This week, one of my clients said that her goal each day is to be fully present to what she is doing now and to enjoy what she is doing now. Why? Because when she worries about everything else she wants or needs to do, she misses this moment. “If I enter everything fully,” she said, “I will come out changed.”
I love that perspective. She’s absolutely right. It’s the classic struggle between doing and achieving–pushing to make things happen–and being fully open to how the present moment is informing us and affecting us and capable of changing us.
She recently interviewed for a new position. When she arrived, she was shown into a room with several interviewers. She wasn’t expecting one-on-five. She figured they were trying to raise her anxiety by putting her on the spot and seeing how she handled the stress. So she “entered fully into just being present.”
After the interview, she was thinking, I did really well. She didn’t have a clue how the interviewers thought she did, but she left knowing she had stayed present … grounded and open … and that was enough.
Staying present is tough. Trusting that who and how we are in this moment is enough–that’s even tougher. Try it. You just might be changed by it.
She was. She left the interview feeling connected to the interviewers … and knowing that she didn’t want the position.