When you trip yourself up or fall, when you feel you've let yourself down or not lived up to your the kind of expectations that should lead to your achieving your objectives... forget it - it is what it is. Life is made up of moments. What you do in each moment determines what happens next. Make sure that you pick yourself up, dust yourself off and do just the right thing in this moment.

We've recently explored how life is, in effect, a set of self-fulfilling prophecies - whether you know it or not, whether you've set your mind in a particular direction or not. Decades of psychological research and, more recently, ground-breaking neuroscience, has confirmed that we perceive and achieve according to our expectations - as surely as night follows day.

Now, it would be wonderful if you could choose your expectations because, then, your self-fulfilling prophecies would be what you want to happen. That's what visualization and what Muhammad Ali descirbed as "Writing Future History" is all about. This is in sharp contrast to most ordinary-minded people's self-fulfilling prophecies which are driven by their early programmed "stored knowledge". But, what if you've "set your mind" and nothing is happening?

We have a lot of things working against us on a daily basis. First of all, we've got our own minds for, with the best will in the world, decades of automated living - from the dawn of adulthood at 12 or 13 years of age up to the time you started working on developing your mindfulness - weighs heavily against us. Secondly, we've all the so-called normal crazy people who not only crowd our mind but crave our energy and dearly wish that we would wallow in their dramas. And, to top things off, our own normal mind will start second guessing whether anything is going to happen according to "plan" or whether we're fooling ourselves. I was going to say that I wouldn't worry about this third problem because it's just our own self-talk - but self-talk is part and parcel of the ordinary-mindedness that drags us back to normal crazy base.

We need to stop waiting for great things to happen in our lives, stop wondering why what we want has not yet come to pass. These are a useless waste of our energy which should only be invested in what we have to do now, mindful of where we want to go and what we want to achieve. In other words, we need to be mindful now. With our expectations set, the very best that we can do is turn up to the present moment, live it, work through it, without letting our ordinary minds run away with us.

Setting your expectations is a prerequisite to success - but mindfulness is how you'll get there.