a few years ago. It was just a small one, but it does offer some helpful tips for enhancing the quality, quantity and results of your “day dreams” — it might help inspire you to put more attention on the things that will make the biggest positive impact on your happiness and overall well-being.
We’re Doing It Backwards!
You take the time to organize your list of things to do; the shopping, the shipping, the washing, the wiping, the cooking, the cleaning, the talking, and stocking the cupboards with food.
You take the time to organize the things you want to have: haircut, a short skirt, a hot date, a day off work. A blender, a juicer, a sauerkraut maker. Something to eat, something to wear, something new to pull up your hair.
When you’re busy with all you have to DO, so you can chase all that you want to HAVE…
…when do you get the chance to sit down and make peace with who you are trying to BE in the world?
3000 marketing messages per day probably have something to do with a widespread belief that in order to BE happy, we need to HAVE the things we want (money, youth, the right body, health, a partner to love, etc.) and then finally we’ll be able to DO what we love and then we will BE happy.
But it works the other way around!
You have to BE happy first. That is what empowers and inspires you to DO what it takes to HAVE the life you really want for yourself.
If you’ve had a rough go or a tough life, your stuff isn’t much or you’re not doing what you love, tomorrow everything could change…
if you decided to BE someone totally different in the morning.
Your habits are not hard-wired. Your destiny is not carved in stone. Every day you can wake up and choose who you want to be and it will change everything about what you do and allow yourself to have.
You can wake up tomorrow and be exactly who you want—the only risk is that given you’re well-grooved into believing what you see, and have been well-taught to value to the stuff you’ve got collected on your shelves and in your bank accounts, you may not trust or believe in the new person you’ve chosen to BE until she can do and have the things you expect of her. It’s easy to keep our attention on what’s in front of our face, but the whole purpose of this challenge is to move you successfully in the direction of your bigger, better life.
Let’s Make Your “To Be” List
So in the name of putting your attention on what matters most and what’s going to give you the biggest bang for your spiritual buck, I suggest you make a “To Be” list.
Decide tomorrow that you can BE; clear, confident, optimistic and hopeful (in spite of the apparent reasons not to).
Maybe you’ll decide to be patient, compassionate, understanding and truthful (in spite of temptations to be otherwise).
You could pick the opportunity to be steadfast, strong-willed, generous, forgiving, accepting of other people’s shortcomings (it will certainly help you get over a few of your own.) 😉
No multi-million dollar marketing firm is going to make the big bucks when you decide to stop doing and having the latest gismos in Glamor magazine and decide instead to stop and spend some quality time with yourself. Put n the glossy magazines and ongoing distractions and crank up the creativity to see what it does for you. Chances are good that what’s going on in your pink cat universe, your crocodile-fighting tough side, it so much more exciting and inspiring than the hum drum you’ve already come to know happening right in front of your nose.
It’s easy to spend lots of money and time doing and buying more stuff. I’d like to offer up the possibility that your next best investment be some time spent in a quiet, confident optimism about the fact that the coolest thing you can do, and the best thing you can have…
…is the ability to be exactly who you choose.
What do you think of that? ?
Love and high-quality attention rockets shooting at all the right things,
Tera