Slow Down to Increase Productivity (special guest post by Sacred West)

We rush so fast we miss it all. Everyone knows how busy we all are nowadays. The TrackSuit CEO wants to shoot for the stars and still spend his entire life with his family, and somehow this seems to me the most reasonable thing in the world. How to achieve this?

As so often, the answer begins inside ourselves.

When I was a kid, rushing around hither and thither, my mother would tell me to slow down because, “more haste, less speed,” using the old British proverb that takes notice of fools getting nowhere in a hurry.

Carl Honore has written a book called “In Praise of Slowness: How A Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed”. I haven’t read it yet, so this is not one of TrackSuit’s famous Reviews. But I have read the Amazon reviews to it, and here’s an excerpt from one review that made me think of TrackSuit’s readers:

“The chapter I most appreciated was the one on parenting. Children do not understand the need for our fast pace, and what they need more than anything is our time. This book made me realize the number of times I tell my daughter to hurry up/we’re late for school/we need to go now/blah blah blah. I do not want my daughter to grow up like so many kids in our culture: overprogrammed, overscheduled, and stressed out.“

The problem of speediness impacts us as Americans today – while the rest of the world watches, amazed – but the Europeans aren’t off the hook completely, because this business of moving too fast is actually a part of human nature that has been observed from ancient times.

Buddhist practice revolves around “mindfulness”, which involves holding your mind in attention to the very moment as it’s happening. You can do this by returning your awareness to each and every breath, even in the middle of any action.

And it’s a funny thing about slowing down in this way: it’s the way to move quickly also.

Mipham Rinpoche, a Buddhist teacher, says in one of his books or videos that when we get in a crisis we start to panic and get speedy, whereas if we would force ourselves to relax we could actually generate the extra energy needed to deal with the situation. Practitioners of the martial arts know all about this too.

There is much more I could say about this, but we have plenty of time

What do you think? Could it be that slowing down allows us to get more done?

Read more at Sacred West about Success, Buddhism and living and succeeding in modern America.

If you’re interested in writing a guest post please Contact Me.

Subscribe to the TrackSuit CEO Feed

Training Our Limits (special guest post by Sacred West)

On the road to success, how do you expand your current limits? How do you train for success?

I like what the Tracksuit CEO says about self-sabotage, it’s a lot more useful to think of this as self-limitation.

But expanding your limits takes a gentle touch because when you push anything, there’s going to be an equal and opposite push coming back to you somewhere along the line. I won’t go into why this is (unless you ask me), but I will advise you: don’t take it personally, use it as a natural force.

How to use it as a natural force? Well, it works the same with positive things also: when you pull something up, and give energy to it as an uplift, there’s an equal pull coming your way also, and it can seem like a gift. Let’s tell the story to show how this works.

~~~

Here’s my own recent story to illustrate how to train for success. I’ve embarked upon a new project just this month, and it’s been a long time brewing. Finally all the preparation and thinking is over, and I’m launched on a new course that I know is absolutely right.

So imagine my utter shock this month to find myself slacking off and blanking out, in the middle of a mission that absolutely inspires me. I started wondering if I was lazy, or too old, or had some secret will to failure – all the things you think when you’re trying to move forward and you stumble.

So I called my business coach in California, in panic. She’s been part of my planning for the last two years. Fortunately, she set me straight.

My mentor reminded me that the course I was embarked on was carefully chosen, that I had authentically laid all the ground for this next push. And it will work, we both know this; the course itself is correct.

I was out of shape, she said. I was taking myself to the next plateau of success, and I was simply out of training for this enlargement in my expectations. I was out of condition for this next level of success.

As the Tracksuit CEO keeps trying to tell us, it’s the inner game that makes the difference in the whole plan. Sure enough, I recognized the wisdom in what my coach was telling me. So how to train?

~~~

I knew I couldn’t just go to my desk and make myself do the right things, perform all the tasks with the serenity of a master. I was a master of the previous level, but I’m just a grasshopper in this one.

I realized I was out of shape physically too: I had no energy, I was tired when I should have been glowing with excitement. The answer was to start running again, which I hadn’t done for two years, what with all the business changes and the excuses we make.

I knew I couldn’t win at the desk, but I knew I COULD win on the street. So the next morning I got up and went for an early morning run. I did what I committed to do, in an area that I knew I could succeed in. And I could easily measure how out of shape I was, and I’ll easily measure my improvement over time.

You see the lesson here? I’m training through a surrogate practice. If I try to expand my limits at my desk directly, I’ll fail, especially if I push too hard at this stage of the process, and I know this. But I can work with these limits on the track, and the deal I’ve made is that this covers the desk too.

And it’s working. When I slipped and spaced out the running, the desk went to hell – noticing this, I picked the running back up, and here came the good energy again at the desk. The running is the way I’m keeping faith with myself, and conquering an area that I simply have too big a hex with to tackle directly.

A lot of this by the way is simply the showing up. If you show up when you said you would, whatever life hands you will be okay, even a failure – after all we don’t create the future, only our response to the present. But you have to show up, even if you sit unable to cope, you have to show up.

For me the running is more about the doing of it than the doing well. But that’s just my configuration. I have doing well hard-wired in, it’s the showing up that could use more training. Your mileage may vary.

Humans are funny. We’re very complex, but at the same time, everything is workable. It’s just a matter of figuring how to work it each time. We can make deals with ourselves, and when we can’t tackle our issues head-on, we can train around our limitations.

By the way, one day I’ll surpass a benchmark at my desk first, and from this I’ll perform better on the track later. It’s a two-way street, and I started with the possible.

This is how you train for success.

yours,
Sacred West

Read more at Sacred West about Success, Buddhism and living and succeeding in modern America.

If you’re interested in writing a guest post please Contact Me.

Subscribe to the TrackSuit CEO Feed