Melissa Dinwiddie shares an excerpt from her e-book Creating Happiness: 9 Essential Secrets for Creative People (and Everybody Else). Melissa is one of the most creative people I know and I’m delighted to have her here while I’m on vacation. Aloha!
A trek up a mountain on a borrowed bike taught me a lot about how shifting focus, even just a fraction of an inch, can radically alter your ride through life.
A few years ago, I went mountain biking on Mount Tamalpais, a mountain east of the famous San Francisco Bay.
As it was my first time actually biking on anything other than pavement, I was fortunate to have a companion for the day who worked as a volunteer coach for a high school mountain bike team. He gave me a lot of tips on how to get up the mountain while staying vertical, and perhaps more importantly, how to get back down.
To any veteran mountain biker, our trail was such a novice one that it would be utterly boring. To me, who was a novice biker at the time, it seemed impossibly rocky. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, then, that the tip I remember most from that day was how to avoid those throw-you-off-your-bike stones that invariably seem to appear right where your wheel is aimed.
The secret?
Don’t look at the rock; look at the clear spot next to it.
How many times, I wondered, had I been toodling around the neighborhood on my bike, and ridden right over the thing—stone, pine cone, crack in the pavement—I was most wanting to avoid?
As my mountain bike coach explained, your wheel will automatically go where you look, so if you look at the rocks while riding, that’s exactly where you’ll go. If you shift your gaze an inch over to look at the clearing, however, you’ll “magically” avoid those nasty bike-tumbling rocks.
It’s not really magic, of course. And it’s an idea that you can apply to more than mountain biking.
Notice What’s Going Well
It’s so easy to lock focus on the rocks in our lives. It takes a bit of conscious effort to train yourself to look for the clear path.
Focusing on what’s not going well will invariably take you down a proverbial rocky path. Shifting your gaze to what’s going well, to what you’re grateful for and what you appreciate in your life, has a similar function for your life’s direction as looking for the clear path has on your mountain bike’s direction.
Try this: Get out a piece of paper and off the top of your head, write down every single thing you can think of that’s going well in your life right now. If the only thing you can think of is “my feet aren’t cold,” write it down. Just noticing that your feet (for once!) aren’t cold may help you to notice that hey, your hands aren’t cold either!
Whatever it is, write it down.
You may be tempted to focus on the fact that your feet were cold 10 minutes ago. Or that they’ve been consistently cold your whole life. But don’t get sucked in! No matter how hard it might be, stay focused on what’s going well.
You have hot, running water! A pretty card came in the mail today! You heard your favorite song on the radio! Your best friend called! No matter how small or random the things you notice are, they all count.
The truth is, we each abound in so many blessings, many of which we never bother to consider. When we do notice the many things we each have to be grateful for, life takes on a much rosier cast.
Once you’ve written down as many things to be grateful for as you can, post your “What’s Going Well” list someplace where you’ll see it. Then make a new list tomorrow. You may even want to start a gratitude journal. One great practice is to write down three things you’re grateful for every night before going to sleep. Give it a try, and let me know what happens.
It seems like such a tiny thing, but a little shift in focus, carried out over time, can be powerful enough to change the direction of an entire life.
What are the rocks in your life? And more importantly, what are the clear spaces next to them?
Do you find it hard to keep your attention on the good stuff? Try it for two weeks — every time you notice what’s sucky in your life, make a point of shifting your focus to something that’s going well. And most importantly, notice how that little shift affects your happiness level over the course of those two weeks.
As I say in my e-book, “I’m upping my happiness; UP YOURS!”
Melissa Dinwiddie is an artist, writer and creativity incubator, whose superpower is helping people live the fully creative lives of their dreams. Find her at Living A Creative Life, and on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
I would never have known that looking AWAY from a rock in the path would be the surest way to miss hitting it (note to self: keep this in mind if you ever get on a bike again)! Very interesting fact –
AND what a great metaphor, Melissa! I love how this applies to life, so glad you shared it!! Also – ““I’m upping my happiness; UP YOURS!”” – ha! what a fabulously funny line.
Teehee! I got the “Up yours” line from a series of happiness lectures I went to years ago. It always makes me laugh.
I never knew that about looking AWAY from a rock, either. I feel kinda silly now, I mean, it should be obvious, right? 8-}
Interesting fact: the same concept holds true in calligraphy, when trying to create a letter made with two strokes that need to join perfectly, such as an “O.” The tendency is to watch your *pen*, but what you need to keep your eye on is your *target*. That’s the surest way to get the strokes to line up the way you want.
Again, for some reason it’s not at all obvious until someone points it out!
I love this metaphor Melissa! And as a fellow mountain biker I have used it as well (for parenting metaphors). When riding up a hill it is especially important to focus on where you want to go. But if it is a particularly long hill I break it down into segments – chunk it if you will- focusing on one tree at a time at different parts along the side of the path & visulaizing a bungy cord or rope pulling me there- then I switch to the next tree as I progressively get further up that hill. Here’s a short video I made in the summer about it! http://youtu.be/MhAO1w7Z1Bg
Ooh, I love the image of a bungy cord or rope pulling you there! I could have used that on my trek up Mt. Tam! 🙂
What a great metaphor! They say the same is true in a race car. If you’re crashing you have to look away from the wall where you’re going to hit and toward the track where you want to go or you will crash every time. I absolutely love
“I’m upping my happiness; UP YOURS!” that is fantastic. I’m going to write it down so it will make me smile every time I read it. 🙂
Yikes – this would certainly have life-saving consequences in race car driving! (Mountain biking too, though not at the newbie speeds I was going. ;))
That “Up yours” quote, which I got from a series of happiness lectures I attended years ago, ALWAYS makes me smile. 🙂 Glad you like it too.