A highly incomplete checklist

The year has just started and already you are creatively adapting to the unexpected, steering around unexpected resistances, and still feeling cocky about taking the hill you’ve assigned yourself for this year. Good.

This cursory reminder list of methods is passed along to keep handy if and when you run up against a boulder that frustrates you, casting a dim light over achievability of the year’s target. The list can also be used proactively even during times of smooth sailing to notch the game up a bit.

I.  Creativity

1. Doodle a schematic of the situation and its players. These could be business or personal relationships that you are navigating. Engaging spatial mind centers in the right brain is a prime directive in terms of overcoming the bias of the time i.e. Acceleritis.
   1. What would be the ideal “win” for each player in the diagram? Getting down to the human motivational level immediately is a typical mensch method. This engages your own feelings, rebalancing you out of leftbrain dominance.
   2. What action might each player take in the situation, and how would other players react? “Consequence thinking” engages the prefrontal lobes. The more your brain is fully engaged the closer you get to Holosentience.
   3. Have you left anyone out of the diagram so far? Who?
   4. What would be the ideal outcome of the depicted situation from the standpoint of a hypothetical Universal Consciousness?
       
2. Get out in Nature alone. Even when it’s freezing cold.
   1. Pay attention to nature all around you, up and down, above and below you.
   2. In the streets of big cities this works too although not as powerfully, so nearby parks are a plus, the less city-like the better.
       
3. Blocked. This is for when you’ve run up against a challenge that worries you and brings you down.
   1. Imagine that you can feel the muscles in your head relaxing while you go blank and stop gnawing whatever bone has your mind obsessed at the moment. Don’t let yourself revive that conversation in your head for a while, force yourself to think or feel about some different subject, for at least several minutes, preferably up to three days if timing permits.
   2. Turning away from a problem allows the subconscious mind with its far greater resources to attack the problem from new directions. Fearing that you must stick with it, if you persist in trying the ingrained approach you are stuck in and can’t see beyond, it will just take longer to get to a solution, making you miserable, and less effective in everything else you do in the meantime.
   3. Like trying to remember a word that’s on the tip of your tongue. You have to stop trying to remember it. You are going into the wrong file drawers, which blocks you from relaxing into the right file drawer where suddenly the word just pops into your mind in the midst of some completely different conversation.
       
4. Right Objectives? Have you set the right goals for 2012?
   1. Are you following goals set for you by someone else?
   2. Were you arm-twisted into these goals by persons or situations?
   3. If you’re stuck with such goals, what would be the twist that would make each goal more important to you personally?
   4. How will you know if an objective is “right”? It will be a combination of a strong hunch feeling that it’s right, plus you could defend it logically if challenged by a naysayer.
   5. In the context of the whole-brain “enlightened” thinking espoused in this blog, right objectives will be outcomes that benefit people widely as well as benefiting you.
       
5. Right Metrics?
   1. Is there a way of re-stating each goal so that its most valuable effects can be better ascertained and appreciated at the end of the year?
   2. Perhaps evaluate not just economic outcomes but also social ones? How will people be affected, people close to you and those far away?

II.  In Preparation

1. Predreaming. This is what you do on weekends in looking at the week ahead, and evenings looking at the next day.
   1. For each scheduled meeting/phone call, whether business, nonprofit, governmental, military, personal, or spiritual, what’s the outcome targeted? What might each party, including you, say that would get you in hot water and move you away from the targeted outcome?
   2. Actually hear and visualize the dialog back and forth in your mind.
   3. What’s the ideal “win” for each player?
       
2. Postdreaming. The after-action report to your Self at the end of each day, at stolen moments e.g. when everyone thinks you’re already asleep.
   1. What could you have done or said better.          
   2. What to do next time in a similar situation — what worked and what didn’t.
   3. What will be the warning sign next time to remind you of this improved approach?

III.  In Action

1. Check for fun.
   1. Okay, if fun is not the right word for you, and neither is play, just make sure you’re enjoying what you’re doing at the moment.
   2. If there’s no sense of enjoyment, forget about getting flow state performance out of yourself. It’s not going to happen.
   3. Take a one-minute meditation break to get into the headspace of loving what you are doing.
   4. Take notes on specific diagnostic ideas you get as to what’s really bugging you so you can focus on them later.
       
2.  What’s the outcome focus now?
   1. You want to be singlepointed not multitasking: what is it you’re trying to achieve right now?
   2. Everything else gets put aside — out of distraction range, hidden from eye movements — and every great new idea that pops into your head gets tucked into a one-word note instantly and then ignored until later.
   3. Even if it has to do with the present meeting, it goes into a note, one that you will pay attention to during the course of the meeting, just not right now. Again, “meeting” includes any encounter with others, not just business meetings.
   4. Stay in the moment. Be 100% present with the others. Absolutely turn off email and all forms of electronic interruption. Do not interrupt the speaker.
       
3. All of you in the Now.
   1. Your estimable resources are not being frittered away by excessive dispersal, though all your armies are on the line, at the ready. Your attention is one. You are focused with everyone on the common immediate objective. Your orientation is a win for all.
   2. As impulses rise up continuously from within, you merely observe them without acting on them, except for the rare impulse that you feel to be perfect for the moment.
   3. Therefore you do not allow yourself to be rushed, you take your time.
   4. Each impulse to do something you allow to float downstream into the past without acting on it, except for those tagged with the mysterious sense of perfection. These perfect impulses will be those that you feel have no negativity hidden in them, and which go to the core of the matter.
   5. In lulls, look over your notes, determine action items and schedule them, file notes in folders based on the relationships you are involved in this year, for easy findability. If necessary start a new 2012 filing system that does not tackle the massive job of re-filing the past right now. Keep the 2012 refined objectives in sight at all times.

Let 2012 be the year of the fresh start for all of us.

Best to all,

Bill