“Try to see that all your life you have only done one thing at a time. It’s all you ever have to do. It’s all you’ve ever done. It’s always worked for you. It always will. You just don’t trust it, so your mind races into the future and you try to do 100 things—in your mind—all at once, and that’s what causes you stress.”
Kyle and I talked for a long time about the impossibility of doing more than you can handle. That coaching session was the first in a series that moved Kyle away from his worried to-do list of 100 action items he was staring at all day. He soon learned to take his hands off that massive to-do list completely and keep it in a drawer. Kyle soon adopted his Mazatlan lifestyle of “one thing at a time.” That’s all he would ever do, and all he would ever have to do. He learned to live at work just as he did in Mazatlan, doing one happy, relaxed thing at a time, and learning, to his surprise, that it would always be more than enough to bring him success. Kyle learned to live in the present moment.
You can see how old-school managers such as Kyle are so painfully attached to all these things they have to do all day (which are, in reality, nothing but thoughts).
Managers similar to Kyle would look at the list of 100 and be repelled by very the sight of it! They’d shrink away in fear. So they would do something else. Something not even on their list! Out of fear of not being busy.
What could these struggling managers be focused on instead of that grim list? They could be focused on their intention to make progress in the present moment. The present moment is the only place where one’s life can be moved forward. That’s where all creativity occurs, when it occurs.
True power—the real measure of actual power—is your capacity to create results in this moment, right now.
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Effective managers do first things first and they do one thing at a time.
—Peter Drucker
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Hands-off management means hands off the past and hands off the future. Your focus is the present moment, because you understand that productivity always happens now.
Then, as your people also learn to create freely in the present moment, success, rather amazingly (and simply), comes to them. When we are in that creating mode, we are advancing upward, evolving and expanding toward higher levels of success.
Creating always occurs in the moment. Never in the future.
When our minds are in the future we experience thoughts of worry and fear. When we drift back to the past, thoughts of regret or resentment arise.
Are any of those thoughts worthy of clinging to?
Allowing success requires nonattachment to such thoughts.
Attaching to your thoughts like Velcro
Professional writers get something they call “writer’s block” when they start believing their thoughts about the future.
Attachment to those thoughts allows no room for freedom and creativity.
This habit of attaching, like Velcro, to every passing worried thought and every little judgment leads us into a life of emotional teeter-tottering all day long. A life of fearful distractions.
Sit down with an unsuccessful (unhappy, struggling) manager and you will hear him describe where his focus goes: “I get too many phone calls. I have too many personal problems to deal with. My health is not ideal right now. The person down the hall has their internet gaming site on. I have too many visitors. I’ll never be able to answer all my e-mails. My reports are overdue. I have too many meetings to attend this week. I have to give a talk.”
Notice all those stressful thoughts crowding in on him. The hands-off manager learns to take just one of those thoughts (“I get too many phone calls”) and work with it (“I’m putting my calls direct to message. I look forward to hearing them later when I’m ready and focused on them”).
Hands-off managers are creators. They take one stressful situation at a time and create something good from it. Hands-on managers, on the other hand, are reactors. They react to all thoughts, all day, full alarm. For them, life itself is just a series of emergencies.
We lift ourselves up from that when we become creators. When we speak of God in religious terms, we often call Him (or that force), “the creator.” Which is why Deepak Chopra humorously says, “God is my role model.” He wants to live in the image of his creator by creating. Whether we know it or not, as we go through life, we all ultimately seek and desire an increased capacity to create. To create fulfillment, happiness, and the ultimate in professional satisfaction. What we all want, what’s a part of our very core, is that capacity to create. And we lose that capacity whenever we lose focus.
As the great teacher of human consciousness Byron Katie says, “If you want to be unhappy, get yourself a future.”
If we wish to move toward a particular outcome, we have to do something right now to create that movement. We can’t move something in the future. And we certainly can’t undo anything in the past. We only advance when we are in the present moment. Only that sacred place will give us room in which to work.
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