“We fail when we get distracted by tasks we don’t have the guts to quit.”
(Seth Godin, The Dip, 2011)
One of the problems with the intellect is that it is very good at giving you reasons to do a lot of things. You can make a case for doing many things and making them all sound important. So what do you choose?
We are in a unique period of history where we have more choices than ever before and more marketing coming at us to convince us to do more. A lot of these choices are in our face literally, with our smart phone.
And not only do we have more marketing thrust at us, but we now have (with social media) more opinions to wade through about what we should be doing. So not only do we have information overload, we also have opinion overload.
This gives rise to decision fatigue. The danger with this is that overly operating from the intellect, we lose the ability to filter what is important and what isn’t.
Enter body mindfulness.
Stopping and focusing on your body is the best antidote to the racing overload of choices, opinions and information that the intellect has to try to sort out. When you take time to stop and go within, a multitude of options drop away and you edge closer to dealing with only the essential, only what’s required, only what’s truly most important. Your intellect cannot do this alone. Your body and your feelings have to be involved. The sifting happens much faster and deeper when you do it through your body.
This doesn’t mean that you will magically get answers every time you stop and focus inward. Sometimes a lot of old clutter has to be addressed, faced and accepted before it drops away, revealing the true core path or option. With that inner certainty, it is then much easier (as Seth Godin says) to quit something that was just leading to a dead end for you. And it is also much easier to hang in through the dip you will experience, the hard slog, the depth necessary to do something really well.