By Accident? Or On Purpose?

It really must be true that the older you get the faster the time goes. I can’t believe it’s been two weeks since I’ve written here. On the one hand that’s a very good thing because it means business has been good – I’ve been creating new programs and designing facilitations for new clients, which has taken up most of my waking hours recently.

But on the other hand, I also understand better how you can turn around one day and years have passed, measured most amazingly by how much the kids in your life have grown, or how the wrinkles have magically appeared around your eyes overnight.

Being mindful becomes so much more important to me when I notice the time in that way.

I was working with one of my new clients Sunday night. We’re working on teambuilding and communication among the team members and we had a really great time. The level of energy in the room was almost physically tangible by the end of our conversation last night. It was a great example of the effects of being mindful about first our thoughts and then our actions.

We talked about the distinction between doing things by accident, or letting things happen in our lives - and doing things on purpose, or being mindful of the cause of things that happen in our lives. As we talked more about being "on purpose," it was almost like a lightbulb went on in the room. It becomes really difficult to be in a state of blame when you realize that by doing things on purpose, you really are part of the cause of the effects you get in your life.

It's difficult to recreate the feeling here, as we also talked about 55% of the total communication being the visual or what you see; 38% being the vocal or what you hear, leaving just 7% for the verbal or the actual words. Since I've only got the 7% here, you'll have to trust me when I say that the energy was made up of the visual as well as visceral, which I think should be part of that equation as well.

The older I get, the wiser I get, and that wisdom for me includes intuition or my inner knowing. As I learn to trust that intuition more and more, I realize that when I'm connected with the capital-C Cause of things that happen in my life, I'm more likely to get a capital-E Effect. For me the capital-C Cause comes from God - the Universe - the Source - whatever you choose to call it. As I'm connected with that Cause, it's much easier for me to do things on purpose - with purpose - and the Effects are astounding.

By letting things happen by accident, I connect those effects with small-c cause, which is not connected to a higher purpose.

As I've been telling my clients lately, as we are mindful of the pebbles we're dropping in the pond of our lives, we might never see all the ripples we create, but that doesn't mean we should be any less mindful when we drop the pebbles. Trust that the ripples we create when we're mindful have a bigger Effect when they're connected to a bigger Cause.

I watched - and felt - that happen in the room on Sunday night, and the really cool thing was that they felt it, too. We all witnessed the Effects of being On Purpose and we made a pact to start dropping mindful pebbles.

What are we waiting for? Let's make some waves!!