It is difficult to stay focused on the present when we continue to allow the past to be a distraction. The past only takes place in our mind through our memories and only has the power we give it. In fact, most of our breakdowns come from just that place of memories and since we think in form of images, remembering is like experiencing the moment again.

This is what happens: we cancel the creative energy with fear that prevents us from exposing ourselves by creating stationary brakes. As a result, we invest more time defending ourselves from life, repairing circumstances – instead of investing our life preparing ourselves and experiencing it in its entire splendor.

So, what to do? How can we stay in the present, empowering our dreams?

Invest your thought energy in what you love not in what you fear. This supports you to focus as much as possible on winning both intelligent and creative solutions in a challenging situation. Where your attention goes, your energy goes. Where your thoughts go, your words and your actions go. Make sure you cultivate good thinking, invest only in your growth because your focus defines your direction.

Ask yourself the difficult questions. Do not depend on someone else to formulate them for you. This gives you an advantage and keeps you alert in the present, making it easier to start with what you have at hand.

The difficult questions are the questions that take us away from our comfort zone, focus our commitment and challenge our will. They bring awareness and usually point us in the right direction.

So ask!

Use the question as a tool of awareness and change for your life.

Correct. Make changes before the change becomes necessary. If you change your strategies but do not make adjustments in your choices (and priorities) you will still have the same results. The most relevant corrections usually are not about strategy but about character. The higher quality of our character, the better quality of our choices – consequently – the greater the possibility of realizing our dreams.

Avoid “Shortcuts”. The longest distance between you and your dreams are the shortcuts. Nothing will be simple if we keep choosing the easy way of doing things. The process is what gives us experience, influence, understanding and relevance. There is no other way. Live the process! Take the lead! Do not underestimate the potential of either.

Eliminate from your agenda everything you should not be doing and eliminate from your life people who do not add you in any way. The sources of influence in your life matter. Why? Because impact your thinking style and your results. That’s a lot of influence! Take care of the relationships that add to your well-being and learn to say “no” to those that drain you.

With this in mind, be sure to keep your focus where it matters and what matters in your present! When the opportunity comes to our life there is no time to prepare. We better be ready, alert and aware to choose the right path. Put it into practice and the past will no longer be a distraction to develop your greatest potential!

“I don’t like your attitude” shouted my high school teacher as I was evicted from the class and demanded to appear in front of the Head Master. He gave me a complete dressing down and I swore from that point onwards to improve my attitude to school.

Having the right attitude or the right state of mind is essential for anyone speaking or training in public. Here’s six tips on how.

Remove all concerns
Remove all concerns from your head. We’ve all baggage of some sorts in our head. A lingering argument with your partner, a major mistake you made yesterday or the loss of a deal can all affect your state of mind. The trick is to adopt mindfulness and empty the head so you can focus on the now.

A favourite Dandy Warhol’s number from the early noughties talks about having a trap door in the back of my head. I use this metaphor to empty out all the thoughts that are bringing me down before I perform on the stage. It works.

Music Anchors
On the subject of the Dandy Warhol’s let’s get into music and the effect it can have on your state of mind. As I write this, I’m listening to my State Changer Playlist on my phone. This playlist consists of a number of songs, tunes and tracks from my collection that each control and influence my state of mind. I’m 33,000 feet above the Himalayas having presented in Bangladesh and I just fancied a boost of energy so I’m listening to my playlist.

Music is an anchor. The listening can bring back a state of mind which you either experienced when you listened to the track or you embedded into the tune at a later date. Anchors do this. Anchors can be any sense – hearing something, seeing an image in your head, a physical touch on your body, a smell or a taste. They all relive a state of mind for you.

Collect anchors for each and every state you need. I use my playlist as it has an instant state changing capability and I love my tunes. Right now I’m listening to “I am the Resurrection” from the Stone Roses voted the number 10 guitar tune by Q Magazine. It revs me up so I can go out into the audience and “give ‘em large”.

Among my playlist I’ve:

• The Raven by the Stranglers for extra energy
• Good Morning Britain by Aztec Camera for inspiration
• One Day Like This by Elbow for concentration
• Nothing in My Way by Keane for Perseverance
• Glory Days by Pulp for stimulation

You may see it differently.

Physical Comfort
In 2016 I attended a private medical since I was applying for some additional medical insurance. The doctor was good, very good, and half way through stated to me with no emotion or prejudice, “Lose a stone”.

I shed 25 pounds that year, continued going to the gym but started doing weights and toned up a little. Boy did it make a difference to how I felt when presenting. It meant all my clothing was a whole lot looser and felt so much more comfortable.

Being physically comfortable is essential, loose clothing helps but learn to stand well. I call it the assertive stance. Ensure your body is perfectly balanced, no leaning on either leg, legs the same width as your shoulders, slightly apart. Girls get rid of your finishing school poses. Balanced, posture upright, shoulders back – just like your mum told you before you set off for school.

Breathing
Breath to thrive not just survive, was a phrase I heard at the annual convention of the Professional Speaking Association. Breathing is more than just surviving; it can affect your state of mind. Let me continue the story of my private doctor from earlier.

He asked me to lie on the couch and he progressed to measure my blood pressure. I have to confess to being a little nervous at the time, you see deep down I’m a big baby. After his first measure, he instructed me to calm down having stated there’s no way he could submit that blood pressure to the insurance company, they’d reject my application.

I thought how can I relax? Breathing I recalled. Breathe in deeply and breathe out very slowly, verrry slowly. I did this for one minute and he measured my blood pressure again. “That’s better, much more normal”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

So if you are a little nervous, and your blood pressure is rising, do the breathing technique before you go on stage for a couple of minutes and it will calm you down, lower your heart rate and put you in a more relaxed state of mind – a presenter state.

Take in the room
The aim here is to become one with the group. You will do that as your talk proceeds but to gain the right state at the beginning adapt a peripheral vision. Many presenters will use their foveal vision and focus on a particular spot; this has no value to become one with the room. Instead pick a spot but deliberately enhance your peripheral capability by concentrating on everything around you. This trains your brain to use peripheral vision as you begin your talk, thus taking in the whole audience.

Usually somebody introduces me on the stage – this takes 20 seconds or so. Typically stand to the side behind the introducer, ready to pounce but as she introduces me, I focus on her but let my peripheral vision do its magic taking in the whole room and every member of the audience that I can.

As I begin my talk, my brain is in peripheral mode and this lets me become one with them. I then relax the peripheral and go foveal ensuring I give as many people eye contact as I can. The eyes are the windows to the soul, let’s never forget that.

By the way, a little trade secret for you. Focussing your attention on peripheral vision rids you of nerves. Not a lot of people know that.

Gain control of the room
The bigger the audience, the bigger the applause you’ll get after the introduction and the more effort you’ll want to exert to gain control. Here’s how:

1. Peripheral into foveal eye contact around the room
2. Breath and adopt the assertive stance, be balanced and relaxed
3. The audience will now also relax
4. Present

A clip round the ear from the Headmaster soon cured my attitude all those years ago. Hey you can’t do that anymore can you? Or the cane, which I endured twice, which left nasty bruising for ages. Hasn’t the world changed but presenting to an audience will always require that you have the right state of mind.

“Don’t let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment.” – Eckhart Tolle

When I moved to London several years ago I didn’t really know the place at all. I’d visited a few times with my family for the odd touristy day out but still didn’t know my way around. So when it came to living and working here I knew I had quite a bit of learning to do.

I remember one day arriving at Waterloo Station wondering how to get to Aldermanbury, where I was due to start a new job. I had a vague idea but wasn’t sure about the quickest or most effective means of getting there. So I did what I thought was quite a sensible thing to do (particularly for a man). I asked someone! I approached a smart-suited, professional looking chap in the belief that he was probably a city worker and therefore bound to be able to help.

“Excuse me,” I said, “I’m not from around here. Please can you tell me the best or quickest way to get to Aldermanbury?”

He looked thoughtfully up into the air and pondered for what seemed like an age, and then replied, “Well to be honest with you, I wouldn’t start from here”.

“Thanks,” I thought, “what a rubbish piece of advice!”

The reason that little encounter has always stuck with me is because I think it’s a perfect metaphor for how many people go about trying to achieve a better life for themselves. They may have an idea of where it is they want to get to, but find it hard to take a step in the right direction because they resist the notion of having to start from where they are.

I’ve come to realise over the years that people can only experience dissatisfaction with their life when they believe that their situation should be different to how it actually is. I’ve noticed it with just about every client I’ve ever work with and I’ve certainly experienced it multiple times in my own life. Whilst I’ve helped a ton people work through an array of diverse and unique issues, the conversation that takes place time and time again is the one that invites us to accept reality just the way it is right now, before figuring out what to do next.

What we call ‘the stress of life’ rarely has anything to do with what’s actually going on, and has everything do with our thoughts and interpretations of what’s going on. As Human Beings we don’t ever get to experience the ‘real world’, we only get to experience our own thinking.

If we are unhappy with where we are right now, the cause of the feeling will be rooted in the thought that there is some other place we’d rather be. Or, if we are feeling stuck, that can only be due to the thought that there is a direction we are supposed to be heading in, otherwise there would be no reason to be unstuck.

When we contrast this with the way human experience really works, the only place we can ever get to is right here, right now. Thinking that we are supposed to be anywhere other than right here, right now can literally drive us bonkers.

The most stressful strategy we can adopt for motivating ourselves to change our situation (and don’t worry if you’ve been doing this, most of us have at one time or another) is to direct our emotional energy toward hating the way things are. We convince ourselves that if we can just muster up a strong enough loathing for our current landscape then we will be compelled to take massive action and finally break free from everything that has been holding us back.

There are a few reasons why this is a crappy way of doing things. Not least that it seldom works!
How many times have you heard people complain about how bad some aspect of their life is and yet months, if not years, later absolutely nothing has changed? Over time they just got used to feeling bad; they habituated into their negativity, which not only set them on a path of blaming and complaining, it also shut them off to the kind of inspired thinking they would have needed to turn their ‘right here, right now’ into something better.

In my experience there are three kinds of thought that can cause us to feel dissatisfied with where we are at:

1 – Thoughts about expectation

2 – Thoughts about purpose

3 – Thoughts along the lines of, “Anything would be better than this”

Thoughts about expectation are where we cast judgement on ourselves for how we are currently doing compared to a story we’ve been sold. All of our lives we’ve had the bar set for us by our parents, teachers, friends, colleagues, advertisers, glossy mags, even OURSELVES, with regards to the standards and accomplishments we should have reached by this point in our lives. It is where we measure the distance between who we think we are versus who think we should be and then allow the size of the gap (or chasm in some cases) to proportionately dictate how anxious we should be feeling.

Thoughts about purpose are when we get the idea into our heads that we are wasting our lives by not doing the things we would rather be doing to make a positive difference in the world and to make our lives count. It is where we feel that our circumstances and outside influences are preventing us from living our ‘true north’, leaving us stewing in frustration and resentment. The most common reason why this becomes a lingering issue for people is that they make ‘living their purpose’ dependent on a specific set of criteria having to be met.

If you ever wanted to feel really frustrated with your life then I absolutely recommend setting it up in such a way that you cannot be truly happy until you have enough money, energy, creativity, opportunity, support or freedom to do live it out in the specific way you’ve always imagined.

Thoughts that resemble “Anything would be better than this” are what crop up we are not connected to a purpose or direction and have no idea what it is that we want. What we do know, though, is that we’re not having fun right now and attribute that to whatever is happening on the outside. “I’m not happy and, although I’m not entirely sure why that is, it must have something to do with my job, or my boss, or my partner, or my location, so I want to change it all. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to change it to; I just know I’ll be happier when it’s different”. The phrase that springs to mind here is – It doesn’t matter where you go, there you’ll be.

Whenever we think these kinds of thoughts we feel stress. But the only stressful element to it is the thought itself. If nothing changed in our situation other than we were suddenly unable to think those kinds of thoughts, we would simply be people living the lives we’ve got. No comparison, no judgement, no stress.

What I know won’t work is to ask to you not to think those thoughts. As far as I can tell you don’t control that (at least not without years of meditative training); it’s just what the mind does. The smartest and kindest thing you can do to move towards the life you want, is to start by accepting and valuing your currently reality exactly the way it is. Right here, right now is the only place you’ll ever need to get to.

The starting point for any journey will never not be where you already are. As we travel through life we learn that no matter how far we get, we never leave the present. We never leave and yet we are constantly arriving.

To live with the thought that your life is not supposed to be exactly the way it is right now is to be disconnected from the most integral part of the route map of your journey; the beginning.

How do I know you are exactly where you are supposed to be? Because you’re not anywhere else.

So what is the stress-free formula for turning ‘right here, right now’ into a place you would love to hang out? Let’s take a look as I explain your homework for this session.

HOMEWORK

There is a big difference between how you show up in the world when you are trying to prove the circumstances of your life are holding you back and how you show up when you are coming from a place of inspired service. Service in this context simply means giving your best self to the world in this very moment.

There are three ingredients that help things along nicely:

1- Knowledge of how you would like to feel if ‘right here, right now’ were already the happy place you want it to be.

2- An understanding of how you would think and behave differently with that feeling as your guide. How would you treat yourself and how would you interact with others.

3- Patience.

I invite you to take each of these ingredients and add them into the mix of your life straight away.

The instant you “assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled” and operate from that space, the present moment has a habit of transforming in the most wonderful ways.

Initially you’ll notice that nothing has changed and yet everything is different. Over time, with patience, you’ll realise that not only can you peacefully go after whatever it is you want to create in your life, but you can also stay happy, regardless of how the scenery changes along the way.

Take great care. Namaste.