The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life by Thomas M. Sterner

workplace and find a trigger that, as I said, lets you get out ahead of your emotions so you can execute the response you have decided upon and thereby begin to make that response your new habitual reaction to the problem coworker. With difficult people, it can be easy to find a trigger: the person merely enters your presence. Once he makes an unpleasant remark, try to use thatvery first pop of emotion — yoursense of offense or annoyance — as your trigger. It is very comforting to know that when you remain present in an effort like this, and when you have a predetermined intention about how to react, that intention will, with surprising quickness, come to your rescue and give you that little edge in personal control you need to stay ahead of your reaction. Then your new reaction becomes self-perpetuating. You execute the reaction you want; then your internal reaction to your response feels good because you have protected your inner peace, and you experience the paycheck for your effort. This gives you the emotional and mental stamina to stay with your effort. Thus a new habit begins to form. Eventually the whole process begins to fade into the background as it becomes a natural part of who you are and how you process a situation.
    If you were trying to replace the habit of plopping in front of the TV for two hours with reading a good book or taking a walk, the act of picking up the remote could be a good trigger that stops the process and shifts you into your new routine of thinking, “Oops, here comes that impulse to invest time in watching something that really isn’t going to improve my mood.”
    Being aware that all your motions, be they physical or mental, are habits and that you have the power to choose which habits you will create is very liberating. You are in control. Remember also that if you start to experience an emotion such as frustration, you have fallen out of theprocess. You are back in the false sense of thinking, “There is some place other than where I actually am now that I need to be. Only then will I be happy.” This is totally untrue and counterproductive. To the contrary, you are exactly where you should be right now. You are a flower.
    All the patience you will ever need
is already within you.
     
    M y mother, who passed on from cancer a number of years ago, once expressed to me an observation she had made about herself as she sorted out both her illness and her situation in her mind. It is worth passing on here.
    During the time she was dealing with her illness, she was reading through books that served to both comfort her and make her more aware of her spiritual nature. This daily routine gave her a soothing perspective during what was surely a difficult time. Though she tried to keep up with this routine, there were times when, for whatever reason, she drifted away from both the reading and her thinking about what she had read. She told me one day that when she maintained her effort, her thought process was elevated and more evolved. She felt different about herself and life, and enjoyed increased clarity and perspective about her situation. But she also noticed thatwhen she drifted away from her reading and fell into an “I don’t have time” or “I don’t feel like it today” frame of mind, she would feel herself slip back into attitudes and perspectives that she felt were not only unproductive but, unfortunately, very prevalent in the world today. Speaking about her reading, she said, “You need to keep reviewing these ideas so that you can hang on to their clarity and perspective. Otherwise, life steals them away.” Constantly reviewing new ideas creates, in a sense, a new habit of perceiving and processing our lives, a habit that brings us the sense of clarity we long for every day.
    I took something from her words when I was writing this book. There are not that many ideas in this book; just a few, and they have always been there for us to discover. But they slip away from us