You Must Be Present To Win

…it always amazes me how very ‘unpresent’ a lot of folks are.  Take a walk down any street, sit in a restaurant, heck even drive your car, and you’ll see plenty of examples of it. People neglecting dangers, family, and even other road users because of the lure of a digital device in their hand. – All looking to be present anywhere else but where they should be. 

Thing is, when you’re not present you can get into trouble. I’ve had my youngest son Finn agree to the craziest things when on his phone, until his brain catches up with him and he realises what he almost agreed to. 

For some folks, not being present means you follow the crowd into thinking that a chocolate bar can bring you to near orgasm, or that once you buy a new car all the roads are suddenly free of traffic, or that people with six-packs sit around all day drinking beer grinning like the Joker at each other. 

Now, you’re probably smirking to yourself, because you know that none of the above is true and that you’re a lot cleverer than those people, but what sleepwalking are you doing in your business? 

Ever find yourself swept away with a bright shiny sales page and find yourself with a piece of software you’ll never use. Or promising that you’ll never buy off someone again and then finding yourself back again in the queue with your credit card in hand. Or telling yourself that this is the year when everything will be different and then going veering off that path and back to your old habits again.. – All because the path to not thinking is easier than keeping yourself present. 

You’re not the only one, most people aren’t even present to what they say.  Anyone that starts a line with  ‘I know I shouldn’t do this…’ hasn’t got their brain in gear.  And in those moments, we smile knowing what they’re talking about but we do it too. But in those moments we get fatter, lazier, and poorer.  

So how do you get control of our problem? The simple answer, try and stay in the present moment as much as possible. Which is easier to say than do. Especially when everything around us is trying to pull our attention in ten different directions at once and making us believe that the past and present are where our attention should be. 

Fact is, we can’t do anything at either time. Ten minutes from now, I can’t act until the clock counts down and I get there. But already I can feel the pull to all the exciting things that my ego is telling me that I could be doing ten minutes from now.  But it’s all a lie. The next ten minutes are probably going to be the same as the last ten minutes, and probably no different to the next ten, but we like to believe that they won’t and so we go into autopilot lost in the past and future and not giving the present moment the attention it deserves.

 Everything we want is done in the present moment. That’s where your power is. That’s where you win. That’s why you need to be present there. 

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