Difficult Decisions
Being a cricket captain is a hard job and one with struggles just like all of us may have in our jobs. Recently Pat Cummins, captain of Australia’s men’s cricket team gave an interview on The Imperfects. Last year he flew to India to captain his team, knowing his mother was not far from death. “I knew when I was getting on that plane [to India] I was going to have to come back in a couple of weeks,” he said. In an open and honest interview he shared the struggle he had around those decisions and also his reasoning behind making those decisions.
We may not have quite such extreme choices to make in our lives but we regularly make smaller choices where we sacrifice one thing that is important to us to do something else that is important to us. Time is a limited resource! And these choices are tough.
I’m not going to comment on his choice of whether he should have left the team or his mother at that point but what is the bigger point is recognising the limits of what you can do while you are living out that choice!
Once you have decided
The bigger problem we often have is how we do the thing we’re doing. If we are committed to one thing but constantly thinking about the other we end up doing neither properly. A less extreme but perhaps more pervasive example is when we have multiple tasks due at work, so we sit down to do one but find we are too busy thinking about the ones we are NOT doing that we can’t concentrate on the one were ARE doing.
I find Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) a useful framework for thinking generally but I think it really impacts on this situation well. It speaks about an idea of presence. Our mind gets hooked on things that feel important to us but it pulls us away from what we are doing. Although it is important to us, there is a limit to how much we can do towards it, often we can’t do anything. So why do we let something we can’t do anything about, take us away from the thing we can do something about.
Accept it is important, but focus on what is useful
In this space we want to accept that our mind will take us towards thinking about it… because it is important to us! But then we want to recognise our limits and refocus to the (also important) task at hand. “What is most helpful now?” is a useful reminder to point us towards what we want to focus on now, which is getting us closer to our goals and stopping overly focusing on things that we can’t do anything about. If we have planned our tasks effectively then we know the most helpful thing to do at that point is the task we sat down to complete, not the one we had planned for later in the day!
This is hard, and we will never be very good at this, so removing that judgement about our mind going to that place is key and if we repeat this process 100 times, perhaps next time it will only be 99 times, and we’ll have done more that we would have done if we hadn’t tried this!
If you would like to work on your mindset and focusing on what is important to you contact us to talk through how Mark can help you!