We're in week two of what will be a journey into the real world - the world where we are mindful of the reality of the moment. The alternative is to continue - yes it is a treadmill on which we all find ourselves by default - to be mindless. You might think that only a fool would be continually wander through life mindlessly but, if that is the case, the world is full of fools.

Over the course of this series of videos and ezines, you can refer back to the previous steps we have taken to get to the current edition... just use the link for each preceding week:

Stop what you're doing and notice how you're feeling - that's all you need to do. For example, if you're feeling anxious or annoyed, noticing that that's how you're feeling is self-awareness... you are now mindful of your current state of mind.

Of course, having stopped and noticed, if you deliberately choose to continue to be annoyed or anxious, then you're a bigger fool than the person who never stopped to notice in the first place! At least their choice would have been automatically mindless.

Last week I said that mindfulness is the game-changer - to enable you effortlessly get what you want out of a life peppered with peak-performance moments. A couple of weeks back, I mentioned that people think it's alright to be "not so bad". Many people that I speak with love the idea of mindfulness but are not really sure that they need to commit themselves to developing it appropriately.

It is alright to be "not so bad" - what's wrong is that "alright" is not good enough... when you could have so much more. Why would you half-do what you should be doing, with one "subconscious eye" on how you perceive your efforts? Why would you take comfort in piling through a load of urgent work but leave no time to do the important things? Why would you flush your energy down the toilet worrying about things that you don't want to happen (and, in the process, enhance the possibility that what you don't want to happen will!)? This is the stuff that "alright" is made of. And, sure enough, none of us is on the breadline, nobody has died... we're all still standing and that must count for something.

Unfortunately, it does. It means that we put up with what we should not put up with. It means that we settle for ordinary success - success compared to mass mediocrity. It means that we sleepwalk our way through life without bumping into too many obstacles... but sleepwalking it surely is. It means that we work harder instead of smarter, that we allow other people pile their crap on us... and sometimes even feel the better for it! It means that we inevitably live down to our expectations.

What fools we are - what mindless fools we are: when the the door to effortless holistic success is in front of us and we have the key to that door in our hand. What fool, key in hand, would say to himself - or herself - "I won't bother opening that door today" or "I haven't got ten minutes to spend on transforming the other twenty three hours and fifty minutes into something spectacular".

Ten minutes is all it takes - ten minutes getting in touch with reality. It's not the getting in touch with reality that's important though - that's just a means to an end. When we get in touch with reality, we disengage the subconscious autopilot that effortlessly "enables" us live down to our expectations. The repetitive stuff of automated daily living simply evaporates because you've experienced reality, without the little voice in your head talling you "no you can't".

That's what mindfulness does for you - it is the game changer because, free from your own perceived inhibitions, you can do anything... effortlessly.