Creating a Profound Relationship to the Current Reality

We are bombarded daily by conversations about the future that carry anxiety, worry and uncertainty. The media is constantly sending messages that present statistics and interpretations about those statistics that confuse and destabilize us and have us looking for safe havens. These communications often frighten, infuriate, and sometimes offer hope. They are fueled with stories that both highlight outrage over bonuses for executives, while carrying illustrations of the misery of real people losing real jobs and real homes.

There is no doubt that many are suffering, and many more are worrying about suffering and many are taking remarkable steps to deal with this. The future that lives in front of us doesn't' portend well - it often looms as something to overcome.

We can look back now and see the "bubble" of false promises, hopes, and expectations. But what was the "bubble" when looked at from the Three Laws of Performance"? It was not just a group think of "exuberant enthusiasm" - more importantly, it became our default future composed of pipe dreams and never-ending good times.

We want to blame the Wall Street guys, or the banks, or the regulators who didn't regulate. But maybe we need to accept responsibility for our part in thinking that our houses and finances and 401 Ks will keep raising forever. We lost a profound relationship with reality.

Remember that our default future lives at an experiential level. It's underneath what we think and hope will happen. Yet we live as if that future is preordained. We live into our default future, mostly unaware that we are doing so. When our default future is embedded in a 'bubble" of pipe dreams, we are as diminished as when we are living into a default future of threat and anxiety.

By Steve Zaffron - Author of the 3 Laws of Performance