The Practicing Mind: Bringing Discipline and Focus into Your Life

Progress is a natural result of staying focused on the process of doing anything.

Everything in life worth achieving requires practice. In fact, life itself is nothing more than one long practice session, an endless effort of refining our motions. When the proper mechanics of practice are understood, the task of learning something new becomes a stress-free experience of joy and calmness, a process which settles all areas in your life and promotes proper perspective on all of life’s difficulties.

So few people are really aware of their thoughts. Their minds run all over the place without their permission, and they go along for the ride unknowingly and without making a choice.

If you are not in control of your thoughts then you are not in control of yourself. Without self-control, you have no real power, regardless of whatever else you accomplish. If you are not aware of the thoughts that you are thinking in each moment, then you are the rider with no reins, with no power over where you are going. You cannot control what you are not aware of. Awareness must come first.

Habits and practice are very interrelated. What we practice will become a habit.

When, instead, your goal is to focus on the process and stay in the present, then there are no mistakes and no judging. You are just learning and doing. You are executing the activity, observing the outcome, and adjusting yourself and your practice energy to produce the desired result. There are no bad emotions, because you are not judging anything.

The feeling "I'll be happy when X happens" will never bring you anything but discontentment.

You are going to find that buying the car is much less satisfying than working for it.

We think too many thoughts at once, most of them the same thoughts we had yesterday and the day before. We are impatient with life, and anxious.

The problem with patience and discipline is that developing each of them requires both of them.

Rushing had become so much of a habit that I was amazed at the amount of concentration it took to work slowly on purpose.

creating the practicing mind comes down to a few simple rules:        •  Keep yourself process-oriented.        •  Stay in the present.        •  Make the process the goal and use the overall goal as a rudder to steer your efforts.        •  Be deliberate, have an intention about what you want to accomplish, and remain aware of that intention.

Consider a sailor trying to reach the horizon. It is unreachable. If the sailor sees the horizon as the point he must reach to achieve happiness, he is destined to experience eternal frustration

The second step in creating patience is understanding and accepting that there is no such thing as reaching a point of perfection in anything.

The first step toward patience is to become aware of when your internal dialogue is running wild and dragging you with it.

When we subtly shift toward both focusing on and finding joy in the process of achieving instead of having the goal, we have gained a new skill. And once mastered, it is magical and incredibly empowering.

Most of us spend very little time in the present moment. We usually are either thinking about something that has not yet happened (and may never happen) or reliving something that already has. We waste each moment’s opportunity to experience what

So, as an adult, try to notice the carefree nature that comes naturally to a child, who lives for and in the present. Try to help children to not lose that nature as they grow up in a world that constantly tries to push it out of them. To

One study states that repeating a particular motion sixty times a day over twenty-one days will form a new habit that will become ingrained in your mind.

Why would I need someone to make sure I do my job correctly?” answered the Japanese worker. “That’s my job.

As we attempt to understand ourselves and our struggles with life’s endeavors, we may find peace in the observation of a flower. Ask yourself: At what point in a flower’s life, from seed to full bloom, does it reach perfection?

When you notice yourself fretting over something, you have accomplished the do portion. Now observe the behavior that you want to change. In your observation of yourself worrying, you separate yourself from the act of worrying. Now realize that the emotions you are experiencing have no effect on the problem over which you’re fretting. Release yourself from the emotions as best as you can — that is the correction portion — and try to look at the problem as an Observer.

Getting the goal and achieving it are worlds apart.

Experiencing impatience is one of the first symptoms of not being in the present moment, not doing what you are doing, and not staying process-oriented.

Our culture does not recognize the value of being process oriented, even though we see so much evidence for it in the work produced by countries that do.

If you are not in control of your thoughts, then you are not in control of yourself. Without self-control, you have no real power,

When you focus your mind on the present moment, on the process of what you are doing right now, you are always where you want to be and where you should be. All your energy goes into what you are doing. However, when you focus your mind on where you want to end up, you are never where you are, and you exhaust your energy with unrelated thoughts instead of putting it into what you are doing.

The paradox of slowness is that you will find you accomplish the task more quickly and with less effort because you are not wasting energy. Try it and you will see.