Little Purple Flowers
When my oldest daughter was little, she and I were walking together on our way to someplace. Where doesn’t really matter except that I wanted to get there and my daughter kept pausing to crouch down and look at the grass. At first it wasn’t a big deal but she kept at it, letting go of my hand and bending down to pick at the weeds. I had places to go, things to do and … really no time to hand trim the landscape. Finally, I had to ask her what was so special about the grass today, using a love language dripping in sarcasm. She looked up, held out her hand and said “the pretty purple flowers.”
Purple flowers?
From where I stood, I couldn’t see any purple flowers.
But when I bent down to get on the same level as my daughter, I was surprised to find dozens of tiny purple flowers mixed in with the green leaves. They were lovely. But you had to be close to the ground to even notice they were there.
This lesson has stuck with me for many years. It is easy to get focused on the destination or goal and race to a perceived finish line and miss the simple beauty of the people and places around us.
The trick is to stay present in the moment, to breathe and enjoy what’s here, now, and bring everything you are to where you are. For some people that sounds like a bunch of nonsense. Others totally get it, take a deep breath and re-center themselves.
I’m probably closer to the first group than the second, so let’s see if I can make this a little more palatable.
The trick is to stay present in the moment, to breathe and enjoy what’s here, now, and bring everything you are to where you are.
Six Steps You Can Try Today
1. Take a deep breath
We tend to take shallow breaths when we get nervous or stressed. And that’s a bad thing in a variety of ways. There’s a considerable amount of science that says shallow breathing can negatively affect the functions of your brain, sleep patterns, immunity and much more.
Seriously. Do yourself a favor and take a deep breath right now.
It causes you to pause and gives your brain and body some of the tools needed to stay in the moment. Meditate if it helps. But give yourself a break throughout the day and just take a nice, deep breath.
2. Think fast and slow
In his ground-breaking book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, the Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman covered in great depth how our emotional, intuitive system—the one that kicks in automatically for fight or flight—unfortunately often kicks in when the more reasoned, logical and considered system should be in control.
That means if we’re not careful, we can jump to the conclusions our gut feels are right when we really should pause for a bit and let what Kahneman called system two do some of the heavy lifting.
It also means we create problems for ourselves by reacting when we should be responding. Not every problem is a crisis. But sometimes it’s hard to convince our intuitive system of that truth. This is a good time to reconsider the first point above: Breathe.
3. Stay present in the moment
Being present means focusing on what’s here and now, as appropriate. I hear parents talk in terms of “can’t wait until …” when discussing their kids. As in, “I can’t wait until he’s 10, so he can pitch a curve ball to me” or “I can’t wait until she’s 16 and can drive herself.” That’s focusing on the future. What about all the amazing things your child is doing at whatever age they are right now? Stay there for a while. Enjoy those moments. They’ll be gone soon enough.
4. Stay present in the room
One of the rules I use in facilitating workshops is to require attendees to stay present in the room. I explain that if they need to take a phone call or check email, leave the room, take care of business and return to the meeting. Don’t try to do both because you compromise both conversations. Commit to one discussion or the other and reengage when you are done.
I have friends who require everyone at the dinner table to put their cell phones in a basket in the middle of the table. Why? So everyone at the table stays present in the room. No half paying attention to the discussion and half on whatever is happening on social media. That’s staying present in both the room and the moment.
5. Worry about what you can control, not about what you can’t
I’m a big fan of having a plan and a contingency plan. Sometimes I have contingency plans for my contingency plans, just so I’ve thought through the range of options and can adjust as needed, should anything come up. This is great in some cases but it can be debilitating in others because so many factors are often beyond our control.
When I find myself getting stressed about all the things that “could” happen I have to take a deep breath and consider what’s in my control and what’s not. For example, when flying on an airplane I could get all worked up about the number of things that could go wrong with the plane, the chances of crashing or having mechanical issues. I could. But me getting all worked up over the possibilities won’t have much impact on when the plane leaves, whether the engines work, or whether the pilot will take off or land well. Those things are beyond my control. So, I have no issue sitting in my seat and resting comfortably as we jet through the air at several hundred miles an hour. As soon as I agree to get on the plane I accept that someone else has this part under control.
6. Make better choices
In their excellent book Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work, authors Chip and Dan Heath discuss at length why people make bad decisions—and how to improve the general process. They describe the usual decision process as having four steps: 1) You encounter a choice; 2) You analyze your options; 3) You make a choice; 4) You live with that choice.
But there are all kinds of flaws in this way of thinking: we narrowly frame our choices, we’re horribly biased in finding support or conflicting opinions, and we believe we know the future so we reinforce our own views of that future.
The Heath brothers offer an alternative approach and use the WRAP acronym to make it easy to remember. It stands for: Widen your options; Reality-test your assumptions; Attain distance before deciding; Prepare to be wrong.
A key idea in the WRAP process is that you think broadly and add a healthy dose of reality to your assumptions. Most of us don’t do that. We settle on what we think is a good idea and get to work convincing anyone who will listen that we are right. But the Heath brothers finish their process with “prepare to be wrong.” Avoid your own biases and breathe a little easier. Instead of adding pressure, I’ve found this actually removes much of it.
Choose to be present, every day.
Why would I end a discussion about presence with decision making? Because every day is one giant, constantly evolving algorithm of irrational, emotional decisions about things in and out of our control. You can choose to worry about the future or live in the moment. You can choose to keep little issues little and break big decisions into manageable parts. You can choose to be present and celebrate today.