Recently I was on a mountain bike ride from Vail to Copper Mountain and was in deep thought. I remembered the quote by Sir Isaac Newton, (when asked how he discovered the theory of gravity.) “You would have discovered it too if that’s all you had thought about every day.”
I thought about the work I had done with my own coach, Steve Chandler and told him that I really WANTED something but still hadn’t figured out HOW TO get it. (The want was to fill a new program of mine, www.safariwoman.net in record time with an already full client schedule).
He asked me to open my calendar and show me how much time in the past four weeks I had booked for calling people, for taking any action. Any tiny action.
He would see almost no time booked. I asked myself – how can you discover gravity, or anything else you want to discover (like how to be happy, or how to make a great living) without absolute, total focus? Without time set aside for thinking about it?
And then as a reminder, on my mountain bike I rode past this sign in a store window in Copper Mountain:
I stopped dead in my mountain tracks. Fear. That’s always the culprit – the voice that takes us far far away from the plan we said we were committed to.
So, now the calendar is filled with time booked for filling my program. Lots of time. Way more than I may need, spacious time, luxurious time, and it’s filling as we speak.
