A Three-Step Approach to Being Present

I was on the #EverydayHustle Podcast the other day, and Adam Ali asked me a little bit about being present in the moment for people who are showing up but aren’t always present.  Being present is not only important for enjoying your life as it happens, but it's also an important part of maintaining emotional and psychological well-being.

I know that a lot of people will tell you to take deep breaths and shake the past and the future, but that’s easier said than done.  As someone with an obsessive personality, I’d be a hypocrite if I said that as if it was no big deal.  There are three steps, however, to being present that anyone can learn from and use to focus on their current situation:

• First, you have to process your thoughts and emotions to a point where you feel good enough about where your mind landed and can let them go for now.  If you can’t either hit the pause button or feel complete for now, you’ll be wasting your time trying to brute-force it.  It's like trying not to think about a pink elephant—your mind goes straight to the thing you're trying to block out.

• Second, you have to bring your mind to where you are once you have left where you’ve been.  If you’re anxious and you’re supposed to be relaxed, then deep breathing does work.  However, if you're supposed to be excited like going to a concert or sporting event, you'll have to amp yourself up a little.  It also helps to give yourself a current situation, problem, or task to focus on that’ll jolt you out of the past or future.  In either case, your goal is to match your current situation physically and emotionally so your focus stays where it's supposed to more easily.

• Third, throw away distractions.  I know it’s a cliché that the smart phone and social media change you, but it really is true.  Now, every moment you’re not either solving a problem or getting a dopamine hit from your phone, you’re bored or going through mini-withdrawal.  Once you accept that there are no alternatives to whatever it is you’re doing, something happens to your brain.  You stop feeling tempted.  It’s like why people don’t put cookies in their pantry or why they prefer to work in an office—if the distractions aren’t an option, then your brain stops thinking about them.  It’s like magic.  People don’t realize what that constant-consumption world is doing to your mental and emotional peace and well-being.  Shut down distractions, and it'll be easier to focus.

Again, the above steps are simple but not easy.  There are times when you really should be thinking about the future to prepare for it, and there are times when you might need to learn from the past.  That's why step one is so important: if there is a good reason why your mind is on that event, the easiest thing to do is address the reason.  Write down a note about how you're planning for your upcoming event.  Write down what you can do about that past event.  Do whatever it takes to scratch the itch that your thoughts are triggering.  Once you feel good about where you left that previous train of thought, you'll be able to match the moment and eliminate distractions much more easily.

If you can do this for just a few minutes, you can get over the hump of temptation to do or focus on something else.  I have a rule to get myself started with something in that exact way; my favorite use case is doing the dishes.  If I don't feel like doing them but know that they need to be done, I just say, "I'll just do 5 minutes' worth.  I'll stop after that."  By the time the 5 minutes are up, I'm in "do the dishes" mode and just finish doing the dishes.  Find tricks like this one that work for you, and you'll be able to shift from whatever you're thinking about or doing to whatever you're supposed to be thinking about or doing in just a few minutes.