Knowing your Priorities

So you do what’s important and is a priority and if it’s not you don’t and in seriously acknowledging this you can immediately let go of your artificial struggle against time, and you can breathe a sigh of relief and relax ... time is not the enemy.

So what is important to you and what are you priorities? 

You can answer this question by observing, without condemnation or justification, where you spent your time. If you notice you’re spending 4 hrs per day watching TV, then watching TV is a priority and if you spend 16 hrs per day working and 4 hrs per week with your family then your work is your priority and your family is not. 

This is a wonderful release, because then you can just let go of the need to keep telling your partner and family that you love and want to be with them, because you clearly don’t. 

It’s the pretence and the unconscious deceit that painfully suffocates our relationships, you say one thing and your partner wants to believe you, but your behaviour is communicating something quite different and it’s the inconsistency between your words and behaviour that erodes the trust and leads to the inevitable and often traumatic breakdown of the relationship.

Peace is not a consequence of control

We live in a global culture dominated by an idea that we are able to ‘get’ control over our own behaviour, and this leads us to believe that we can therefore ‘get’ control over the behaviour of others, and from this emerges the idea that though the process of ‘getting’ control, we can somehow ‘get’ control of our future.

Which of course leads us to believe that after we have managed to ‘get’ control of everything, we will begin creating and building a personal and global environment characterised by sustainable peace and our wholehearted participation for the common good.

And we live in a world culture of such denial, that few are even able to acknowledge that any and all of this is ‘pathologically irrational’.

Managing your time and priorities

If there’s a clock near you take a moment to look at it ... notice the second hand ticking away, is there anything you can do to make those seconds go any faster or slower, is there anything you can do to manage time?

There is just the relentless ticking of seconds, minutes and hours, which flow past impersonally, consistently and irrevocably.

It does not matter who you are or what you do, you have 24 hours in a day, and the idea that somehow you can make more time is debilitating, because you can’t and neither are you able to speed it along nor slow it down, all you have is the same 24 hours ticking along at the same pace, as everyone else.

I encourage you to let this in, because there is simply no way to manage time, there is no getting a handle on time and there is no secret time management tool, you have exactly the same 24 hours as everyone else.

Coping with crisis

So how does mindset help us cope and deal with, let’s say a home crisis where more than one family relationship has taken something more than a significantly toxic turn, and you feel violated, angry and resentful, and more than a little justified in your indignation and you see your life transforming into something resembling a second rate soap opera right before your eyes.

It’s hurts like hell and you’re in pain, you’re disappointed and angry and depending on the situation you may even feel persecuted.

No mindset cleverness, no philosophy and no spirituality is going to take that away, you need to own it, it’s your pain [anger, frustration, disappointment ...etc] and it simply does not matter who caused it or how they caused it, the pain you feel is yours. It may have been brutally intentional, woefully ignorant or devastatingly unskillful, but whatever the intention of those who hurt you, the pain they inflicted, is yours.

The NEW mindset means a new logic

Your behaviour which is simply your mindset in action, both holds and acts though a logic, and any logic emerges out of an already established assumption or belief, and then works very hard to prove that assumption true.

So you feel you’re working hard to achieve both material and relational success, simultaneously, not one or the other, not one now and then the other later, but both together, now. I need to be clear about this because I’m not so sure you are, I know you think you are, or at least you have an idea that you believe you are, but I’m pretty certain that you’re not.

I’m pretty sure that you’ve already made a very deep, unacknowledged, unrecognised and unconscious decision to pursue either one or the other, in the hope that the other will ‘somehow’ follow in due course, or you’ve reconciled yourself to the fact that they’re mutually irreconcilably and have therefore made your choice, or you’ve come to the decision that the whole thing is bollocks, and you’ve packed you bags and gone to live in the wild, on a diet of wild honey and locusts, in which case you’re probably not reading this.

What is a 'conscious consumer'?

As a consumer you have two powerful words at your disposal, ‘yes’ this product or service meets and fulfills a real need of mine or ‘no’ it doesn’t, and through the intentional application of these words you influence which products, services and businesses survive and which don’t, but more than that you determine which business practices (behaviour), values, visions and philosophies survive and which don’t.

Through this apparently asinine choice of saying either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a buying impulse you shape our tomorrow (yes, your choice now affects my quality of life) and influences the quality of the air we breathe, the water we drink, the health of our planet and you even influence the probability of our survival (yes, your choice now affects the lives of my children and grandchildren)

And without money is it consistently possible to make solid, well thought out and integrated conscious consumer choices?

Is it reasonable to expect that an item manufactured to the highest green and socially responsible standards possible, land on the store shelf at bargain discount prices?

Relax

I wish people would stop telling me to relax and why is it that I need to relax anyway, what possible benefit could there be to relaxing? I need to be uptight in order to be motivated enough to get through today, and anyway isn’t it cool to be all stressed out, doesn’t that mean I’m ‘working’ ... NO

There’s relaxing and RELAXING.

The first...
... is a step into distraction and unconsciousness with its corresponding loss of awareness, in the desperate hope that your problems and challenges won’t weigh on you as heavily, and they won’t, except that tomorrow you’ll need to deal with the consequences of the unconscious and unskilful decisions you made today.

The second...
... is a very intentional relaxation of the self-contraction with a corresponding heightening of alertness and awareness and with the deliberate application of developed skilful means.

You make more aligned, integrated, creative and intelligent decisions and your quality of life improves when you’re relaxed, alert and wholeheartedly participating, and you’ll only be able to do this after you’ve learned to intentionally relax into the often demanding and unwanted, moment to moment circumstances of your life.

Who is the real you?

One of the most common questions I hear from my clients is ‘who is the real me?’ and it’s this question that sparked, over a decade ago, a pretty intense investigation, by yours truly.

The question itself though is a little misleading, because there’s some confusion around what the word REAL really means, so lets clear that up right away.

REAL and ‘unreal’ has nothing to do with existing and non-existing
The contemplative traditions use the word REAL to mean permanent and unchanging, not to mean existing or non-existing. A brick wall for example exists and trust me if you’ve ever run into one you’ll know for sure that it does, however according to the contemplative traditions, it’s not REAL, which simply means it’s not forever permanent and unchanging.

I can't commit to your deadline, sorry

I needed to call someone yesterday and give them some news which I knew they didn’t want to hear. They were expecting me to commit to a timetable I genuinely could not commit to, because my commitment depended on other connected circumstances ‘coming together’ over which I had very very little influence.

“They wanted a date and a very specific action which I sincerely could not commit to, given what I knew at the time”

So how do you handle a situation like this?

Let's recognise
The Scarcity Mindset needs to be liked and to be right more than it seeks to find a way to understand, establish or meet needs. It’s working from the assumption that failure is more inevitable than success and it’s working hard to prove that assumption.

The Abundant Mindset seeks to understand and create solutions (process) more than it needs to be either liked or right. It’s working from the assumption that needs can be creatively (unexpectedly) met and is working to prove that assumption.

Behaviour is mindset in action

I don't believe there is anything of more importance to our well-being and success than our mindset. And if learning to master our mindset does not quickly become our number one priority, I doubt a consistently better quality of life and relationships, with the ability to develop a sustainable and successful business in the face of global transformation, will be almost possible.

But what is mindset?
Mindset is the assumptive base of our psyche, the totality of our beliefs, values, knowledged, world-views, pathologies and assertions. It's formed in part by the depth of our presence (objectivity), shadow (unresolved past pain), maturity (ability to hold and access perspective), experience, education and personality.

Mindset is the frame upon which the narrative of our individual, communal and human life is hung. It informs our perceptions, guides our behaviour and determines the business and global systems we develop.

Behaviour is mindset in action

Behaviour is mindset responding and reacting to the provocations of events and circumstances, even our own thoughts and feelings (it's all external to mindset). Without mindset assumptions we'd have nothing to inform our behaviour, nothing to pull up on or push back against. To create sustainable behavioural change, our mindset assumptions at some point need to be either de-constructed, changed, transformed or created anew, depending on their degree of usefulness and accuracy. Many if not most of our mindset assumptions where passed onto us by our parents and our early influencers.

This is extremely helpful because it’s impossible to see mindset (our real inner beliefs and ideas) assumptions, they can only be inferred through behaviour, But in learning to observe our behaviour, without justification or condemnation, we soon come to learn everything we need to know about our mindset beliefs. And we need to know if we are to consciously participate in our own development and success.

Behaviour is a flow of logic
The word behaviour implies an isolated action, reaction or response but this is hardly ever the case. Almost everything we do involves a sequence of actions, from answering the phone (a simple short sequence) to building a successful business over many years (many multi-disciplined sequences over time). Now any sequence of actions holds an inherent logic, a reasoning be it conscious or sub-conscious, which emerges out of our mindset assumptive base, and then works to assert them.

In this way a sub-conscious belief may be that money is difficult to make. Then every strategy you create, which is just a flow of logic and behaviour, works to prove that assumption true. In other words the very strategies you create are designed to prove that money is difficult to make -- and yet you may think you are working very hard to prove just the opposite. 

Or you may believe you are not worthy and your partner will at some point abandon you. Your behaviour over time works to assert that deep sub-conscious belief true, by finding ways to drive or push them away. This ultimately proves and deepens the original assumption and a habit or pattern is born.

Mindset influences the stream
Imagine the circumstances of your life as a stream of events rather than isolated individual occurrences, this is closer to the truth and more helpful. Through our reactions and responses we influence sometimes more and sometimes less, the flow of this stream of events. Of course everything, and I do mean everything is also influencing that stream of events. It is therefore impossible to control that stream, and the idea of control itself is nothing more than a completely unhelpful idea that I would urge you to abandon.

Results are snapshots of the stream
There is no such thing as a permanent result (another unhelpful idea), there is simply the flow of events and circumstances. What we take to be a result is simply a snapshot, like a photo of that stream at any given moment. Mostly we forget or are not even aware of how we influenced that stream of events at an earlier stage, when we where less aware or had less personal mastery.

Where do we have more influence?
We have depending upon our degree of mastery an almost complete and uninterrupted influence over our mindset, and therefore upon our responses to the flow of circumstances. But we have very little influence over the flow itself, and therefore over the totality of the results we experience.

Mastery means growing our degree of influence
It’s not possible that we ever control the flow of events and therefore the results we experience, but we can grow our degree of influence. Now sometimes that influence is more and sometime less. For example my business may be doing well and my life peachy, but if a asteroid suddenly came hurtling toward the planet, my degree of influence over my business, life and the flow of results I'm experiencing would radically diminish to practically zero.

Or I may be talking to my partner, and in that moment either of us may be exerting a dominant influence over the other. But if a fire suddenly broke out, my dominant influence would radically diminish and the fire would then exert the dominant influence over the both my partner and myself, over our house, our stuff and our future.

Influence in everything except our mindset, is a very fluid, waxing and waning affair.

Mindset and our quality of life
This is much simpler and more complex to understand. Suffice it to say, that the direct, unwavering and permanent consequence of mastery over our state of consciousness is the real feeling of joy and wholehearted connectedness we experience.

Thus to the degree that I am able to hold my presence (and not loose the plot) is to the same degree I avoid the psychological contraction into fear, stress and anxiety. And the same degree to which I experience joy and respond more fluidly, intelligently and creatively to the flow of events I am continuously and irrevocably swimming in.

Now 3,000 years ago, presence was a very big deal and the result of a lifetime of intense spiritual practice. But today it’s been my consistent experience that the average person can learn to hold their presence in just a few months. Because without learning to do this, it becomes impossible to master mindset and therefore to have the degree of intentional influence we need over our behaviour, to adequately influence the flow of events and the results we experience.

We would literally be like a ship without a rudder, being blow from one place to another, a victim of the flow of events, and suffering.

The Scarcity Mindset has it's defences 
There is a significant difference between a lifetime of struggling against our behaviour and what feels like a barrage of isolated events, circumstances and results, and working fluidly, intelligently and creatively with our mindset and the flow of events and circumstances.

Because mindset is so subtle and because we're already inside the very mindset that is the cause of all your troubles, it’s almost impossible to find the intentionality to ‘do the work’ without deeply understanding that your mindset is our biggest problem and our most pressing priority.

Because the moment you finish reading this, there is the overwhelming compulsion to set it aside with the thought, I do need to look into this ... one-day, as soon as I’ve gained more control over my life or work, and I have the time and money I need.

In other words, I’ll look into learning to ‘master the heart of mindset’, when I don’t need to learn to ‘master my mindset’ ... and that day never arrives.