Morning Mindfulness - A Few Positive Minutes to Start Your Day With

Perhaps many of you have heard the saying “When student is ready, teacher will appear”. I agree with that. I’d like to combine this statement with another one: “When you know how to listen, everybody is the guru.” So is it the teacher who appears, or is it just me who finally recognizes the teacher?

I’ve heard from many coaches that success happens when the opportunity and preparedness meet. I learned from John Maxwell that many people are saying, "when I get the opportunity I get ready.” And that is one of the biggest mistakes. That’s one of the reasons people fail. You don’t get the opportunity and then get ready, you get ready and then get the opportunity.

We are educated, programmed, trained and conditioned to perform certain tasks in a certain way. While we are growing up we are literally learning the ropes. Any alternative thinking inconsistent with the main trends in the society, often gets ridiculed. As a result, many people don’t even know they have a huge potential. They are supermen inside capable of much more then they think they are. 

You may think you have the best vehicle in the World. Nothing wrong with that. It may actually be the best vehicle for the job it was created for.  However, if you goal is to get to Hawaii, for example, you may get disappointed trying to drive your Lamborghini across the ocean. I don’t think you even need a coach to figure out that you should change your transportation in that case. 

If we have some kind of an invisible ceiling above us, maybe it is a job that does not allow us to reach our potential, or maybe some other circumstances, life, family, etc., or maybe it was a series of failures that caused a lack of belief, then if we get a real opportunity we may not believe that there’s no ceiling above us. That ceiling was just an imaginary limitation we have in our mind.

This what happens in our every day life. Distant objects represent our goals, and the finger - obstacles. If we concentrate on the obstacles, we loose the sight of our goals. Well, they may be still there, but they are not clear. However, if we keep our eyes on the goal, the obstacles become blurry. We still see them, but they are not really in the way.

I met so many people who surround themselves with a wall of fear and doubt. I can see it, I recognize it, because I am one of them. And if you are inside your wall too, I can tell you from my own experience: people need what you have.

I read about a temple in Japan that has a statue of a finger pointing at the Moon instead of a Buddha statue. That is just a reminder: don’t worship the finger. Quit staring at it. Look at the Moon, that is where the finger is pointing at. 

Hundreds of cable channels, almost unlimited growing information on the internet, available on the smart phone. People look at their phones several times a minute. No wonder that this constantly changing images in front of our eyes have such a hypnotic effect on us.