Creating Your Own Happiness

I recently took up archery. I decided to try my hand at something new because I love being in that place where I can fail and it doesn't mean I am awful. It just means I don't know yet. 

Notice what I did there... I used my performance to determine if I was good or bad. I see this all the time in climbers. "I suck" is a continual refrain when the performance is not as expected. It doesn't matter what the grade is that someone is shooting for, it only matters what grade they expect they should be able to do, and if they are not doing it... they suck. 

Now there those who will blame other external factors, like the setters, or the weather, or their shoes. Some will blame their sleep or diet, or body weight, (cringing eyes and pursed lips as I type that last bit).

This is how the mind works... it takes external information and uses it to inform how we should feel. Read through the following thought development,

• I am trying to get an arrow onto a target from a specified distance. I miss the target. The thought is. "shoot, that wasn't very good." Pun intended.
• After ten weeks of practice though, I aim for the target at the same distance and I miss, the thought becomes, "I am not very good at this."
• Years of shooting arrows and 10,000 hours of practice and thought becomes, "I can't do it! I am unteachable!"

I went from "the shot wasn't good" to "I can't" and "I am unteachable."
Or, I went from focus on the performance to focus on how the performance defines me. 
Those 10,000 hours of just shooting arrows do not mean a thing if I am not applying deliberate practice. 
Deliberate practice is the craft of looking at how I was positioned making the shot and refining what I need to change or correct to improve the shot. 

How many of us use the principle of deliberate practice in our daily life?

• How frequently do we examine our interacts and see where we could have refined our word choice or our question?
• How frequently do we examine our daily habits and use deliberate practice to examine where we could have interrupted a habit with a more skilled choice?

If you are like most folks, probably not very often. We coast, repeating the patterns of thought we usually have. Doing so means we have the same outcomes. 

​This evening I thought about going to the grocery store, aghhh.. but the drive and the people. I thought about watching Netflix and aghhh, the boredom and snacking. Neither thought made me happy. Then I thought, go to the beach, no phone, no one else, just meander along the beach and see what happens. The result has been the reflections in this post. I hope you find it helpful and if you are unhappy, then deliberately practice disrupting the discouraging and negative thoughts and reframing the thoughts to more gratitude and awe is the path to start traversing.