The Visual8

The winds of circumstance take you off course.

You can manage through them. You cannot control them.

However, there is another force which frustrates your progress. It’s something you can control. Or at least manage better.

Most of our days are spent in unconscious routines. We run the pattern like the second hand of the clock: mindlessly moving in circles all day.

Remember when you visited an unfamiliar place. The drive to the destination is made turn by turn. Thought by thought.

Take a similar drive in your home territory and you arrive at the destination with nothing to remember.

The brain does this because it is programmed to save fuel.

Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, wrote about this phenomenon in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. He suggested that system one thinking is fast. It gets us ready for work with ease but without the burden of heavy cognition.

System two is deliberate.  It’s how we solve complex math problems. We think step-by-step.

System one blurts out the answer, like a well-practiced response to multiplication flash-cards.

System two is heavy-lifting. It’s why we feel taxed at the end of an exam.

When you end the day, and that big thing never got done, you now appreciate why.

Our intention is to reach those milestones. Yet when something merely urgent arrives, we defer the important.

Maybe it’s an email request from a colleague. Maybe it’s something quick for a family member who called unexpectantly. Maybe it’s a thought that compels you down a rabbit hole on the internet.

How do we stay on track? How do we honor our own personal commitments?

How do we make every stroke of the clock count: towards what we want versus what others want?

First step is to practice awareness.

Meditation is a brain game to focus the mind. In some practices, it invites you to concentrate on a single object. Maybe a candle. Maybe the breath.

Or it’s a practice to open awareness far and wide. To notice every creak in the floor, every reflections in the room, and every sensations in the body. All at the same time.

Both techniques exercise our mind to stay present on the current moment.

Next step is to defend your attention.

Maura Thomas wrote about attention management in her article, “To Control Your Life, Control What You Pay Attention To,” published in the Harvard Business Review, 2018.

She described how to put away the buzzes and bings of our pocket computer. She defined how to deal with internal distractions like spurious thoughts. (jot them down on paper and come back to it later).

These methods are the judo moves in the heat of the battle.

The third, and most critical step, is to center on your goals.

Large goals are chunked down into discrete steps. For example, write the book, chapter by chapter. Bird by Bird, as Anne Lamott would suggest.

Or you can set guidelines. Want to be thinner? Make choices a healthy person would make. Not lose a certain amount of pounds.

Remaining conscious at every turn is critical.

Interrupt the pattern by asking: does this next action drive towards my goal or away from my goal? It is necessary? Or is it a distraction?

You will see that steps one and two listed above are the strength and conditioning part of the formula.

Step three is putting strategy into the game.

If you have reached these conclusions but fail at a daily practice, stop trying to over-ritualize.

Stop promising yourself that you will make time tomorrow to get organized. To set aside an hour to clean up the to-do list.

Instead, go brush your teeth.

When you reach for the toothbrush tomorrow morning, ask yourself this question: what three intentions do I have today?

Make one of them about becoming someone different. Someone with virtues that you don’t have now.

Make the others about tasks that stack towards an important goal.

Get up right now. Put a post-it on the mirror so you won’t forget in the fog of the morning.

Then at the end of the day, brush your teeth again.

This time, account for the day that just ended.

What were you proud of in the pursuing those intentions? What would you like to see differently?

For the length of time to polish the pearly whites, you can program your future.

You will soon find new moments of reflection seem to emerge throughout the day, too.

In those liminal moments between one action and the next, you will find clarity.

You will begin to see why Warren Buffet recommends saying “no” to almost everything.

You will become that person you wanted to be. Brush stroke by brush stroke.