As a coach or as a client, when you show up present; when you choose to live now, in the moment, there is no time or space for lack of confidence, inaction, fear, etc. Seems simple enough.
I came across a concept in a book on emotional intelligence that discussed how researchers are working to identify emotion as the difference between expectation and reality. Their concept is that emotion and its intensity of experience is a direct result of how close or far apart expectation and reality are. If we have an expectation and exceed it on the positive side, we experience primarily positive emotions. If we have an expectation and exceed it on the negative side, we experience primarily negative emotions. The difference equals the intensity of emotion experienced. Seems simple enough.
I’ve been going over the differences for me in living in time vs. living through time and the differences between expectations and reality.
When we live in the moment (in time) there is no room for lack of confidence, inaction, fear, etc. because there is no time or space between the expectation and the reality. They are collapsed into one experience. There are no differences.
When we live in the past, present and future (through time) there is room for lack of confidence, inaction, fear, etc. because there is time and space between the expectation and the reality and the difference affects us.
When we are living now, in the moment, we are living in reality. When we are living in the past or future, and this is sometimes difficult to grasp, we are living in imagination. Whatever thoughts, feelings, actions we experience in our mind regarding the past or future may be real in our mind, but are not reality now.
Imagination is the realm of the sub conscious and the sub conscious does not discern between real and imagined. Other than controlling our automatic functioning, its main job is to protect us. It does this in a number of ways and fear is one of the strongest mechanisms it employs to protect us from harm, whether imagined or real.
So whenever we step out of the moment (choose to be not in time) and live in past memories or future expectations (choose to be through time), we are choosing to live in imagination. We are giving permission to our sub conscious mind to use fear to protect us from any negative consequences, real or imagined, that might result from the difference between expectations and reality. In this sense we are choosing to live in our imaginary fears and in their effort to protect us they effectively shut us down from moving forward to achieving our dreams, desires, visions & goals.
So here’s a challenging concept: Anytime we are not living now, in the moment, we are living in imagination, in a state of fear.
This state of fear, which can be so mild as to hardly be noticeable, or so powerful as to be phobic and shut us down completely, interferes in our ability to fully realize our maximum potential. It interferes at some level in our ability to create magnificent dreams and visions and to continue to work on ourselves to move forward towards achieving those dreams and visions, manifesting them into reality, now!
One of my teachers was always reminding us that to truly take possession of oneself it was necessary to live in our fears.
I understand this better now. By focusing our attention and intention on living in our fears, we are choosing to bring the reality of living now into the place we are afraid. In doing so we collapse past memories and future expectations into now. This results in there being no time or space for differences between reality vs. expectations, between reality and our imaginary fears, between reality and the negative emotions that stop us from moving forward towards achieving our goals. We stop living in a state of fear and start living in a state of actualizing.
Imagination is a powerful tool. As portrayed in the the movie “The Secret”, we need to respect the power of our sub conscious mind and learn how to consciously command our imagination to do the work we require of it.
Angela Bird made an interesting statement that fits here: She said that the thing we are the most afraid of is the reason we are here, what we do best, where our greatest strength is. Fear is just the journey the universe creates for us.
Bruce Paye
