Here’s an insight I had into “WORK IS HARD!”:
How much easier would life be if we would stop stopping. If the focus was not to get it perfect, but to keep on the game and let the intelligence of our minds and bodies to adjust to the moment. What if we don't have to edit everything in the midst of a task?
What if hard work only existed because while I am doing a task I am also simultaneously correcting everything along the way, not letting myself make mistakes, stumble and just continue to move with freedom of thinking?
I just realized how much my “work is too hard” belief was based on me withdrawing myself of being in a flow because of my perfectionist tendencies of editing everything while I am doing it.
I start to write something and I am already editing it, just this text alone I’ve felt the impulse to edit it many times. And did a couple of them. But that is also true for many other things I consider to be important for work. Recording a video, recording an audio, talking with people, sending a message.
All of that feels really hard many times because of the amount of perfectionist thinking I am putting into doing each of these tasks.
At the end of the day I can always write first and edit later, or record first and be well with my mistakes, but when all I can see is mistakes, my mind gets really personal about it and don’t want to see it happening anymore.
For me I am asking this question now: what if I allowed my mind and body to run freely while doing a task?
What if the only thing I need to do is show up and notice how much I am trying to correct my mistakes or perfect things and how much I am just swimming in the flow of the doing ?
This reminds me of a video from the author of the book The Inner Game of Tennis. It is an old video of Timothy Gallway, who was also a tennis coach, teaching complete novice people how to play tennis.
In the video Timothy asks the participants to not think at all at what they are doing, to just try as best as they can to copy the swing movement he shows of his racket hitting the ball.
The students are told to not think about making a successful attempt in getting the ball to land in the right place of the field, but instead just to focus their attention on something completely different than that, like the sound of the ball hitting the floor, the feeling of swinging their arms and rackets, the shaking of their bodies once the racket hits the ball.
All of which is happening in the present moment, all that is dynamically happening in the now. Their focus are not in the perfect performance, but in the movement that comes out from them spontaneously as they are present to the moment.
And guess what? They perform BETTER! Without more effort (mental straining their way to success), without more stress, without much thinking. But with much more grace and enjoyment.
I leave you with the video for you to see and reflect for yourself in your own life what kinds of things you do that could be done with less perfectionism, less mental strain to control every little detail or fix every small mistake?
Is it possible to do it without that much thinking, stumbling your way in a flow?
Much love,
Felipe.
P.S: Writing this post without focusing on editing everything along the way was more freeing and faster than many others I’ve written.