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Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
The most important insights I am getting through this virus attack disaster on my sites have nothing to do with my sites.
What I am getting is probably way more important for everyone.
When you are too busy with something that occupies all your attention all the time… then creativity, inspiration, self-awareness… all the things that are vital to having a good life, being powerful, being the captain, are suffering.
You can’t put all your power into the thing you are doing, because every crew member, every thought, every urge wants to take you out of that one thing.
Everything feels equally important, and that makes nothing important enough to give all your attention to it.
Your productivity gets really low… as little as 10% of what it could be.
And that is not even personal… it is almost everyone on the planet.
The work I do on any normal day could fill an entire day… if I allowed anything to distract me.
Anything. I cook for the whole week all at once, so deciding what to eat doesn’t distract me.
- I buy the same grocery items every week.
- drink the same amount of tea every day.
- wear the same clothes all the time.
- take a shower once a week.
- turned off my phones’ ringer. My computer’s system sounds.
- read my emails for inspiration only.
It is easier to see the productivity difference when the proverbial shit hits the fan… like having to recreate 54 websites fast.
I did it in eight days.
I also slept normally, read 2 hours, because I am important to me. A normal person would take months to do what I have done.
I had to spend a lot of time on technical support calls, so I could gauge the productivity of ‘normal folks’.
What takes me 5 minutes takes them more than an hour… and then they forget some things they promised, and is part of the process, like sending me a confirmation email. This happened four times in the past week.
But that is what is now ‘normal’.
Distractible means low productivity.
And if you were paid for your production, you would be in trouble.
So in the Reality Challenge people are struggling with this whole notion… a life where you are so distractible, that nothing ever gets done.
And… forgive me for being blunt, but a life where you never amount to much… just like your father said when you were a child.
The secret is simple but incredibly hard.
You need to be able to call the shot, moment by moment, about what you pay attention to.
What is you and what is not.
And when your attention gets hitched, gently bring it back to what YOU said you were doing…
The goal is not that you force your attention to STAY… no the goal is to bring it back gently.
And this comes to an issue some of my clients are struggling with.
To get better at anything requires mindful practice with the intention to get better.
It is called ‘deliberate practice’ by some.
Deliberate means intentional. With intention to get better, with successive refinement. Simple.
So what we are practicing here is increasing the quality and the amount of attention we can give solely to one thing.
But if we pay attention to the time, because that is what we want to increase, then we are ‘outcome dependent’ and the practicing is about a result, and not what we are doing.
You can only get better at anything if you pay attention to the ‘how’. Because that is what needs to get better. The how is going to increase the productivity, the sense of power, the quality of your work and life.
Not the how much.
Every good coach prepares their players to be excellent at the basics through deliberate practice.
So when it comes to the game, the results, the outcome can come more readily.
So if you are practicing training your attention with a stop watch… stop doing that. You are practicing the wrong thing.
When I do my practice at night, I get distracted about 20 times… but because I am soooo good at bringing my attention back to what I am doing, it feels seamless…
And just so you know: this same skill is what allows me to be angry only for seconds and return myself to sober inside those second. Or depressed for only seconds. Or vengeful, regretful, any of those emotions.
It is the same move: not trying not to get angry, but when I get angry (or any of those emotions) return to equilibrium… FAST.
When you force, you are not practicing anything other than forcing. Ugh, right?
Now, how do you reduce the distractions… because obviously if you have too many, all this practice will not produce much increase in your productivity, in your sense of power in your life.
The first step is to reduce the outside distractions as much as it is humanly possible. Phone, visitors, etc. Too many choices…
And then start working on the inside distractions… the voices and the urges.
You learn how to do that in the Amish Horse Training Method, as one of my students calls it ‘drown-proofing’ yourself. And then in the Reality Challenge.
But without reducing the outside distractions, your practice inside those programs will be ineffective.
PS: Read more about this in this 67-step report by Jodie
PPS: If you look, Kaizen, the Japanese method of improvement is a deliberate practice method.
