Month: October 2021

Taking Responsibility, an Aha Moment


Good evening readers. I am sharing this quick post tonight because these moments can be rare. I seriously had one of those Aha moments tonight. I have been a advocate for taking personal responsibility for your own life for a long time. This is one of those moments where i realized I should say “I am learning” rather than “I have learned.” I say this, because sometimes you think you have learned something and then you discover you are still learning. Tonight I was testing out a journal exercise for a short course I am putting together, and I was thinking through personal responsibility as part of the exercise. All this time my mouth was saying “I take personal responsibility”, but I discovered there were still two situations in my life where I thought others might be to blame. It wasn’t that I was being a hypocrite on purpose, I just didn’t realize how unconscious we can be. This exercise was asking the student to take an honest look at the areas in their life where they do take personal responsibility, and areas where they don’t. When I started writing my brain was almost arrogantly saying, “I got this one, but if I am going to ask someone else to do it then I have to”. It was both humbling, and liberating to eat those thoughts.

I was reminded that we often look at personal responsibility as something we have to grin and bear. In truth, when you take responsibility it gives you a greater sense of control. You can’t control what other people do. What you can control is what you do, which can also lead to greater level of satisfaction in your life. So tonight I learned a lesson, and got validation that the course material I am putting together is effective. At least this section.

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Listening Over Telling


One of the most important skills for all of us is being a good listener. You can’t listen to someone and really understand them, while you are thinking about the next thing you want to say. If we don’t naturally connect with people this is most often the reason why.

By listening closely and seeking to understand someone, you are telling the person that they are important. You are telling them without words. People instinctively know when you are not listening. Books have been written entirely on this topic. Instead of writing a long post about the benefits of being a good listener, I invite you to take part in an experiment. Commit today to spend the next seven days deeply listening and trying to understand those people you come in contact with. This exercise is a game changer for many people. This is something that I naturally struggle with, and one of the greatest discoveries that came as a result of preparing to become a helping professional.

Please comment on this post to share your outcome. You can also leave me a personal note here.

A Mirage In the Desert


This post is meant to expand on and provide a “how to” for my last post.  Most of us who are working towards our life’s goals are thinking about a destination where life will be easy.  This is a place where we will have plenty of abundance to keep us happy and content.  Many successful people have traveled the road to their ultimate destination, only to find a new set of challenges, and another goal.  If we really pay attention, this is the story we tell ourselves.  We keep this destination in mind and we move forward.   Standard Oil billionaire John D. Rockefeller was asked, “How much money is enough?”  He answered, “Just a little bit more.”  He was teasing the fact that it will never be enough.  Someone who has achieved so much, realizes that the destination doesn’t exist, only a continued journey. 

That feeling of having given it everything you have, and getting to your goal is a great feeling.  If you talk to most people who have achieved a big goal like reaching a billion dollars in business, they report that initial deep satisfaction of having reached their destination.  Then they often report a huge let down once they settle into their new reality.  In their minds they had imagined a long term sense of satisfaction, only to be disappointed that it quickly faded.  If you want to achieve great things and avoid being fooled by a mirage in the desert read on.    

Goal Setting

The first step in a better way forward begins the same.  Write down your goals and visualize what your goals might mean for your life.  Only a small percentage of people write down their goals, and only a small percentage of people have great success.  That doesn’t mean that if you write out your goals, you will achieve great things.  What it does mean is that the chances of success without specific goals is thin.  It is important that you visualize what those goals will mean for your life as well as write them down. Once you have your goals written down, list the first ten or so things that you will need to do to achieve them. This is where your new path forward diverges from the traditional way of achieving goals. 

Shifting Your Focus

Take that list of ten next steps that you will need to take, and pick the one you are going to work on first.  You have already determined that this is something that you will need to do to reach your goal, so put everything else out of your mind, and just focus on the doing.  Most of the time when we are doing things, our mind is busy trying to distract us.  As I discussed in my last post it is distracting us with pictures of our goal, or by telling us we can’t achieve it.  As soon as you catch your focus going anywhere else, other than on what you are doing, gently push your focus back to what you are doing.  The purpose here is to derive your satisfaction from the doing.  Perform each task with equal parts trying to discover something interesting, and getting the task done.  Look at the task like it has something to tell you.  If you have never done this before, it might feel a little odd, but trust me it works.  

The Reason for Shifting Your Focus

Shifting your focus away from the destination does two things for you.  First it keeps the distractions that your mind will feed you at bay.  Just as important, it will add flexibility to your destination.  If you talk to someone who has grown a large company from scratch, more often than not, the business they created is much different that the business they set out to create. One you have the full picture of that original goal, that should become a second priority.  Your first priority should be on what you are doing right now.

Review

At the end of each week set aside a couple of hours to review what you have achieved.  Review the list of ten steps, and see what you have accomplished.  Then add anything new that needs to be done in the coming week.  Just like any other task along the way, focus on the doing and don’t let your focus move away from the task at hand.  This is a particularly good time to discover new things to guide you forward.  When you are done go back to the big goal, and see how certain parts of it may have changed or stayed the same.  This process of adjusting your goals as you go keeps your reality aligned with your goal.  It causes your goal to become the journey.  It will keep your expectations aligned with the process.

Continuous Improvement

As you perform each task, keeping yourself laser focused on just that task, and performing it as if it is the task itself that is the goal will greatly increase the quality of the work.  You will also start to notice inspiration coming from the doing rather than the achieving.  Continuous improvement will come naturally.  

If you have any questions about this post or are interested in life coaching you can drop me a note at www.brentpinkston.com/contact .  I also keep four fifteen minute spaces open on my calendar each month for free discussions about what you want to achieve via Google Meet.  These can be one on one, or group calls.

We Have Goal Achievement Backwards


Writing down and visualizing your goals is critical. It gives you a sense of where you want to go and you should review it daily, but there is something more. The big goals, once written down and internalized should become secondary goals. They are something in the back of your mind for you to aim at. Your primary goal should then become to focus one-hundred percent on what you are doing right now. Even when you achieve a big goal, it often looks very different than the vision you first had. A lot of things can change along the way. Be flexible with the specifics of your big goals, but review and visualize them daily.

Humans have three perceptions of time. They are past, present, and future. The only one of those three perceptions of time where we can actually do something, is in the present. As we begin to do things, thoughts rise in our mind. They may be painting pictures of the past or the future. Perhaps they are painting the future only to alert us of something else we have to get done. They are often telling us we aren’t good enough to get it done, or that we are wasting our time. Sometimes they remind us of how great it will be to get there. Either way we become distracted by our own thoughts. Once you have decided there is something specific to be done, let that be your only goal for the moment. If another thought occurs to you just gently go back to focusing in on what you are doing right now.

Try this out for the next several weeks, and you will not go back to your old distracted ways of working. Once you have decided something is worth doing, then do it. As you are working on it, and you catch yourself thinking about something else, just come back to what you are doing and focus intently on it. Don’t worry about whether the work you are doing is moving you towards your big goal right this moment. The act of focusing on just what you are doing, and quieting your mind while you are doing it will become so engrossing, that you will learn to get fulfillment out of what you are doing right now. Sometimes when I do something like write a routine email, I practice paying insanely close attention to every key stroke, and become engrossed in the thought I am trying to communicate. This is good practice for when I am working on something more complicated and proned to be derailed by distraction.

If you have a big goal, there are usually a lot of challenges along the way to achieving it so it is important to keep the benefits the goal will provide to our life. On the other hand, If you learn to get fulfillment out of every piece of work it becomes much less painful when things get hard. Admittedly, it also becomes much harder to focus, but that is where learning to focus your attention, and gently push thoughts back to the task at hand helps. If you have not read this post, it might be worthwhile for a bit more background on focusing.

When I talk with people on this topic for the first time, there are usually questions or challenges that arise. If you have questions you can drop me a note at brentpinkston.com/contact