Tag: perspective

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Deepak Chopra and the Meaning of Life

Your consciousness constructs the expansion of facts

I’m a dreamer and a skeptic. As a teenager, I remember being fascinated by the Amway promotional materials given to my parents, dreaming (like so many MLM victims) of the good life, then sitting at my desk and doing the math. When I walked to the living room and shared my findings during the pitch to my parents, the Amway visitors were not pleased at all.

My skepticism continues around gurus, the fortunate few who have built lucrative businesses around their products and ideas. Deepak Chopra is a big one, and my impression was always that his teachings were hollow.

Imagine my thrill when I stumbled on Wisdom of Chopra, a website that generates Chopra-esque quotes. They sound like science, sounds like sage wisdom, but do the words actually mean anything?

The Role of Skepticism

Inspirational words are intended to help us dream, but wistful dreaming can lead to trouble.

Skeptics have a bad reputation. They are the Debbie Downers in our lives. The stubborn naysayers. That’s not all skepticism is.

Skepticism helps us sift the good from the bad. It helps us test hypotheses, to really unearth what works. And in the case of gurus, it helps us avoid expensive folly.

Let’s sift through some of the gems and folly from the quote generator:

Innocence is the womb of dimensionless success
It certainly is a womb of success for those who prey on innocence. And yet, while we have our guard up for the charlatans of the world, it becomes ever more important to retain innocence and wonder and creativity and love.

Your heart experiences positive experiences
I certainly hope so. Both my anatomical heart and my metaphorical heart thirst for the positive.

Making tea expresses visible creativity
Tea anyone? I can imagine a guru rolling out a bespoke line of teas using quotes like this. If you’re not drinking enough of it, you won’t ever reach your creative potential.

Information is the path to the progressive expansion of truth
Um, as long as that information is not corrupted. There are too many sheep following dangerous leaders. Folks whose brains have been infected with false facts often peddled by the right wing. We need more skepticism around sources of information.

The secret of the universe exists as exponential positivity
All I imagine when I read this is alarm bells ringing louder and louder as a nuclear power plant melts down. Or someone stubbornly insisting on “looking on the bright side” in the midst of his life falling into tragedy. It’s not just positivity, it’s exponential!

I’m more into insightful positivity than exponential, thank you very much. I’ll take empathetic mourning in the service of healing over the nuclear meltdown positivity, please.

Unleash the Dreamer

What do fake Chopra quotes have to do with peak performance and taking on ambitious goals?

Everything.

For all but the most privileged, life is about overcoming setbacks. Our mental game is what keeps us moving forward. We become powerful by being able to transform the weird into something useful or even inspirational.

We’ve all seen the inspirational photos and quotes that champion athletes put on their walls leading up to big competitions. In the end, though, the inspiration is not in the words but with us. We give the words power, and the power changes with each reader of the words.

One of the reasons we partner with coaches is that they help us find the words and keep us connected to what inspires us. They remind us that we are greater than we believe. They hold us accountable to our words. They strengthen our skill at getting through discomfort in order to generate velocity toward what matters.

Therefore…Your desire is reborn in visible potentiality

Skeptics have a bad reputation because we perceive them as being only skeptical. We imagine them having no capacity to dream. As we navigate a tough and often brutal world, it’s important to stay connected to inspiration.

Words mean things. And we can create meaning out of anything we encounter, including words. So while these fake quotes might be funny or scary or even insipid on their surface, they also offer an opportunity to interpret them for our own purposes. My cynical takes on the fake quotes could have been inspirational instead.

Maybe “making tea unfolds through nonlocal actions” has nothing to do with tea for you. Maybe it shakes you out of dwelling on neighborhood gossip and reconnects you to a larger purpose.

Maybe “greatness illuminates the flow of happiness” is not about traditional ideas of happiness or greatness but simply finding a way to happily go grocery shopping and get the laundry done

What if “nature is inside the light of fulfillment” has no other meaning than reminding you that there’s a park nearby and it might be nice to take a silent walk on a cold winter night, or feel leaves ruffling past your feet as you walk, or hear birds chirping as spring unfolds?

We get to use words as we please. We get to be fueled by a word or phrase even if no one else understands it.

We get to remake each moment, transform the tough ones to our purposes. We’re not always as skilled as we’d like, and sometimes it feels like an impossible goal. But, the possibility is there, even if it is to chuckle at some fake Chopra quotes during a rough day at the office.

Don’t take it from me. Be discerning and intelligent. Be blindly loyal to no one. With healthy skepticism AND an openness to imagination and dreaming. And, just as I share a bit of myself here in the hopes that you will be skeptically inspired, please share a bit of yourself with those around you.

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Those Damned Expectations

Peak performance is about paradox. Be intense and stay relaxed at the same time. Play with bravado and humility simultaneously. Be fully trained nearly beyond the bounds of health – and fully rested too.

The bigger picture of peak performance is the same. When we commit to big goals, we can be seduced by the expectations that go with them. We can lose track of the work needed to get there and lose sight of our progress. Both of these diminish our potential. Today, we’ll talk about setting aside expectations and keeping connected to progress.

PERSPECTIVE FOR LONG-TERM DOMINANCE

Perspective makes the experience of pursuing goals more effective and rewarding.

While it’s useful to attack our huge goals and aspire to greater achievement it’s also important to keep things in perspective and to celebrate successes. Let’s say your huge goal is dominance. You want to be the number one company or the number one athlete or have the greatest social impact of any activist in history. If our expectation is achieving that at the next milestone, we are setting ourselves up for frustration. Becoming the Dominant One can feel like trudging forward, but there is a more rewarding, effective road.

A problem with enormous goals like dominance is that they are always in the future until they aren’t. Sometimes we only see dominance in retrospect.

In the meantime, it can be a pretty bleak road where we only see disappointment at not meeting our expectations. Even the victories seem smaller than we want.

But let’s step back for some perspective. What seems disappointing today might have been an unimaginable performance five years ago. Most of the time we don’t see that. Our progress is entangled with end goals and ego. Expectations. We’ve lost sight of how wonderfully we are moving forward, and with that we’ve lost an opportunity to be even more dominant.

CONFIDENCE

Seeing progress gives us access to confidence. When we are bound by expectations, our self-talk might sound like “why is it never good enough?!?!?!” or “of course! Another mistake that puts me behind everyone else.”

Freeing ourself from expectations with a bit of perspective, we are free to say “that’s not the level I’m ultimately going for, but it’s so much better than last time.” We give ourselves credit for progress, but there’s something else available. One of the key factors in clutch, dominant performance is confidence or bravado. By giving ourselves credit, we also give ourselves permission to own a higher level of bravado.

Team leaders take note. If your folks have just hit their number or delivered on a deadline, give ample time for celebration. Talking about the bigger goals too soon spoils the fun and prevents the team from locking in their well-earned bravado. It’s also possible that your newly confident team might have bigger, better ideas for what’s possible next.

TINKERING TO OPTIMIZE

Seeing progress also lets us evaluate and see new opportunities. We’ve gained bravado. Now we get to add a dose of humility to shake things up.

True dominance requires tinkering. It requires a paradox of complete immersion in generating momentum toward the goal AND self-awareness of what’s working and what’s not.

Sometimes we get so inside our pursuit of a goal that we lose sight of what it actually takes to succeed. We become reactive instead of strategic. We might take short cuts, sacrificing long-term success for a short-term win. In this moment, we might feel frustrated or drifting or fuzzy about how we’ll ever get where we want to go. It’s at this point that many people give up.

Not you.

By taking a step back and seeing your progress, you can access both the bravado of a champion and the humility that makes a dominant force.

Take an honest look at what’s working and make a comprehensive assessment of what’s needed next. Remember, we don’t always know everything the ultimate goal will require of us. Pausing gives us a chance to notice things like:

Are my assumptions flawed?

What are others doing that might work for me?

What are others doing that might be completely wrong for me…or even them?

How am I enjoying the experience of getting there?

Where can I cultivate a surprising dominant advantage?

We pause. We tinker. Then we do it again.

And through the tinkering, we discover opportunity.

Now go tinker!