The other day, I was driving to Sedona and realized that the last 10 miles had gone unnoticed. I was in my head, figuring things out, imagining sharing with friends and clients… needless to say, I was not “in the moment”.
I started in on the lovely self-talk, “What’s wrong with you? You really have to work on getting present. Experience the moment. Maybe I should meditate. I’ll talk to Susan about meditating. But what if she’s busy? I’ve been meaning to tell her about this class I took… ”
Woops! Slid off into mental la-la land again. But suddenly it struck me how natural my internal dialog felt. It just felt like ME. I started to wonder if perhaps this was not a fault, but rather a gift.
How we manage our so-called “faults” is incredibly important. Some people work to improve them, while others ignore them. I encourage the third option that I stumbled upon the other day – leverage them.
For instance, I’m inherently lazy. It’s true. I never want to spend more time on a project than absolutely necessary. So over the years how did I leverage laziness? I translated my laziness (working as little as possible) into efficiency (working smarter, not harder). Same motivation, but when laziness is turned on its head, it becomes the gift of efficiency. I eventually (though quite unintentionally) moved past feeling bad about it, and leveraged my natural tendency towards sloth to serve me better.
But back to my original dilemma of not being present. How could I possibly learn to leverage this “gift” of drifting off in my mind, thinking about how I’ll tell others what I’m experiencing? Then it hit me – I already learned how to leverage it… I became a storyteller.
Joyce S. Kaye says
Wonderful resolution of dilemma!
Ruth Breiling says
Thank you for a great example of “re-languaging” your self-talk.
Mary Cravets says
I love that term – “re-languaging”. Hope you don’t mind if I borrow it!