I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book. — Groucho Marx

We’re all jugglers. We all have many projects going simultaneously. Some of us are better jugglers than others.

How many projects do you have going on, right now?

One? Three? Eight? A couple dozen?

How about 50? That’s how many projects Thomas Edison had going at any given time. Astonishing, isn’t it? Yet he wasn’t a multitasker. On the contrary, he was an exceptionally focused individual.

What was Edison’s secret?

Thomas Edison’s Secret

Certainly he worked a lot — but no more so than any other entrepreneur running a thriving business. He possessed an active intelligence, of course. But Edison’s secret to managing so many projects at once was that he was a master juggler.

Remember the last time you watched a master juggler at work? I do. The man I saw juggled bowling pins, torches, watermelons, and chainsaws — at the same time! I was amazed at the skill required to perform such a feat. When I reflected on how the man was able to juggle such a mixed lot of objects, I observed three things:

1. He was focused, yet relaxed.
2. He was grounded and completely present in his body.
3. All the objects he juggled moved in the same plane. Edison did precisely the same thing. The “plane” in which he juggled his projects was the process of invention and experimentation.

The key to mastering the juggle in your own life is to focus on what’s congruent for you. I work as a facilitator, coach, and information entrepreneur. For me, congruence comes from my focus on bringing out the best in people and organizations. As long as I work in that plane of focus, I can comfortably juggle quite a few projects.

I’m no Thomas Edison, but I don’t have to be. And neither do you.

How to Become a Master Juggler

To become a master juggler, keep yourself grounded, relaxed, nourished, and engaged. Here are some suggestions for doing so:

• Do one thing at a time. Multitasking does not work. It does nothing more than support mediocrity and create a false sense of haste.
• Practice complete presence in every moment. Be where your feet are and watch how powerful your focus becomes.
• Eat regularly and well. Avoid foods with high fat and sugar content. Use caffeine moderately, if at all.
• Get plenty of rest. Edison was a “napper” — he would take four-hour catnaps at different times of the day. He was as a result always rested and relaxed.
• Eliminate the non-essential from your life.
• Engage the minds of others through conversation and reading.
• Get out and walk every day.
• Avoid being a whirling dervish. Handle difficulties while they’re still easy.
• Get some time alone to reflect and enjoy a bit of quiet each day.

Imagine now that you, too, are a master juggler. See yourself focused, in flow, and engaged. Like Edison, bring your full to what is before you in each moment.

Watch your life change for the better.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices. — William James

We spend a lot of time between our ears to no good purpose.

It isn’t that thinking is a bad thing. It’s that people often do it poorly. In your mind’s eye, step back for a moment and watch yourself think. You’ll observe ideas blazing along… concepts intermingling with to-do’s and dozens of oddball interjections light the inside of your skull up like a fireworks display. Worries, fears, plans, and desires jockey for first place in your consideration.

Some days it’s a wonder we get anything done at all, isn’t it?

Our image-and-information-driven, television-fed, sound-bite-work culture encourages people to practice a brand of brain-based elitism that’s mistaken for The Real Thing. Our thoughts seem as real to us as anything we touch, taste, smell, hear, or feel — perhaps in some ways even more real.

The mind amazes us with its complexity and its ability to synthesize while keeping the human body running like clockwork. But thinking, now, thinking is a tool that we all too often brandish like a leaky, smoke-belching chainsaw, slashing life up in little pieces on our way to who knows where.

Thoughts Are Ghosts

Thoughts are nothing more than ghosts until we connect them to the physical world.

Good thinking is the opportunity to unite mind and body and create meaning.

When we unify the mind and body, we achieve a level of awareness that can seem almost psychic or superhuman. Unification creates genius-level thinking. All we’re doing, though, is practicing maximum presence. The mind and body working as one gives us access to a richness of life experience that cannot be reached by focusing on either alone.

Engagement and Useful Activity

It’s no surprise that the world’s greatest thinkers deeply engage the world. They know instinctively that the secrets of the universe open up only when mind and body are completely in sync. Perhaps that’s why so many people are drawn to mind-body work such as martial arts, yoga, tennis, golf, and rock climbing. Each trains the mind and tunes the body simultaneously, yielding strength that is the natural result of being a whole human.

This weekend, seek an activity that involves the mind and body as a unit, that engages your full attention and all your senses. It can be something as simple as drawing, as playful as juggling, or as challenging as rock climbing.

Whatever you choose to do, bring your full focus to it. When the activity is complete, observe how your body feels. Watch the calmness of your mind.

That’s the blessing of being whole. Bring that wholeness to your life each day, and see miracles happen.

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing. — Agatha Christie

A bleak, foreboding day comes eventually for each of us.

Bleakness binds the mind, makes the chest feel heavy, forces the head down as though a great weight had dropped upon it overnight. Thoughts such as, “What’s the point?” and “What am I going to do now?” come unbidden. In bleak times it may seem as though your well has run dry, that there is no recourse, no salvation.

Yet there is always a path of action, even when you find yourself facing what seem to be limited options. The challenge when life looks bleak is to reclaim the energy trapped in the bleakness trance.

Acknowledge

Begin by acknowledging your state of mind without trying to change it. There’s a natural tendency to struggle when one feels trapped. Acknowledge the struggle itself. Acknowledge the condition of bleakness rather than the story of bleakness.

Here’s the difference: The story of bleakness is the tale of woe, the list of fears and worst-case scenarios the mind manufactures. You’ll enumerate those in a minute, but what’s important is raising your awareness about the state you’re in.

At the top of a sheet of paper, write, “My mind is telling me [insert the condition here].” Some examples:

My mind is telling me I’ll never recover from this broken relationship. My mind is telling me we’ll never have money again and I don’t know what to do. My mind is telling me I’ll never find another job. My mind is telling me that I’ll never get over my grief. Writing down your state of mind puts it out in the open where it can air out, so to speak. As soon as you take this step, you already have reclaimed some of the energy trapped by bleakness.

Now you have options.

List the Fears

Get specific. List all the fears your mind creates about the situation you’re in. Write quickly. List all the worst-case options, and for each answer the following questions: What’s the worst thing that will happen? What’s the worst of that?

Write until you can write no more. Then set the list aside and find a comfortable place to sit.

Tune Into the Body

Scan your body slowly from head to toe, going first down the front and returning up the back. Be aware of temperature, tension, and how you’re holding yourself.

Thoughts will rise. Watch them but don’t play along. Bring your attention back to the full body scan. Proceed to the next step after three slow, complete scans.

Oxygenate

When bleakness comes, it seems to steal one’s breath away. The result is oxygen deprivation. If you wanted to make yourself feel lousy, all you’d need to do is spend a few minutes taking shallow breaths.

You need to re-oxygenate the body to clear your mind. Why not do this at the outset? Because your mind needed to be distracted from its perceptions about what was happening. It’s a lot easier to focus on breathing once you’ve throttled back the freight train of despair.

Begin by sighing. Sighing comes naturally and has the beneficial effect of relaxing the diaphragm and stomach muscles. Sigh three times. Then take a deep breath and release it slowly. Take 14 more deep breaths, then scan your body again.

What do you notice now?

Step Out and Re-engage the Larger World

Step out of the present situation now. A change of environment works wonders. It isn’t that you’re trying to change the situation. You can’t. But you’re shifting your perspective about it, and that’s powerful.

Walk outside or visit a quiet place such as a church, library, park, or garden. You don’t have to speak to others; simply notice the world around you. Notice that it is always moving forward, no matter what happens. Reflect on the difficulties you’ve faced before and notice you moved forward too.

Remain engaged for at least 90 minutes before returning to the situation you’re facing.

Recognize the Simple Truth

Return to the situation now with a new perspective. The simple truth is that you have survived many trials and griefs in your life, and the one you face now is no different.

The reality is that you’re here, now, confronting what’s disturbed you. You have the opportunity to select the attitude that will best serve you and those around you as you move through whatever is happening in your life today.

It may not be easy, but it isn’t hard, either.

Identify New Options

Read through your list of fears. The list represents what your mind made up as the worst things that could happen. Perhaps now you can perceive the fears on that list from a new point of view. The worst- case scenario could happen, but you get to create the options for handling it.

When you operate from an attitude of conscious choice, you take responsibility for your attitude from a positive position. You reclaim the energy that was bound up by fear and can move with faith that you will be able to respond appropriately to whatever happens.

In so doing, you may discover there is no bleakness, ever.

There is only presence and the positive flow of life itself.

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. — Elbert Hubbard

It’s easy to be afraid. All you have to do is… nothing.

Fear feeds on inaction. The less you do, the more afraid you will be. Fear consumes those who sit around, who choose to do nothing because, after all, what’s the point?

The point is that fear is a choice. Misery is a choice. Anger is a choice.

Until you learn to live in the here-and-now, fear will be your constant companion. Fear happens when we peer into the unknowable future and decide danger awaits. Fear is the fabrication of events that have not yet transpired. It is a conversation we choose to have with ourselves about what might befall us.

Fear is a lie.

Will you lie to yourself today?

Should you choose instead to tell yourself the truth about your fears, what then will you do?

First, make a list of all your fears. Write them down on a piece of paper and look at them. Bring them out of the darkness in your mind and expose them to the light. The magic of your words on paper is the beginning of clarity.

Granted, there may be items on your list of fears that could come true. But the fear itself is only a thought. And thoughts cannot harm you.

So in the worst of cases, what to do about your fear isn’t the real question.

The question is, what will you do when life looks bleak, when your options seem limited, when the only choice seems to be something like cut and run?

The answer comes in part II of this article, “What to Do When Life Looks Bleak.” Stay tuned.

Passion alone is not a reliable indicator of future results.

Listen now.

You can hear it all around you. Sit in silence for a moment near an open window in late afternoon. Hear the loudest sound, then beneath it ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred subtler sounds.

Cars ride by. Children laugh and cry. A dog barks and a bird flits by. The electric warm sounds of summer buzz in your ear.

Yet there is something more, a steady hum, a throbbing of another, stronger rhythm on top of which the summer symphony floats.

It’s the background noise of your life.

Further now. Extend your mind and imagine that you’re dropping deeper, sinking into the surging river carrying the world along. Steady, sure, and powerful, it conveys you on the raft of your attention down through swirling eddies and the occasional plunge into white water.

Let yourself flow into the vastness of its magic. Feel it feed the gentle currents of your mind, washing strife and struggle away, cleansing the fissures and canyons of your consciousness. The great water flushes out all that holds you hostage: assumptions, fears, doubts, regrets, and resentments.

Stepping out of the raft of your fertile imagination, you know in your heart that all is well. From greener fields once more the sounds of summer com, calling you back from your journey. Refreshed, you move back into the day, walking on to other places, other tasks.

You hear footsteps, and they’re your own, and you smile as you notice you’re moving to the rhythm beneath the sounds of summer.

The constant rhythm of your essential life.

Passion is not a reliable indicator of long-term results. But it can keep you in the game.

When was the last time you examined your principles of living?

Principles are our operating guidelines, rules by which we choose to live. The extent to which we consciously choose and practice positive principles directly affects the course our lives take.

In fact, principles are impossible to live without. It’s just that too many people adopt principles unconsciously. If you want to be a force for positive change in the world, the quality of your principles are vital to your success.

The application of ungrounded principles, on the other hand, leads to disaster.

Consider the economic downturn of 2007 to 2009. It seems clear that the downturn came about in part as a result of ungrounded operating principles. It wasn’t capitalism or a free market economy that brought about the collapse. Nor was it lack of regulation.

It was the lack of grounded principles being practiced by those who had influence on how money was to be invested.

Closer to home, consider what happens when we choose to indulge in activities that harm others. When we lie, cheat, or make promises we have no intention of honoring; when we refuse to consider the impact choices may have on unseen others; when we break trust to satisfy our own urges or because we are afraid; when our only goal in life is to get what we want, no matter the consequences.

So the question is simple: What operating principles do you practice each day? How often do you consciously weigh your choices against those principles? How often do you abandon them?

While none of us is perfect, we each have the responsibility to live well in accordance with conscious principles.

Want a better quality of life? Choose high-quality operating principles. Take a little time today and consider the way you want to live, and the kind of life you want. Then identify the principles that, when consistently and mindfully practiced, bring about those results.

It surely beats living with blinders on.

Passion alone is not a reliable indicator of future results.

Fear is a sneaky little devil.

The problem with attempting to work something out when you’re in fear is that fear creates its own reality distortion field. We lose perspective. Fear can turn a respectable sense of urgency into haste.

Worse, fear takes our attention off our purpose.

For example, suppose you want more clients for your business. Smartly, you create a marketing plan and put it to work. Yet you focus exclusively on numbers and the need itself — that’s fear at work. If you come from a place of fear, those numbers will never add up to what you want them to be.

On the other hand, if you go out and promote your services with the intent of helping others get what they want, do it effectively and inoffensively, and you’ll find people who want what you have to offer.

Oddly enough, we often don’t recognize when fear is misdirecting our attention and actions. Here are seven symptoms of working from a place of fear:

• Thinking you haven’t done enough, even when it’s clear you’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty.
• Focusing solely on “numbers” or outcomes.”
• Thinking that things in your life aren’t happening quickly enough.
• Rushing.
• Failing to handle difficulties while they’re still easy — everything is an emergency.
• Experiencing sudden, irrational bursts of anger or snappiness.
• Your body feels tense, overtired, or even ill.

Instead of working from a place of fear, consider operating from a place of fearlessness.

What can you do to ensure you operate from a perspective of fearlessness? Practice having faith in your ability to respond appropriately to whatever comes your way. Identify a purpose for your life that acts as a canvas on which you can paint your vision using whatever raw materials life delivers.

Become an acute observer of your senses. Check in with the senses frequently, observe what they tell you without labeling the sensations or struggling to change them. Become a practitioner of deep awareness.

Take good care of yourself. Eat wholesome foods and walk daily to keep your body limber and grounded.

As you work through the week, experiment with focusing on helping others get what they want. What results do you observe as you change your mindset from need to the action of giving and the openness of receiving?

What happens to fear?

And what happens to your life?

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ever have one of those weeks in which you work hard yet seem to get nothing done?

I found myself frustrated and worn out at the end of one such week not too long ago. So I called a good friend and colleague to get a little support.

She let me go on for a few minutes about how aggravated I was that nothing seemed to be moving forward. It seemed to me that I hadn’t accomplished very much.

“Well,” she said, “sounds as though you’ve nailed yourself up again.” Ah, the brutal honesty of a trusted friend is a gift beyond measure!

I shook my head and laughed. Not only was she right, but she went on to suggest that I do something I always tell my clients to do:

Step back. Survey the territory. Get out of my head.

I’ll say that once more: Step back. Survey the territory. Get out of my head.

So I sat down with a sheet of paper and listed all the things I’d gotten done during the week. Lots of phone calls, meetings, email, and conversations. A good bit of driving. I’d lined up panelists for a collaborative working session coming up in a few weeks. I’d helped a client solve a particularly difficult problem. I’d developed new relationships with good people, and strengthened existing ones.

The list ran on. I stopped, looked at what I’d accomplished that week, and smiled. I’d been so caught up in my own head that I had neglected to take my bearings.

There are a couple of learnings I’d like to share from this episode. One is how important relationships are to our well-being and perspective. The other is we all have our moments of doubt and frustration. But we do not have to crucify ourselves when they happen!

Stop. Survey the territory. Get out of your head. See where you’ve been.

And be amazed at the Light that is you.

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well. — Horace Walpole

What is essential for you this week?

I worked with someone recently who, like most of us, leads a busy life. Her to-do list ran several pages in her notebook. She spent a lot of time sorting, organizing, and maintaining that list.

She was held hostage by it.

“I’m just not managing my time very well,” she told me. “I sit on Sunday afternoons and put that list together with the best of intentions, but by the end of the week I’m tired and frustrated because I just couldn’t get everything done.”

I looked at her running to-do list. The items she’d completed had been crossed off, yet many items were left undone — some dated back as much as two months.

I asked her about the open items, and she sighed. “I know I should get to them and finish them off. They’re all things I should be doing, but I just can’t seem to get my act together and get them done.”

Her problem, of course, wasn’t time management. It’s probably clear to you that she had too many items on her to-do list. She believed each item had to get done. Yet what consequences had she or anyone else suffered because those other “must-do” items had gone undone?

There were no consequences at all. Why? Because they were not essential items. They were should-do’s. Should-do’s look essential, but they are nothing more than items that either don’t really need doing, or that can more appropriately be done by someone else.

We’ve all fallen into the “should-do” trap before. I used to keep my “should-do” list on index cards. One day I realized that I had stacks of index cards with things I believed at the time truly had to get done.

I was caught in should-do land.

Are you? If so, then do what I did. Eliminate your should-do’s!

Getting rid of should-do’s can be a tall order in this everything- is-urgent world of ours. We are programmed to get busy, stay busy, look busy, hustle hustle hustle. But the truth is that people who have the lives they truly desire abandon haste in favor of devoted focus on the essentials.

A “to-do” item is essential if it meets three criteria:

1. It is aligned with your vision of the life you desire.
2. You — and only you — can get it done.
3. The consequences of leaving it undone will harm yourself or others.

Examine your to-do list with rigourous intention to apply these criteria. Identify and eliminate the “should-do’s,” then look at what’s left. Odds are that the resulting list will not only be far more manageable, but it will be “do-able.”

Try this process in your life for one week and watch what happens. You’ll be amazed at the results.

If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life. — Wu-Men

What message is your body sending you today?

Mine tells me I must have encountered a little virus in the past couple of weeks. I’ll be listening for more cues… but…

Funny how the mind seeks to explain, to find reasons for why my neck has been achy the past week, why my stomach doesn’t feel quite right, and why my eyes seem hot.

The mind is wired to make connections, suppositions, and assumptions. It seems to want the world to be ordered and sensible, to make its own diagnoses, as though it cannot bear to have each sensation labeled, every act explained.

And, of course, that’s what our minds have been trained to do: Make sense of the senseless, explain the inexplicable, and create order out of chaos.

We experience a set of physical sensations and our minds almost automatically label them: I have a virus. I am anxious. I am sad. I am happy. I am depressed.

I’m glad that I am not my mind.

So today I can sit and observe the sensations in my body, letting them be what they are without wishing them to be any different. That’s a challenge to be sure, for I would rather my body not be feeling how it feels and doing what it’s doing today.

After all, there are Things to be Done, People to Meet, Articles to Write, and a Performance this weekend for which I Must Practice.

Yet as I decide to listen to the body’s language, I hear its message loud and clear: It calls for rest. It requires energy in order to recover from whatever malady has invaded it. All the “musts” turn to dust as I simplify and eliminate the nonessential thoughts.

All that remains is a sense of presence, and suddenly I am Here, simply writing about explanations without seeking to explain.

What is your body telling you right now?

Are you ignoring it?

This weekend — better yet, right now! — bring our attention to your physical sensations. Scan the whole body. Avoid explaining or labeling the sensations as a group. What’s the temperature of the ambient air? Where do you feel pressure? Tension? How do your eyes feel? What about the muscles in your head?

There is information in the senses, a message in the body waiting for your listening ear.

What does it say?