- When you want to achieve, and feel stuck, where do you start?
- With yourself, of course.
- How well do you really know yourself? Probably a lot less well than you think.
I’ve spent much of my life studying minds and emotions–my own as well as my clients–and I’m still surprised when I discover blind spots in my own thinking…which both humbles me and makes me even more committed to helping my clients identify their blind spots, so they don’t keep tripping over their own feet in the dark.
- What are blind spots? Here’s an example. You are faced with a difficult life transition. Maybe you’ve lost a job or an important relationship has gone south. Most probably you are also struggling with questions about your abilities and self worth.
Often you try to deal with the pain by falling back on behaviors that “helped” you in the past. Sometimes they are healthy–exercising more, setting up a structure to look for a new job, asking friends to introduce you to new people.
But sometimes (more often?) they are like comfort food–they help you manage your negative feelings for the moment but don’t contribute to building solid muscle for the long haul. You know what those kinds of reactions are.
In fact, you may tell me you know you shouldn’t do or feel A,B, and C–but you don’t really see the long-term effects of your choices, because you have naturally fallen into an old barely, conscious pattern for reducing anxiety.
- Here’s the good news: once you can recognize these entrenched thinking patterns and appreciate how powerful they are, you stand a good chance of changing them. The results can be amazing.
- That’s why gaining clarity is such an important tool for life success.
Gaining clarity leads, as David Allen, the productivity guru, rightly says to “connecting to the highest levels of energy I have access to. There’s a relationship between those two things – the clearer the space, the easier it is to move around in terms of where my focus is, how I focus, and what I focus on.”
How does he do this? Through taking time to meditate and reflect regularly, “staying engaged with what’s meaningful to me. . . . Connecting with people is key for me. I get weird if I unhook from directly working with people for very long.”
The effort he expends connecting with an inner clarity makes him aware of the strengths that really sustain him–connecting with people.
This knowledge allows him to operate from an energy that “is really a flow that’s not accessible in a purely passive state. Tapping into it requires high engagement. When we connect with clarity, when we manage our intentions and our attention, we increase our capacity for positive energy. For me, working there, figuring that out, is the ultimate game.”
David Allen (To read his whole statement on lifebyme.com, click here. You may want to contribute your own manifesto there.)
