Over the next couple of days, allocate a little time to sit down and then write down your priorities. There should be no more than five of them and they should cover every aspect of your life. Day-to-day life has a habit of smoothing one day into the next - to the extent that we can become immune to the experience of living and the kick that we should be getting out of it. Reminding yourself of why you get out of bed each morning is necessary and does focus the mind.

Your Questions

Whether a face-to-face workshop or online workshop, anyone who has done one of my workshops will know all about what I describe as "perfect moments" - a moment that would encapsulate success (as defined by the "user"!) in which all is well with the world. Our subconscious needs this kind of point of fixation because our subconscious dictates our behaviour by reference to "snapshot" learned "stored knowledge": give your mind a new "snapshot" (perfect moment) and it will focus your mind on a moment-to-moment basis.

Generally speaking, my clients' perfect moments tend to be about big life goals - goals which can often be difficult to conceptualize - or, indeed, dangerous to conceptualize on the basis that being too specific would lead to a closed- rather than open-mind. However, you can conceptualize and write about any perfect moment, little or large. Tactical perfect moments - like imagining yourself sitting on the train home, feeling wonderful, having just clinched a big deal, is the kind of "snapshot" that really does, focus the mind.

The point I'm making is that life is meant to be full of perfect moments.

I've used the word 'reminding' in today's Quick Tip. It is one of those everyday words that we use which, in fact, describe a state of mind or what we are attempting to do with our state of mind: we are re-minding our mind to focus on something of our choosing.

We need to constantly and consistently re-mind ourselves - becuase the manner in which our default mental settings start each waking day is such that our mind is set to automatic. And it doesn't matter what you do today to re-mind yourself, tomorrow's waking moments will, again, be characterized by default-set automaticity. Daily re-minding is required.

The intriguing thing is, though, whilst today's re-minding will have worn off by tomorrow, what does matter is how often and how regularly you re-mind yourself. Because, whilst you'll need to re-mind yourself tomorrow morning (to avoid a day of abject mindlessness), there will come a morning when you awaken, when your default mental settings will have changed. This will be a morning of true awakening.

Our mental traffic trundles down the line of least resistance. For the ordinary-minded person, this will be the well-worn neural pathway of automatic "living" (not really living at all!). Research has established that regular and consistent meditation grows and enhances previously little-used neural pathways. This, in practical terms, means that the neurons are broader and better insulated, facilitating lots of high-speed traffic. In other words, a new neural super-highway becomes the new line of least resistance and, as a result, you have a new default mental setting - a new automatic but, in this case, an automaticity that is tuned into reality instead of the ghosts of conditioning past!

In short, a few minutes meditation every day will alter the flow of mental traffic. One morning you will awaken and you will have truly re-minded yourself.