Ten years ago I held a monthly meeting with a small, amazing group of people I had been working with for over 5 years using the Best Year Yet model.
The conversation turned to managing time (something most of us feel there is never enough of) and the notions of scarcity and abundance.
There is no denying that time has physical boundaries: 24 hours/day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year. So how could members of this group get more time to do all they wanted to do?
The answer is in shifting the mindset. What if instead of worrying about NOT having enough time, the focus was put on having all the time needed for what one needs and wants? Wouldn’t that reduce the time spent hammering ourselves for what we haven’t done? The group agreed unanimously that by relaxing, time appears to expand. . . that is, we get more done in less time if we are calm, focused and unruffled.
I remembered something my younger daughter learned in 2nd grade. . . the idea “flip the pancake.” It worked really well with her and her class. Since we are just bigger, more complex versions of 7 year-olds, can we make that work for us? It takes mindfulness, the simple act of noticing how our thoughts relate to time. Consider, whenever thoughts like, “I’ll never get this done” show up, what might happen if we looked on the other side of the pancake? We might remember that all those term papers we got done the night before took half the real time to finish because we had to, so we dropped the idea they had to be perfect. For others it might be something else. The point is we don’t often look once negative thinking sets in; yet, the power to is always available to us.
By the time our call ended, we were all happily flipping our flapjacks and thinking we need to have a pancake brunch. Seriously, each and every member had come up with a powerful way to move forward in the area in which the perception of scarcity was an issue in their lives. Maple syrup anyone?