PERSONAL SPECIAL...The Conscious Lifestyle: Find Better Coping Mechanisms (Part 2)

The Conscious Lifestyle: Find Better Coping Mechanisms (Part 2)

The kind of coping mechanisms that you use will have a huge bearing on how your life turns out. If you want to lead a conscious life, that goal is incompatible with self-defeating behavior.  It's well accepted in professional consulting that most people could manage their time better at work, but this is an external solution and a false one on the whole. Work fills all the time allowed to it, which is why millions of people find themselves, not just short of time, but psychologically pressured, obsessed, stressed out, and insecure. No matter how hard they work, there is always more to do.
A conscious life develops from the inside. You must stop and ask yourself how you want your work to feel. In the last post, I offered the criteria for coping well at work.

• Being relaxed.
• Having fun.
• Enjoying yourself.
• Feeling no pressure.
• Appreciating the steps that get you to your goal.
• Immersing yourself in the process.
• Being focused and centered at the same time.

These things are achieved only through a conscious process of changing your coping mechanisms. The questions you need to ask are simple. Take each item on the list and ask yourself: Is this how I feel?
If not, then you aren't thriving. You are letting your work be in charge, sacrificing who you are for what you can accomplish. The two should come together.  Conscious living can make it happen. I know that many successful people are immersed in competition, deadlines, time management issues, and other stresses. But as soon as you blame your woes on externals, they have won. The externals change when you change. That's entirely how it works.
This truth, if you can accept it, shows you a way forward.  Focus your energies on the inner person. The more you do, the more you can find an unshakable center. Along the way, you will begin to value how you feel, what your intuition tells you, how other people are responding, and what your limits are. The most successful people have already reached that point. It isn't "successful habits" that get them to the top. It's being centered, aware, and secure.
Once you decide that life is fulfilled from the inside, your whole perception begins to shift. It's not that you give up the race, hang loose, and drink a Mai Tai while the world runs past you.  If you get truly centered, you shorten the distance between what you want and how to get there. This is the difference between knowing the solution and casting about frantically to find the solution. Knowing is an inner quality. It uses input from the outside, of course, but inner processes dominate - the goal is to create a setting where the right choice can be made.
There is a huge difference between the ecology of bad decisions and the ecology of good ones. In the next post, the discussion will turn on how to avoid the things that make decisions go wrong, because ultimately, the way you cope must bring fruitful results.


Deepak Chopra, co-author of Super Brain wth Rudolph Tanzi, Ph.D.