The Bi-Weekly Personal Development Ezine from Gurdy.Net

ARE YOU FEELING FRUSTRATED?

If you’re feeling frustrated, you’re normal – but that doesn’t justify your feelings because, as we will discover, normal people are crazy.   In addition, the things that are frustrating you – from a difficult boss to a difficult relationship, from your business that you think is going nowhere fast to your apparent lack of ability to lose weight – are no excuse for your frustration either.   The key thing that you’ve got to understand is that your frustration is a figment of your imagination, the product of useless thought.   And, as normal people, we’re really good at thinking useless thoughts.  Most important of all, if you give in to your frustration, you’ll probably give up on what you think is a lost cause and prove to yourself that you were right to feel frustrated in the first place!   After all, given the way our minds work, life is a string of self-fulfilling prophecies.

The normal mind is plagued by fifty thousand thoughts each day.  Many of them are harmless, some of them give rise to stupid distraction but some of them are toxic.   These self-defeating thoughts well up from our subconscious mind which, psychology tells us, is the part of us that creates our self-image and view of the world and, as a consequence, dictates our behaviour.  In doing so, our subconscious quite literally creates your life.  The subconscious is home to all your perceived inadequacies and it is these that command the greater part of its focus.   It is from this well of discontent that seriously useless thoughts, like frustration, come to the surface.  In other words, it is not outside events or people that frustrate you – you frustrate yourself.   This is the key problem that I want to address.

The knock-on problem, however, is very real.  Because we get frustrated so very easily, we tend to give up on the idea that our lives can get any better.   A classic twenty-first century example of this – one that I read of regularly – is the extent to which people, having set up and internet business, give up on the idea after only weeks, frustrated that their efforts haven’t borne immediate fruit.   The advice any internet expert will give such people is that they must persevere – and it’s this same advice that I constantly offer my personal development clients with regard to whatever project they may have in hand.   Research from the University of Madrid’s Business School has shown that highly successful people are those who have persevered – even in the face of serial failure.   To paraphrase US President Calvin Coolidge, perseverance is the only thing that guarantees success.

Perseverance comes naturally to a focused mind.   And it is focus that will enable you banish your feelings of frustration.   Many people, however, misunderstand the concept of focus – thinking that it relates to keeping your mind on whatever target you have set for yourself.   Whilst we all need to have an idea of the direction we want our lives to go in, this goal-orientated focus is not the kind of focus that I’m talking about.   Focus, at its most basic and most powerful, means paying attention to the here and now, to the task is hand, to the reality of the moment.   And it is this type of focus that not only fosters perseverance.   More importantly, this type of focus will completely rid your life of all feelings of frustration.

As I already said, frustration is a trick of the mind – it is the concrete result of you paying attention to the useless thoughts that give rise to frustration.   The useless thoughts that we all guard jealously in our subconscious mind are the product of the things that we learned about life in general and ourselves in particular during our formative years.   As such, these useless thoughts are never likely to simply vanish into thin are – they are part and parcel of the human condition.  However, as a responsible adult, you can choose whether or not to pay attention to these thoughts – in other words, it’s time for you to take responsibility for your own state of mind. 

By learning the fine are of focusing, you will automatically stop paying attention to the thoughts that lead to frustration – although they will still be present, they will no longer wield any power over you.  Therefore, your goal should be to cultivate your innate ability to focus.  Remember, focus simply means paying attention – but, in this case, we’re talking about paying attention to the reality of the present moment rather than paying attention to the imaginary scenarios that our subconscious thoughts conjure up for us.

As a child, you were expert at focusing on the present moment.  If you have or know young children you will understand the extent to which they can easily become fully absorbed in whatever it is that they’re doing.  A three-year-old opening his or her Christmas gifts uses all of their senses to fully experience the moment – the gift is rattled, smelled, tasted, examined from every angle – the experience leaves no room for attention for anything else.   You must regain your childlike ability to see, feel, hear, smell and taste the reality of the moment, even if your apparent reality is one that annoys you of frustrates you.  Remember, those feelings have been added to the real reality of the moment by your otherwise preoccupied mind.

The sooner you start your ‘focus training’ the better.   So, after reading this, take a few moments to close your eyes and simply listen to the sounds – the sounds of present moment reality.  Each morning you should take a few minutes to pay attention to what each of your five senses, in turn, are telling you.   If you start the day in this way, you set yourself up for a completely different experience from the normal day that the normal crazy person creates for themselves.