The Front Row Movement

Unfortunately, this is not how life works. Every meaningful goal takes time. Therefore, if your goals require time to materialize, take this as a positive sign. Designing your dream career, becoming financially secure or returning to your ideal weight will never happen through luck. It will only happen through the implementation of a specific process over a long period of time. The investor, Warren Buffet, said, The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient. Patience not only applies to the stock market but to many other areas of your life. People who can think long term and remain patient will make daily decisions that increase the chances of them having a better future. Maiden Voyage by Tania Aebi (Ballantine articles, 1989) A story of one woman's courageous journey around the world in a sailboat. A true tale of courage. Websites/Organizations Toastmasters is an international speech club that supports members in learning the art of public speaking. Everyone has an opportunity to practice conducting meetings, giving speeches, and offering constructive evaluation. This is an amazing website that offers resources on a simple and effective treatment for fears, phobias, and a wide range of physical symptoms including anxiety, depression, and body pain. Pass Up Good for Great THERE ARE TWO GREAT ASSETS that we all have temporary ownership of in our lifetimes: time and energy. In order to live a life that honors your personal and spiritual development, and your commitment to make the world better in some way, you must direct these assets toward those things that are aligned with your values. By contrast, explicit attitudes are the evaluations that we consciously make using the cognitive system (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2014). Implicit attitudes

Automatic associations based on previous learning through the experiential system. Explicit attitudes Attitudes people are consciously aware of through the cognitive system. Because we have no direct conscious access to our experiential system, measuring people's implicit attitudes requires a bit of cleverness. One popular task developed by Tony Greenwald and colleagues is the implicit association test (Greenwald et al. This task measures the degree to which a person mentally associates two concepts (eg, flowers and pleasant), essentially by measuring how quickly she or he can lump together examples of Concept 1 (rose, petunia, tulip) alongside examples of Concept 2 (happy, lucky, freedom). If you are like the average person (and not an entomologist), you'd probably be quicker to throw these flower and pleasant words in the same mental file folder than to group the same pleasant words with insect names such as flea, locust, and maggot. It's this difference in speed that tells us something about your implicit attitude toward flowers relative to insects, which may or may not be the same as what you would report explicitly on a questionnaire. As a result, they will tend to be healthier and wealthier than people who find delayed gratification impossible. To be honest, impatience has been one of the hardest things I have had to battle with over the past few years. Like most people, I want things to happen--and to happen now. Consequently, I had to display a great deal of self-compassion when things didn't go as planned. It's okay, you have time, and Be patient, have been my favorite mantras over recent years. You, too, are likely to feel frustrated and may want to give up on your goals from time to time. But always remind yourself to be patient. You have time. Life is a marathon, not a sprint. So, take a step back, look at the overall picture and think in terms of years or decades, not weeks or months. To do this you must be able to exercise the patience and maturity to pass up good for great. We are each given the gift of free will.

With this gift comes a responsibility to make wise choices. By becoming highly selective about how you will and will not use your time and energy, you acquire a more mature perspective on life. You realize that less is often more, and that quality is far better than quantity. You also recognize that because your outer life is a direct reflection of your inner life you must develop patience and a sense of mindfulness about what you will and will not let into your life. When I talk about passing up good for great, I'm not talking about feeding an insatiable hunger for material possessions. A hunger for more things is born from spiritual deprivation, a longing for something deeper and more nutritious than any car or house can ever offer. I'm talking about a quality of greatness that is directly in line with your spiritual standards. The standards that create the right emotional and physical environment you need to be your best self. If the cognitive and experiential systems can both produce attitudes, and if these two systems operate independently of one another, does that mean that the same person can have different attitudes toward the same thing? The answer, again, is yes. To illustrate, when volunteers in one study (Nosek, 2005) were asked whether they prefer dogs or cats, what they consciously said--that is, their explicit attitude--was that they prefer dogs. But their responses on a reaction-time measure revealed that, at an implicit level, they associated cats with good more than dogs with good (perhaps because cats seldom have a bad reputation as dangerous animals). People's explicit attitudes toward dogs and cats were correlated positively with their implicit attitudes, but only moderately so, suggesting that implicit and explicit attitudes can coexist at different levels of consciousness. Not only can they coexist, they can kick in under certain circumstances to influence how we act. Your explicit attitude might dictate which kind of pet you choose to adopt from a local shelter (a very conscious decision), but it's your implicit attitude that probably accounts for the automatic startle response you might have if you encounter a German Shepherd, rather than a tabby cat, in a dark alley. As shown in FIGURE 3. For example, in a study on judging political parties, the correlation of about . Other attitudes can be quite distinct, so the preference people say they have for family versus career might be only weakly correlated (about . If you lack patience, don't beat yourself up. We are all in the same boat.

Being patient and thinking in the longer term is a skill and one you can develop over time, by focusing on the long-term picture. This shift from short-term thinking to long-term thinking will make a huge difference in your life. In fact, I would go as far as saying that, for the most part, your ability to think long-term will determine where you end up in ten years from today. Being patient is wonderful, but if you just wait around without doing anything, nothing is going to happen. Lack of consistency is another key factor explaining why people don't reach their goals. Did you know the swimmer and Olympic gold medalist, Michael Phelps, didn't miss a single day of training from the age of twelve to eighteen? Now, that's what I call consistency! We all know people who can't stop talking about what they're going to do. Wanting better is not selfish or self-indulgent, it's the by-product of high self-esteem and a deep understanding that we are all entitled to a high quality of life. There is nothing immoral or selfish about having high standards. As a matter of fact,as you learn to pass up good for great, it will fuel your desire and your ability to support others in doing the same. Deprivation breeds fear and selfishness, the opposite of a generous spirit. Abundance breeds love, generosity, and a deep desire to serve our fellow human beings. Developing the ability to pass up good for great is a natural next step in your spiritual growth. As your sense of self-worth deepens, you recognize that you deserve more from life and you allow yourself to have it. You stop settling for less. Of course there is risk involved in using this skill--the pain of disappointment, the fear of loss, or the feeling of being an outsider when you choose a different path than others close to you do. It is this fear that keeps many of us from having high expectations. Our implicit and explicit attitudes are more likely to align when we feel strongly about the issue in question, have given it a lot of thought, and feel comfortable expressing our attitudes (Nosek, 2007). On the other hand, when we are explicitly undecided about an issue, our implicit attitudes predict our later explicit preferences (Galdi et al.

It seems that our experiential system is a bit of a backseat driver at times, whispering directions when our cognitive system is not sure which way to turn. Implicit and Explicit Attitudes On some issues, such as those at the top of this graph, people's implicit and explicit attitudes are highly related; Automaticity and Controlled Processes The example of the German Shepherd in the dark alley illustrates how the experiential system guides simple behaviors such as automatic reactions to the environment. But this system guides behavior in more sophisticated ways, as well. In particular, it can control the behaviors necessary to reach our goals. By building up mental associations through routine interactions with the physical and social environment, we can automatize certain behaviors so that we perform them while devoting little to no conscious attention to what we are doing. They're going to lose all this weight, create this incredible business or make all that money--or so they say. But once the original excitement wears off, you never hear about their exciting plans again. They've already moved on to the next new thing, and they will keep moving on to different things for years, never hitting any of their targets. Because it's a pattern. It has become a habit deeply ingrained in their brain. The same goes for you. If you lack consistency in one area of your life, you probably lack consistency in other areas as well. If so, reading one more article, taking one more course or trying one more diet won't work. You must change your pattern. Consistency must become part of your identity. Instead we learn to settle for, and hang on to, what is safe and familiar or what is expected of us. A typical example of this is the man or woman who settles for an unsatisfying relationship out of a fear of being alone or not being able to find someone better.