For 20 years from my teenage years through to my mid 30s, I was a high performer, but I did stress
and anxiety like a champion! Sometimes I was fine with it, sometimes I was not. When I decided I
needed to master a happier and more peaceful way of being I wondered if that was the end of me
as a successful achieving professional. My name's Steve and I coach professional people just like
you to beat stress, clear your mind, and raise your game; and a great place to start is with
my free simple five-step guide to mastering stress in the moment. This is me 30 years ago. You might
not know it from looking at me, but I was one of life's nervous passengers. I was always thinking
about how everything could go wrong. I didn't need to. I had a great job, I was good at it, I worked
hard, I got great performance reviews year on year, and I was much more capable at dealing
with difficulties than I gave myself credit for. It didn't stop me having to pace round the block
sometimes to calm my nerves. It didn't stop me waking up in the night with stressful thoughts
spinning around in my head. I put up with that for years until one day it got too much and I decided
something had to change. My friend Tim sat me down and started talking to me about how my
experience of life was created from thought. At first I resisted that. Everything I was stressing
about was real, I insisted. He persevered though and I'm glad he did, because as we talked more,
I started to see that he was right, and I started to see new possibilities for me and how I could be
in the world. I started the journey of learning and self-discovery that led me to learn so
much about me and about human nature. I started investing in recreating myself as someone living
and working from a more peaceful ground of being. I started to see something else though. I started
to see what looked like a conflict between being a responsible achiever and somebody deeply grounded
in a peaceful mind. I didn't want to drop out. I wanted to be a responsible achieving professional
person. I just wanted to be that with a peace of mind, a gentle but unshakable confidence,
a lightness of being that meant life could be happier. As I studied with teachers who could
take me further down that path, and learning about acceptance, I started to question whether
it was possible to be in that place and still have goals and ambitions, or if you prefer,
projects. I wondered if it was going to become a choice a peaceful mind or professional success. I
wondered which choice I would make. You see there's something about goals and ambitions
which can take us out of the now, that can have us looking over yonder into the future
rather than being mindfully here now. The key word there though is 'can'. I mean, I had certainly
used goals as a way of imagining that happiness was somewhere over there and all I had to do
was cross the assault course to get to it. Now I was learning that happiness is something that we
create here and now, with acceptance, compassion, not resisting or fighting with the flow of life as
it is. That's where I also realized the crucial difference between goals and projects. A goal
is over there. A project is happening now. It might seem like a trivial or pedantic difference.
After all, a project is a means to some goal or ambition. One of my pivotal learning experience
was a program called What Every Person Can Do, facilitated by one of my coaches Bill Cumming.
It's a program I'm now trained to facilitate and is integrated with my coaching. It is a program
of spiritual connectedness, groundedness and equanimity. It's also a program that uses that
clarity of mind to create higher levels of capability, responsibility, problem solving,
and action. Under Bill's guidance I set goals. I had ambitions about things I wanted to create in
the world, but I didn't lose my mindful presence in the moment, because while I would look over
there to check on the goal, which is not a bad thing to do, I stayed present with the project,
the thing happening in this moment. A peaceful mind does not mean having to drop out. It's what
will make you more capable. It's like shutting down a load of programs in the computer to free
up capacity, so you can have goals and ambitions whilst working on a peaceful mind, as long as you
realize that the magic of having the goal is what it inspires you to be and do in this moment. One
thing that can get in the way of cultivating a peaceful mind is difficult meetings. To stay calm
in difficult meetings, watch this video here. This is steve wishing you health and happiness.