Change: Tracking Your Personal Growth
We live in an age where everything is digitized, from our phones to our cars to our house utensils—hence the dubbing of this as “the Digital Age.” There is even a group on the Meetup website called Quantified Self, whose members discuss and share the myriad ways we now have to digitally track our lives, from the logging of personal data to DNA sequencing. There are also a variety of apps to track our life activities, such as the length and frequency of our meditations, how well we have been sleeping, or how many calories we eat a day. All of this exists because most of us like to set goals and then monitor our progress.
So, why should we approach our desire to gain a greater self-awareness any differently? We can achieve many successes by holding ourselves accountable to reach our goals. The only difference in doing this when creating self-awareness for personal growth is that we have to make sure we are setting realistic goals. If we set these types of goals too high, then the experience of holding ourselves accountable may be like creating a stick to beat ourselves with when we don’t attain the desired change in ourselves. This can be counterproductive and detrimental when trying to change deeply personal aspects of ourselves.
Tracking Makes It Fun
To track something, we have to be able to observe it. To observe something, we have to be separate from it; we have to be on the outside looking in. To change something, we have to know what’s not working and how to fix it. Our Meditative Feeling gives us the place to stand within ourselves to address both of these. To date I have shared with you two techniques using the Meditative Feeling, the first was the Meditative Reservoir and the second was the Wedge of Awareness. There is a third that I would now like to cover and that is Create, Hold & Build.
Create, Hold & Build
Again, this is to do with the Meditative Feeling. They breakdown into “create the Meditative Feeling,” “hold the Meditative Feeling,” and “build its resilience.”
As you can probably guess creating the Meditative Feeling is our daily practice. I sometimes call this my daily booster shot. As I go through this chapter I will highlight the other two aspects and how they are used.
The first time that I used a form of tracking was when I started practicing the candle meditation that I share with you later in this chapter. I tracked the length of time that I could hold the image of the candle’s flame in my mind with my eyes closed. I decided to do this as a game to hold my focus and interest in the meditation. I did not actually set a timer because having to keep checking and resetting a timer would most definitely break the flow of my meditation. So, instead, I counted until the image disappeared from my mind. It was an intriguing challenge to find the best balance between counting and focusing on the image of the flame in my mind. When I would focus too much on counting, I’d lose my concentration on the image of the flame, and it would vanish quicker. I had to focus most of my attention on the image of the flame, and count softly in the background of my mind.
It didn’t take long before I started noticing how peaceful I felt after each session and how this feeling lasted for a longer period of time the more I did the candle meditation. That also became a game of tracking how long I remained in this peaceful state; it didn’t take many sessions to move from minutes to hours of holding this peacefulness. I didn’t realize just how engaging it is to quantify our actions until I was reflecting on this experience when developing my meditation course. I have now integrated quantifying various actions into most of my techniques. This point of noticing how long I was holding onto the Meditative Feeling for after the practice became my hold aspect.
Why is this aspect of hold so important? Generally speaking, people enjoy meditating for the peace that it brings while they are doing it. When they finish their practice, they start to get on with their daily life, or as I sometimes put it, jump back into the crazy. Many times as I talk to people it has never occurred to them they can take this wonderful Meditative Feeling and carry it into their daily life. The way I like to explain it is through something I call the toothbrush and the chewing gum story. As part of our morning routine brushing our teeth is on the checklist. It is something that has to be done and once we have done it, we move onto the next thing that has to be done before we can get out of the house. Many times our meditation practice may be treated this way, just another thing that has to be done before leaving the house. However, I want you to consider another perspective. When we chew a new piece of gum (let’s make it sugar free to try to be healthy), we put it in our mouth and chew away enjoying the flavor. This part is equivalent to doing our daily meditative practice. What usually happens is, after the flavor has gone, we still keep on chewing the gum even though there may not be any flavor left. This part is the equivalent of holding the Meditative Feeling after the practice. Your meditative practice should be like chewing gum and not like brushing your teeth. In fact, the longer you can “chew the gum,” the better. To help with holding the Meditative Feeling it is important to recognize the feelings created during our practice: Peace, Calm, and Stillness. By remembering these feelings when we go within, we will know what it is we are expecting to find. By confirming their presence, we can confirm we are still connected, still holding the Meditative Feeling.
This experience with the candle meditation also made me realize how much I enjoyed coming up with games that prompt me to rise to a challenge—it is my way of holding myself accountable to attain specific goals. Through sharing my techniques, I have found that many other people like doing this as well. Another game I made up to reach a personal goal came to me when I was figuring out how to build stamina and resilience in holding onto my meditative energy. After my morning meditation, I started tracking how long I could maintain the calm, meditative energy as I went about my daily routine and plans for the day.
There was a place where I occasionally went because of its convenient location, but the negative energy in this place was always thick. As soon as I walked through the door, I felt like all of my good energy was sucked out, and I always left feeling despondent. I felt very demoralized that the feeling I had held for several hours was suddenly gone. Then one day while walking out of the place, in a flash of inspiration I suddenly realized that I could use this place as a testing ground with which to build up my resilience of the Meditative Feeling. So, I started this game of tracking how long I could hold the meditative energy throughout the day, and also intentionally going to that place to challenge my meditative stamina and resilience. At first, I could only hold my meditative energy in there for a few minutes, but I committed to the game and each time I went into the place, I would hold the meditative energy slightly longer than the last visit. Finally, one day I found myself holding my meditative energy the entire time I was in the place. In a way, this place had become my training ground to improve my ability to stay grounded in my good, meditative energy even when I am in negative situations or surroundings.
I often advise my clients to play the game described above in situations or places where it is easy to be overpowered by negative energy (impatience, frustration, anger, etc.), such as at the workplace, during the daily commute, or even in a shopping mall. When clients work in a place that’s filled with negative energy, I usually recommend they start by playing this game only during the commute to work or while shopping or running errands on the weekend. Taking baby steps enables you to see results sooner and builds your confidence to take on bigger challenges like holding your meditative energy in a negative workplace. I hope you try to make a game of tracking your progress as you work toward each of your personal goals, and that you too find doing this to be an intriguing personal challenge and maybe even fun.
The Pickpocket—
A Story with the Master
In my story above, I blamed the place for sucking the good feeling out of me, but of course this was not the case. I was unconsciously choosing to release it. Here is another one of the Master’s stories to help understand how nothing external can control our feelings and that we have control over them. In our lives, of course, we control them by our perceptions of the external event. The Master is back with his student.
The old Master was walking in the grounds of the school when one of the young students came up to him looking very perturbed.
“Master, there is another student in the class who is always disruptive during the lessons and he makes me so frustrated. Why doesn’t he be quiet and listen?”
“Why is he a problem for you?” The Master asked.
“Well, I spend a lot of time meditating and I get this wonderful feeling of peace and calmness, which I then take with me into the classroom. This student then takes it away from me with his attitude. What am I to do?”
Just then the Master tripped and gently fell against the student apologizing as he regained his footing. As the Master was asking for more details about the other student from beneath the folds of his garment, he produced a beautiful bound version of a philosophy book and started to open it. “In the book it says …”
The student suddenly interrupted. “What a coincidence, I have a copy just like that.”
He started to feel in his pockets to show the Master, but as he fumbled around, he looked increasingly perturbed and suddenly realized that he could not find it.
“I have lost my copy,” he suddenly blurted out.
“I am holding it,” said the Master, giving it back.
“I do not understand,” said the student.
“Let me demonstrate further. What are you feeling now?” the Master said, moving directly in front of the student.
The student replied, “Confused, but also calm and peaceful as I like talking to you and listening to you sharing your wisdom with me.”
The Master told him to stand there a moment and to watch him. The Master closed his eyes and slowly reached out his hand toward the student’s chest until he was almost touching it. Closing his hand into a fist, as if taking hold on something, he slowly drew it back. He did this several times and then stopped. “How do you feel now?” asked the Sufi Master.
The student smiling replied, “Still very confused and a little jovial, as you looked strange doing that exercise. What were you doing?”
“I was trying to take your calm and peaceful energy from you. Did it work?” said the Master.
“No,” the student replied.
The Master smiled and said, “Some things can be taken from you like the book and other things like your feelings cannot. However, you can choose to give them up. When you have your Meditative Feeling and are in the class with the disruptive student and you get frustrated, you are choosing to give up your feelings of peace and serenity. He is not taking them away from you. I would advise you to focus on holding your peaceful feelings and not let the other person’s behavior distract you from you knowingly or unknowingly giving them up.”
As the understanding showed on the student’s face, a broad smile appeared followed by a profound thank you as he walked away to his next class.
Setting SMART Goals
to Track Your Personal Growth
As mentioned in the introduction, I have developed a system to create, track, and observe self-awareness goals based on a performance evaluation process commonly used in corporations. It’s called setting SMART goals: S= Specific, M= Measurable, A= Achievable, R= Realistic, T= Timely
Let’s start to delve a little deeper into how we can apply SMART changes to our self-growth. We’ll take some examples and apply SMART changes to them to see how they work.
Being Specific about your goal
When you first start setting goals for personal growth, it is particularly important to come up with clearly defined goals—you want to make them simple and specific. For example, when getting started you don’t want to set a goal that is too general, such as “improve my patience.” Instead, you want to pinpoint a specific behavior or characteristic that you would like to change, such as “stop arguing with my mother on the phone.” This is a well-defined goal because you can easily identify the behavior that you would like to change when you are in the moment of acting out that behavior—and maybe even identify the discordant emotion behind the behavior before acting on it as discussed in the chapter “Creating Awareness”
Be careful not to use general terms in a specific fashion to describe the goal, like “improve my patience with my mother.” Take the time to think about what the action of “improving my patience” would look like. In the above example, it would be to stop arguing. General terms, like patience, connote different actions; in this example, improving your patience with your mother could mean either “taking the time to let my mother finish what she has to say” or “not reacting to what she says in a discordant manner.” These are two different actions, so when getting started with setting SMART goals, you want to be specific about the behavior or characteristic you wish to change. Later, as you begin to attain the desired changes in yourself based on these goals, you don’t have to always be as precise or preoccupied with the details when setting new goals.
Making goals Measurable
In setting specific goals to change an aspect of ourselves, it is also important to think about how long it may take to accomplish a goal and to come up with an approximate time frame. To do this, think about how long it takes you to act in a way that you’d like to change or improve. For example, when I was doing the candle meditation, I set the goal to hold the image of the candle’s flame in my mind with my eyes closed for as long as possible. In setting this goal, I counted how long I could hold the image of the flame in my mind, and then to accomplish the goal, I counted in my mind, and tracked my improvement. In the same way, when I was trying to hold my Meditative Feeling for as long as possible in the shop that triggered negative feelings in me, I timed how long I could hold my meditative energy and then tracked the longer spans of time I could hold the meditative energy each time I visited the shop.
In the example of setting a goal to “stop arguing with my mother on the phone,” you could determine approximately how long you are on the phone with her before the conversation turns into an argument or discordant feelings arise in you. This will be a starting point for your measurement. When I think about this example, the adage “It takes two to argue” comes to mind, along with a sports analogy that if one of you plays a straight bat (cricket term) or bunts (baseball term) when the conversation reaches that heated point, you may be able to prevent the argument altogether.
Setting an Achievable goal
Achievable in my understanding means that it has to be achievable within all the other constraints defined in SMART. So, for example, while it might be achievable for me personally to want to train to be an astronaut, just how realistic is it? Another example might be a desire to make peace with those kids at school who used to annoy me—while it could be achievable, I am not sure how realistic it is.
Keeping each goal Realistic
When setting a realistic goal for personal growth, you want to make sure that it’s not only a goal that you can achieve, but also a goal that will bring about a desired change (and without causing you other personal issues). For example, referencing again the goal to stop arguing with your mother on the phone, if you are in the US and your mother is in China, it would not be realistic to politely end the conversation stating that something came up and you will call her back later. You may instead want to discreetly change the subject to something positive by saying something like, “Before I forget, Mom, I want to tell you about …” This may mean that before calling her, you think of an event or a positive or neutral topic, like complimenting her on a card or gift she gave you, that you can use to redirect the conversation. For example, you may say, “Before I forget, Mom, I wore that shirt you gave me and I got a lot of compliments on it,” instead of reacting to whatever she said that provoked discordant feelings inside you. At first, you may even want to write down these conversation redirectors and keep them handy in case your mother calls you unexpectedly.
Making the goal achievable and making it realistic are closely related. For example, as stated above, you may not be able to achieve the feeling of acceptance when your mother says something that you disagree with, and in the same manner, it would not be realistic to set a goal to not feel sad or angry when your mother brings up a topic that is upsetting. In the latter situation, dismissing your feelings may cause other personal issues, like sadness or anger that manifests in other situations with other people. If your goal is not realistic, it will not be achievable, and vice versa.
When reflecting on the difference between achievable and realistic, I thought about how it might be achievable to make peace with someone who bullied you in your childhood if you knew the person was in a positive personal situation and you were able to get in touch with that person, but I questioned whether this would be a realistic goal. In this case, you need to use discernment about the end result, and question if it would be more realistic to set a goal to cultivate peace within yourself concerning the unpleasant event in the past, rather than rehash the situation with the person who perpetrated the event.
Another example is that it is realistic to set achievable goals to let go of bad energy that built up over the workday, such as meditating as soon as you arrive home, but it is not realistic or achievable to be happy with a job that you have been miserable doing for many years; it may just be time to find another job.
Setting goals that enable you to see
results in a Timely manner
When setting timely goals for personal growth, we need to define goals that enable us to attain desired results in a reasonable time frame. At first, “reasonable” should be as short as possible. So, in the example of the goal to stop arguing with your mother on the phone, you want to define measurable steps to start seeing desired results in the short term. For example, the goal may be to stop arguing with your mother on the phone by politely telling her that something has come up and you will call her back later, or discreetly changing the subject to something positive as described above.
When trying to change an aspect of yourself, it is easy to become discouraged if you don’t see results after a few attempts. This is why it is important to set goals that are achievable in a timely manner. In this example, if you define steps like those described to enable you to stop getting to the point of an argument with your mother after only a few attempts, you will most likely start feeling good about upcoming phone conversations with her. You will also feel encouraged about your progress in changing a behavioral pattern.
I usually recommend setting goals that enable you to see results within two weeks. Or in the example here, you would want to experience a change by the third phone conversation with your mother. As you start differentiating between the five aspects of setting SMART goals, you will realize that they are closely interconnected. I described the close connection between achievable and realistic goals, and the same could be said for measurable and timely goals. These five aspects also depend on each other; for example, if we set too short a time period to see results, the goal most likely will not be achievable. You need to draw on your common sense and find a good balance among the five aspects. Most importantly, remember to congratulate yourself every time you accomplish a step toward your goal.
Journaling to Track and Observe Your Progress
To create a deeper or new self-awareness, especially when setting SMART goals, it is important to track your progress so that you can see the change in writing. Seeing our progress is vital when making changes within ourselves; if we don’t take the time to notice even the slightest changes, we may lose our fortitude and tenacity to keep going, particularly at the beginning of our path toward personal change.
When I began my journey to make personal changes, I used a small journal to write down my goal for the day or for the week. I also wrote about my successes and the moments when I did not do as well as I had hoped. It is very important not to be self critical if you find that you were not as successful with your SMART goal as you would have liked. Remember changing who you are is not easy, there are many millions of people who do not have your courage for change. Also, I can’t emphasize this enough—baby steps. Start with very small goals and then work up to the bigger ones. I found this process encouraging and useful in tweaking my goals as needed.
This is the template I defined for what I wanted to work on. It is split into two parts. The first part describes how the situation would normally happen without the Meditative Feeling and the second part using the Meditative Feeling. Within each of those two parts are a few subsections I will describe now. I would write a very brief description (emphasis on brief as this would help me to get clarity on what to write) for each of the following subsections.
• Part 1: what was the situation, my typical behavior, my typical thoughts, my typical feelings, the other person’s behavior (if someone else is involved).
• Part 2: my new thoughts, my new behavior, the other person’s new behavior, how I felt with respect to the outcome.
Remember, the second part is the description after creating the Wedge of Awareness during the situation.
I hope you will find the template useful as you get started with journaling your experiences. Please modify it as you see fit to personalize your journal.
Start by writing your SMART goals for the day and the week in your journal, and then use the template above to journal your experiences. Just write a few words for each category so that this doesn’t become a time-consuming task. You don’t want to be stressed about getting this done. However, try to be disciplined about writing in your journal regularly. In my practice, people always appreciate and grow from writing down their experiences.
When journaling, remember to remain objective about your experience, especially a difficult one in which you wish that you had behaved differently. Always, search for the balance between beating yourself up emotionally and giving yourself so much latitude that you never have to make any real progress.
How Will I Find the Time to Meditate?
When I get asked this question, I tell people they will not find the time to meditate. I tell them in the beginning I tried looking under my couch and it wasn’t there, in my closet and not there, even under my bed and wasn’t even there. In desperation I put an order into Amazon Prime for next day delivery for meditation time. I am still waiting for that delivery. Joking aside, I believe that we can all agree that we will not find the time to meditate, that leaves only one option—to create it.
One solution I suggest to people is to set the alarm fifteen minutes before it would normally go off in the morning and when it does, get out of bed and go straight to your meditation spot and start the practice. Generally, fifteen minutes early will not seem like too much of an impact on the sleep time. An important consideration is to have the spot already prepared. Any incense, cushion, candle, or music should be there ready to go otherwise the time allocated for meditation will get used up looking around for all these things you like to have for the practice.
Remember that there will be good meditation days and bad ones. Do not try to push yourself into the Meditative Feeling with your practice. It’ll either just happen or might take a few minutes or just not happen at all that day. Always, give yourself credit for sitting down to try. Do not underestimate the lethargy and excuses that will arise to stop you starting something new, especially if it involves getting out of bed earlier. Remember the Wisdom Insight on meditation:
Whether a meditation is successful or not is based on a single criterion:
whether you meditated or not.
With anything new we want to achieve, we need to have a regular practice. Practicing meditation is just like training for a marathon or getting fitter in the gym. It might not seem like we are making any progress at first, but it is not until we compare where we are now with where we were at the beginning, we see the difference. When we create a regular mediation practice for inner change, it may not seem as though we are making any progress but we are. It may not be until we are in a situation that might have created many discordant thoughts and feelings within us that we suddenly notice either there are none, or they are reduced dramatically. Then we can appreciate the benefits of the regular practice. Here is my last story, for now, with the Master.
The Frozen Lake—
A Story with the Master
The winter seemed to the young student particularly hard. The snow was unusually deep for this time of the year and the winds very biting. He wrapped his thick cloak around himself even tighter as he paced up and down near the ice-covered lake that was in the school’s grounds. He had got to the end of his tract and as he turned around noticed that he had pounded into the snow quite a deep groove with all his pacing.
“What’s with all this pacing?” the friendly voice of the Master suddenly broke in on his thoughts. He had been so engrossed in his thoughts that he had not noticed the Master approaching.
“I do not understand the purpose of one of the aspects of the philosophy module,” he blurted out in frustration. “I understand the contemplation and the reading, but for the life of me I do not see any use in the meditation.”
“What part of it seems useless to you?” the Master asked with a gentle smile.
“Why am I doing it, and how do I know if it is doing anything or not?” he said. “Don’t get me wrong—I love just sitting down and relaxing my mind, but what’s the point?”
“Hmmm,” the Master said, “Come to the edge of the bank here.” As the student joined him at the edge the Master said, “Now step out onto the ice.”
The student looked perplexed and was very reluctant to go anywhere near the ice but his trust in the Master eased any doubts and he tentatively stepped out onto the ice. He had taken two steps when the ice gave way and he found himself up to his ankles in the cold water. Stepping back quickly onto the bank he asked “What was the point of that? My feet are wet and cold now and my cloak is wet at the bottom.”
“Don’t stand around talking about it,” the Master urged. “Hurry back inside and get yourself dry and warm but meet me here in a week’s time.”
The week passed quickly and the young student went back to the lake where sure enough the Master was waiting for him.
“Any problems from your soaking last week?” he asked.
“No,” the student replied.
“Good, good,” said the Master. “I have heard that you show great promise, and I’d hate for anything to happen to you.” At this remark the student’s spirits lifted, as it was well-known that the Master very rarely gave out any compliments.
Just then the Master noticed that the young student was clutching a book. “What is that you are reading there?” the Master inquired.
“A book on eastern philosophy,” the student replied.
“Ah, yes, one of my favorites from our eastern brethren. May I take a look at it a moment?” As the student handed it over, the Master looked through it for a moment, and then suddenly threw it into the middle of the lake. It hit the frozen water with a thud and then slid across the surface, coming to a stop about twenty-five paces from the shore.
The young student looked horrified. How could the Master treat a book, especially one that he had just admitted was one dear to his heart, with such disregard? To add to his consternation, the Master turned to him and said, “OK young man, go and fetch it.”
Remembering his experience of the previous week, and how long he took to warm up and dry out his shoes and cloak, he said with much consternation “Are you crazy? I’ll fall through the ice and surely die.”
“Calm down young man,” the Master said in a reassuring tone. “I know what I am asking of you, just trust me and go and get it.”
So, the young student tentatively moved onto the ice and with every step half expecting to fall through, walked to the book, picked it up and returned to the safety of the bank.
Quite pleased with himself but stilled confused he asked, “What was the purpose of that?”
“Come along, let’s go back inside to the fire and I’ll explain. It’s too cold out here for my old bones,” the Master said as he started to walk back into the school.
“All the time the temperature is cold the lake is slowly freezing,” the Master started, “you can never tell just how thick the ice is and can easily wonder if it’s freezing at all. It is not until suddenly you need to stand on it that you find it is holding you up. Your meditative practice is like that lake: you do a bit every day often wondering if it is working. One day out of the blue, something might happen that would have normally sent you into a tailspin, start a panic inside you, or just made you so anxious that you cannot think clearly, but you suddenly find that you are very calm. Your thoughts and your behavior that arise from this peaceful, calm place help you see a different path forward while you remain in this better awareness. You might even think that you are acting out of character. However, the Meditative Feeling had not gone away but had been creating a new foundation within you.”
The young student smiled as the understanding came upon him. “But how did you know that the ice was thick enough to support me?” he asked. “That was quite a leap of faith.”
“Not really,” the Master said grinning. “When I awoke this morning, I saw the village children playing on it, so knew it was thick enough.”
The crafty old man, the young student thought to himself as he headed off to his next class.