Last week's article asked if you are shortchanging yourself by ignoring life's big rocks while focusing on all the little pebbles instead. This week, I want to examine an apparently-small pebble that is actually the biggest rock you have in your rock pile -- the energy you have with which to live your life. What you do with your energy is probably one of the most overlooked areas for personal improvement there is.
The big rocks in life (your health, your relationships, your personal or spiritual growth, your values, etc.) all require you to focus and make choices about what you are going to do next. That part may be obvious in the saying, but in reality, doesn't it seem that a whole lot of people spend a whole lot of time on the pebbles of life instead? You know the drill: tweeting about breakfast, bad hair days, or the commute to work. How about spending an hour or two on Facebook, cruising around pictures, posts, and other proxies for communication and relationship?
Fundamentally, the question comes down to how you are choosing to use your energy as life shows up. You can use your mental, emotional or physical energy to create positive experience or negative experience, much like you can use a hammer to drive a nail or pound your thumb. The hammer doesn't care, and your energy doesn't care, but you do!
How's your experience going so far today? Are you growing or cowering in the face of whatever lies in front of you? Are you using your energy to expand or to contract? If you haven't already, you will most likely bump into one of life's challenges in the not-too-distant future. Today, tomorrow, later this week -- when may be unknown, but you can pretty much bet something is going to show up that will challenge you.
How you experience those challenges will be dependent on where you choose to put your focus.
How to Direct Your Energy
Here's an oversimplified way of looking at this, something that many of us have experienced. This may seem trivial, and it is in one way of looking. However, I encourage you to find the element of power contained in something as seemingly minor as the difference between being excited or nervous.
While your body can't tell the difference between nervous and excited, you sure can. Both nervous and excited states cause adrenaline to be released into your system, which in turn sets in motion a series of physical effects and feelings. How you experience those effects and feelings is simply a matter of choice or focus. If you name the experience nervous or fear, you will wind up experiencing the contraction that typically accompanies nervous or fearful states of mind; if, instead, you call the experience excitement or anticipation, you will find that you have an expanding sense of possibility and perhaps even fun.
In either state, you are likely to enter into a heightened state of awareness. In the fearful or nervous state, your awareness starts looking for what could go wrong. In the expanded state of excited or anticipation, your awareness starts looking for the positive possibilities. Curiously, if you start looking for what could go wrong, you will probably find something, while if you start looking for the positive, you will likely find that as well.
What you experience as a result of what you observe is dependent on what you tell yourself. I know when I was a kid taking diving lessons, I was nervous one time and excited the next whenever I climbed the high dive. Nervous showed up when I told myself that being 30 feet off the pool surface was scary, and excited showed up when I told myself that I was about to experience all kinds of fun doing twists and turns in 30 feet. Nervous depended on how vividly I could make up potential negative scenarios in my head (OMG, I'll go splat), while excited showed up as I imagined the fun I'd have flying through the air.
The adrenaline was the same either way. In one instance, I used the adrenaline to paralyze myself, while in the other, I used the adrenaline to propel myself off the platform. So the question isn't whether or not you have the adrenaline -- it's what you do when you notice.
After all, it's just energy being released. You get to choose what you do with the energy. You can paralyze yourself or you can expand. It's all the same energy, but you get to be the one directing it. So, how would you like to direct your energy?
You won't be able to answer that question very well until you are clear on what kind of experience you want to have. I know that later this week I will wind up having a difficult conversation with someone I have known and cared for over the years. When I think about the downside possibilities -- he could react badly, I could wind up with my own feelings hurt, one of us could break off our relationship, etc. -- I wind up shutting down inside, and my thoughts turn toward protection or defensiveness, both of which are forms of contraction. Neither feels particularly good, and not surprisingly, the more I direct my energy into these kinds of thoughts or fears, the more negative my thoughts become as well.
The other option is to focus on the good and goodwill that has been built up over the years, and in so doing remind myself that he is a good person, a soul having a human experience. And so am I.
Regardless of where he chooses to place his energy, I know that I'm the one who will determine my experience. If I can use my energy to focus on the soul-centered possibilities in our relationship, I'm certain that good things will come. That certainly has been my experience over the years. Maybe not right away, but certainly over time.
Of course, these are oversimplified generalizations, but as Mark Twain was fond of pointing out, "All generalizations are false, including this one." So, again, there really is only one energy, and it's neutral. What would you like to do with yours?
What big rocks will you face this week? If you paid more attention to the quality of experience you would prefer, how might you direct your energy and focus in ways that could help you expand and be beneficial, both for you and for those with whom you interact?
I'd love to hear your take on this subject. What have you found to be most helpful? Please do leave a comment here or drop me an email at Russell (at) russellbishop.com.
If you want more information on how you can apply this kind of reframing to your life and to your job, about a few simple steps that may wind up transforming your life, please download a free chapter from my new book, "Workarounds That Work." You'll be glad you did.
Russell Bishop is an educational psychologist, author, executive coach and management consultant based in Santa Barbara, Calif. You can learn more about my work by visiting my website at www.RussellBishop.com. You can contact me by e-mail at Russell (at) russellbishop.com.
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Your perspective could allow some or many to access a path of their own toward "REALIZATION" of a perspective beyond that shallow illusory one that seeks to immerse us within it whether we like it or not. Of course part of the unspoken strategy is that we cannot find any referents from which to judge and thus are lost without knowing it consuming machines serving our purpose within that...larger whole.
One person (or group) might say; "We've SEEN this house. It's REAL. And it has two large bay windows with a rose garden under it.) The next might say, "Oh no no no no. The house has two LITTLE windows, a massive wood door with trees in front".
A third will say; " NO. Actually, it looks like...XYZ" And so on. They're all right, but they're all wrong, too. Such is this dualistic existence of ours–we (the vast majority of us anyway) are incapable of grasping the absolute truth. In fact, it's not that we're incapable, we're just going about it the wrong way–with religious dogma or the intellect.
I don't really recommend this approach. It usually places someone in a place of power over you in a bad light. I also find it difficult to disguise disdain. Pyrric victories are not worth winning in the first place. And thus I learned there are ways to pre-empt this type of thing entirely if you can see far enough ahead. And if you can see far enough to CYA, you can do the other.
Def something I am concious of and aware of on a daily basis. as the old zen koan goes "...to fully enjoy sweeping even the floor."...not always easy to do, but the wrestle is whats important.
but your touching upon that inner connection between moving experience and observing self is getting quite close to alot of physical and metaphysical Truths...therein lies much more of an understanding, where time falls by the wayside
The sentence above sums it all up for me. Great article Russell.
Nice. Great comment. I'm tired of the current milieu of fear, whining, irrationality, and divisiveness and have lost patience with people who uselessly ruminate on the dire state of global affairs without taking positive action to correct things - even if only within the small sphere of their personal life. We must be more consistently aware that we can still direct the bad energy around us in a constructive way. Time is too short to live in a perpetually defensive position. There is always something within our power to create, to solve, to learn, to remedy.
Here are some of the warning signs that indicate that you are becoming weaker, by not tapping into this critical energy supply: 1) You are frequently impatient, mean and irritable towards others. 2) You are jealous of what others have. 3) You don’t respect others, become angry and offended easily, rarely forgive and find it easy to lie and break promises. 4) You treat others badly but always expect to be treated well. 5) You celebrate other people’s tragic misfortunes. 6) You think other people have to lose so that you can gain.
It’s easy to course correct and tap into love if you are guilty of any of the aforementioned behaviors or attitudes, simply do the opposite. If you are not walking in love, you are not tapping into the most powerful energy source in the universe. Love gives your life meaning and makes you and your world better.
But you cannot live up to your potential as a consumer within this illusion if you do that. You will harm the bottom line of the pharmaceutical companies. What will we do if you don't buy into the illusion. Our entire reality will collapse. How will we support the 600 plus lobbyists in DC? The foundation for our marketing machine will collapse, Television commercials will not be made, people will lose their jobs. This is treasonous talk. You just made our list. (functioning in the guise of a pharmaceutical company executive)
If there are energies or gods or God, then they are facts, and people just don't get to make them up. Either there is something greater than Nature, or there isn't. And if there is, then we are indeed creations, and should be looking for what those powers or power (God) said to us; this implies that we are not neo-paganistic gods who get to mold our own reality. And if not, then this and all of my own beliefs are all rot anyway.