The Practicing Mind

Written by a Techno-expert Thomas Sterner, The Practicing Mind shows you how to cultivate patience, focus, and discipline for working towards your biggest goals. The book talks about going back to the basic principles of practice, embracing a child-like trial-and-error attitude again and thus make working hard towards mastery a fulfilling process in itself. The author has developed an approach called Present Moment Functioning (PMF), which helps individuals achieve a state of high performance by focusing entirely on the present – think of it as entering the flow state on command.

Pic: http://www.jaicobooks.com

Highlights:

# With deliberate and repeated effort, progress is inevitable. Simplicity in effort will conquer the most complex of tasks.

# Completely forget about your end goal every time you work towards it. If you can manage to shut out that bigger thing in mind for an hour or two and just focus on the process, that’s when real work gets done. The skill is practicing the goal, not having the goal.

# Don’t use your goals as an indicator of how much progress you’ve made. It’s sometimes good to take a second, step back, turn around and actually look back, not forward. You’ll see you have plenty reasons to be proud and feel a lot better about tackling the next challenge. Judging your work is wasted energy that can’t go into the work.

# Creating the practicing mind comes down to a few simple rules:

-Keep yourself process-oriented.

-Stay in the present.

-Make the process the goal and use the overall goal as a rudder to steer your efforts.

-Be deliberate, have an intention about what you want to accomplish, and remain aware of that intention.

# When you lose your focus, use the Do, Observe, Correct technique to get it back.

• Do something productive, but pay attention to your concentration level. Notice when it drops!
• Observe the behavior you’d like to change by asking why you’re losing your focus.
• Correct those negative emotions by seeing how they influence your productivity and really make everything seem worse than it actually is.

# The problem with patience and discipline is that developing each of them requires both of them. Habits are learned. Choose them wisely.

# If you are not in control of your thoughts, then you are not in control of yourself. There is no real power without self-control. You have to be aware of your thoughts, and rein them if needed.

# Everything in life worth achieving requires practice. Life is nothing but an endless effort of refining our motions. With proper understanding of practice, life will become an enjoyable journey of joy and calmness.

References:

Twitter @LibraryMindset

http://www.jamesclear.com

http://www.fourminutebooks.com