Stop - be mindful of where you are now. Notice what you see, feel hear and even what you smell and taste. Just notice, don't evaluate, don't judge, don't start thinking about it. Just be. Re-mind yourself.

If you've started your day in the wrong frame of mind then your day is only going to get worse until you take deliberate, focused, concrete steps to take charge of your mind.

By default, our minds are set against us each morning - it is the way we are hard-wired and neither you nor I are going to alter the course of evolution within the short span of our own lives. We have to play with the cards we've been psychologically dealt.

In practical terms this means that you need to consciously take deliberate steps each morning to ensure that your mind knows who's boss. A good start is half the job. It doesn't matter how you do it - there's plenty of advice on this website about how you might do it - but you, yourself, need to find what turns you on. And turn yourself on each morning.

If you don't, your day will be a mere shadow of what it might otherwise be - and it will have been your own fault or, perhaps, your own stupidity. After all, who do you think should control your life - a mind on auto-pilot overwhelmed by fifty thousand random usless thoughts, or you?

Surely we hit the peak performance zone when we are striving to achieve our goals. Goals, by their very nature, are things that we don't have now - they are in the future. So, why do I place so much emphasis on the present, the here and now?

Our normal minds are constantly focused on the past - what psychologists call our stored knowledge - the things that impressed us during our formative years. Because this is constant and because it happens subconsciously, we are unaware of this constant backward focus. And yet this out-dated navel gazing saps the greater part of our mental energy and, as a consequence, our current behaviour becomes tainted, counter-productive, even self-sabotaging.

We, as normal people, can never do our best whlist looking backwards - yet this is our default state of mind. And, even if we are striving towards the achievement of future goals, the only place and time in which we can do our best is where we are now.

We must stack the cards in our favour because, as things stand, our default mental settings stack teh cards against us. We need to cultivate our natural ability to focus on what is real in this moment and what is opportune in this moment. Only then will we come to realise what is a concoction of our warped normal minds.

In cultivating our ability for presence, we are not seeking some guru-like other-worldly state of mind - there is no practicallity in wandering around in a fog of peace and love. We are seeking to do the job in hand, to take on more responsibility for our lives and do just what needs to be done to the very best of our abnormal ability.