Nov 10, 2011
Today is the perfect day to be shared. Because above everything that had happened strikes a simple a stubborn question: Am I doing it right?
I’ve been asking myself this question over the last three months again and again and still didn’t give up for a very simple reason: it is the right question. Here comes the trigger person who came up with a mere solution: Find the right answer! No big deal, isn’t it?
„Convince your brain that while opinions of others should be valued, they say nothing about the worth of yourself as a person”, confessed the author of “Racing Towards Excellence”, Muzaffar Khan.
Here my starving brain started to generate questions. Who said life should be simple, right? If we completely discount others’ opinions, don’t we risk to become arrogant and over-confident about who we are and what is the attitude to be adopted in this case? The answer Mr. Khan gave was rather simple.
People are used to judge each other following some patterns – stickers on their mindsets as they went along through life. This is why we can distinguish negative and positive attitudes, self-confident and self-diffident people, open-minded and conservative behaviors. People are different, patterns are different, opinions are different, I am only one!
We can compare others’ visions with our own ones in order to decide whether to count or discount extraneous opinions. The border between arrogance and self-esteem can be easily blurred if our mental laziness tells arrogance not to ask for help but rather to stay hidden in a nutshell until we will completely screw up regarding communication and outperformance.
So how am I supposed to find the right answer? Once again, I was provided with an uncomplicated suggestion of a mental exercise.
Try to experience how happy would you feel in the place you imagine yourself you are. Allow the feeling of really being enthusiastic about it. Delay the immediate gratification with a scrupulous meditation about the future self feeling
This daily, half-an-hour exercise can allow us to explore and consequently, find our passion. Spending this amount of time on trying to identify what we really should do with our lives makes us step forward day by day to a more tangible image of desired selves. Arrogance can not only stop the effectiveness of the exercise, but also represent an endeavor in finding a mentor who would objectively evaluate our performance.
“Really great people make you feel that you too can become great”. This quote of Mark Twain says much about Muzaffar Khan. He inspires people to take action, by giving a book of instructions on how to maintain enthusiasm in the ‘long run’. If we want to make a change we’d better start doing it right now, because this is exactly the moment when our tiny pitchy voice, or ‘homunculus’, or proverbial ‘little-man-in-the-head’ (because this is the way everyone thinks of themselves) started screaming of worry. The future is not the time for planning a change, because when we get to the moment when we ‘scheduled the change’ it will be still called NOW. Change hasn’t a future tense.
The Outperformer’s Strategy points out some steps to be made in order to channel the process of improving the current vision or to start creating a new one. The first is finding ‘a constant intrinsic source of drive’, i.e. whatever that pulls you out of the bed every morning with the amazing feeling of ‘everything is possible’. The drive comes again from the daily exercise of exploring when you focus especially on seeing things with an open mind and work to discover what you love.
When you have outlined your vision, you take the next step – let it ‘generate enthusiasm towards you idea for your future, creating happiness right now.’ To be mentioned, happiness comes from the balance of the four accounts described in ‘Racing Towards Excellence’: Emotional, Material, Mental and Physical Health. None of those should be ignored although all of us do that, persuaded by the same yellow stickers on the brain: money doesn’t bring happiness; I’d rather be spiritually balanced than physically fit (why not both?); emotional health is influenced by the environment rather than by our emotional intelligence; to be in a good fit does not release us from the mountain of the responsibilities we should care about first; we are not going to change our lives, let alone changing the world. That’s exactly the boundaries we put to narrow down our list of actions and still feel excused for not doing anything worthwhile.
Finally, another bullet point in this strategy is to wait in order to obtain something that you want and to factor this in our decision making. Moreover, if one can succeed in applying this strategy, he can become himself a source of inspiration for other people and this way the chain keeps going on.
Have I tried to apply any of these? It would be unfair if I said ‘no’. I tried and failed. I tried again and failed again. Of course I’ve given up. Lots of times. But every time there was someone there to pick me up again and urge me to recover the same enthusiasm. Now I feel again on one of these waves, with no idea what is going to be ahead. But as long as I am nearer than I was yesterday, it is worth it.