How to Stay Present and Productive

A few years ago, a fellow life coach and I decided to keep each other accountable and provide support for each other’s goals by scheduling regular talks or “sessions.” We speak twice a month.

As we typically do with our clients, we each create a list of actions to help us get closer to our goals. It keeps us on track and acts as a guideline, or plan, for the coming weeks until we speak again.

Lately, though, for reasons unknown, I have preferred talking to list-making in those sessions. I like to share what I’ve been doing, work through issues, and bounce ideas off of her. I haven’t made a list since mid-February and it’s been working wonders. I feel like I’m more in a flow and my professional life has been filled with challenging, appealing opportunities.

Coincidence? I wasn’t clear if one had anything to do with the other until Monday night. I was participating in an international webinar on the book A New Earth with its author, Eckhart Tolle, and Oprah Winfrey, who had selected it for her book club. It was the fourth class and the first three had centered very much around explaining the concept of life lived “in the now.”

Early in the fourth class, Oprah brought up a question her hair stylist had asked, which essentially was, how do you ever plan for anything if you are living in the present all the time? Tolle’s response was, and I paraphrase: Planning will be fruitful if preceded by presence and stillness. The idea is to keep your main focus not on where you want to get to, but in the doing, the now.

Far be it for me to get all “woo-woo” in the business section, but truly this has its practical applications. Tolle explained that we should not be continuously in the next moment. Bottom line, it’s not productive. It diverts our energy from what we’re doing now.

In my nearly 15 years in sports writing, I saw that play out again and again -- the baseball player whose attention is solely on that at-bat, the football player who can focus on one yard at a time, the basketball player on the foul line who can make it about her and the hoop. These athletes, the ones who had it down, could do that and still follow an overall plan to win. In that moment, though, they concentrated on the baby step.

Tolle even used a sports example in an anecdote. He told of a Zen master watching an archery competition who said this after watching one competitor: His need to win drains him of power. That’s something to think about, isn’t it?

Apply it to public speaking. We have all seen the natural speakers who seem to be enjoying themselves and the ones who seem stiff and rehearsed and just have the end in mind. This week I received a newsletter called “Speak and Grow Rich eNews” and its lead story was about a speaking pro named Tom Antion. Here’s what it said: “The audience was listening to every word. A cell phone rang. The presenter stopped his presentation and looked in the direction of the disturbance. Every one was silent, wondering what he'd do. Not missing a beat in his presentation, he said, ‘If that's my mother, tell her I'm not married yet.’ We all cracked up.”

Had Antion not been “in the now” or had it been a speaker that had to stay on script, that moment could have been awkward rather than funny. Instead, he enjoyed that moment as much as his audience.

This all goes a long way in explaining why my list-less approach has been producing results lately. I have given myself space to create each day rather than turn to the list and see what I “should” do next. I have structures in place, certainly, but I like working without preconceived ideas sometimes. I am more present. And the results show it.

Does this mean lists are off-limits from now on? Not necessarily, but I will be more inclined to recognize when a client might benefit from tossing them out and trying a different approach.

Of course, we’ll see what’s happening in the moment.

Nancy Colasurdo is a practicing life coach and freelance writer. Her Web site is www.nancola.com. Please direct all questions/comments to FOXGamePlan@gmail.com.