The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life Read Online Free PDF

view each mistake as a barrier, something delaying you from realizing your goal and experiencing the joy that reaching that goal is going to give you.
    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 areexecuting 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.
    Using music as an example, let’s say you are trying to learn a particular piece of music. If your goal is to play the entire piece of music perfectly, with each note you play you will be making constant judgments about the music and yourself: “I played that part correctly, but I can’t seem to get this part right.” “Here comes the part I always mess up.” “It will never sound the way I want. This is hard work.” All these judgments require your energy, and none of that energy is going into learning the music and getting to a point where it is effortless for you to play it. These thoughts are only keeping you from learning the piece of music. We waste so much of our energy by not being aware of how we are directing it.
    This doesn’t mean that you must lose touch with what you are aiming for. You continue to use the final goal as a rudder to steer your practice session, but not as an indicator of how you are doing. The goal creates a dilemma in any activity you choose, because it is usually the reason you undertake an endeavor in the first place, and it is always out there as a point of comparison against which to measure your progress. You can really see this dilemma in sports such as skating, gymnastics, bowling, and golf, which have “perfect” scores, but in more subtle ways it is also present in any area of life where we aspire to accomplishsomething. If, whilewriting this book, I start to feel that I just want to get this chapter done so I can move on to the next, I am doing the same thing and misusing the goal. If you are trying to improve how you deal with a difficult coworker, and one day you slip a little in your effort and then judge yourself for that, you are doing the same thing and misusing the goal. The problem is everywhere, in everything we do. In the particular case just mentioned, you could just stay in the present, observe your interaction with your colleague, use how you want to deal with the situation (your goal) as a rudder, and then readjust yourself so that you are in the process of sailing toward that goal.
    You could think of it as throwng tennis balls into a trash can from ten feet away. Imagine that I gave you three tennis balls and told you to throw them one at a time into a trash can ten feet away. The most productive way to perform the task is something like this: You pick up a tennis ball, look at the trash can, and toss the first ball. If the ball hits the floor in front of the can, you observe this and make the decision to adjust the arc of the ball and how hard you will toss the next ball based on this observed information. You continue this process with each toss, allowing present-moment feedback to help you refine the art of tossing a tennis ball into a trash can.
    Where we fall down in this activity is when we drop out of this present-minded approach and become attached to the outcome of our attempts. Then we start the emotionaljudgment cycle: “How could I have missed the first one? I am not very good at this. Now the best I can do is two out of three,” and on and on. If we stay in the process , this does not occur. We look at the outcome of each attempt with emotional indifference. We accept it as it is, with no judgment involved.
    Remember, judgment redirects and wastes our energy. One could argue that we must judge the outcome of each attempt to make a decision about how to proceed, but this is not true. Judgment brings a sense of right or wrong, good or bad with it. What