TIP 11
PERFECT THE PRESENT
Paradise is where I am.
Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.
If you have the “not enough” conversation—not enough money, not enough time, not enough space—there is something you need to learn. Life is a master teacher. If you catch yourself saying, “I don’t have enough (fill in the blank),” there is something imperfect about your present situation. Yet one of the principles we use in coaching is that the present is perfect. Something has to give, and it isn’t going to be the principle. For example, when I was up to my eyeballs in debt, I thought I didn’t have enough money. If not enough money is the problem, then the solution seems to be to make more money. This wasn’t happening as fast as I was spending. Then one day I realized that the debt was a good thing—getting out of debt would require that I change the way I handled money. I was supposed to learn something here. The challenge was to learn how to save and to stop spending so much. I realized that when I did come into big money, I would know how to handle it responsibly instead of frittering it away on meaningless things. In three years I went from being in debt to having a year’s worth of living expenses in savings (Tip 24). I had learned the money lesson.
Once my money issue was solved, I found myself sitting in my lovely New York apartment where I had all my worldly possessions in three rooms, and guess what the conversation was? Not enough space. A pattern emerges. Since the present is perfect, how could this be? Clearly I needed to learn how to live with less stuff. What about my office with those piles of papers? The problem wasn’t the lack of space, but rather that I needed to learn how to handle paper only once. The problem becomes a challenge and a game. The interesting thing is that once you master the game, you usually get rewarded. Instead of moaning about the lack of storage space, I made the present perfect and tossed like crazy. Ironically, when I learned how to live with less stuff, I ended up living in a very spacious place.
What is your “not enough” conversation? What new skills and habits do you need to learn? Start perfecting your present situation now.