The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life (3 page)

You could think of it as throwng tennis balls into a trash can from ten feet away. Imagine that I gave you three tennis balls and told you to throw them one at a time into a trash can ten feet away. The most productive way to perform the task is something like this: You pick up a tennis ball, look at the trash can, and toss the first ball. If the ball hits the floor in front of the can, you observe this and make the decision to adjust the arc of the ball and how hard you will toss the next ball based on this observed information. You continue this process with each toss, allowing present-moment feedback to help you refine the art of tossing a tennis ball into a trash can.

Where we fall down in this activity is when we drop out of this present-minded approach and become attached to the outcome of our attempts. Then we start the emotional
judgment cycle: “
How could I have missed the first one? I am not very good at this. Now the best I can do is two out of three,” and on and on. If we stay in the
process
, this does not occur. We look at the outcome of each attempt with emotional indifference. We accept it as it is, with no judgment involved.

Remember, judgment redirects and wastes our energy. One could argue that we must judge the outcome of each attempt to make a decision about how to proceed, but this is not true. Judgment brings a sense of right or wrong, good or bad with it. What we are doing here is objectively observing and analyzing the outcome of each attempt. This observation serves only to direct our next effort. It is amazing how everything changes when we use this way of thinking to approach any new activity. For one thing, we become patient with ourselves. We are not in a hurry to get to some predetermined point. Our goal is to stay in this process and to direct our energy into whatever activity we are choosing at the present. Every second that we achieve this, we fulfill our goal. This process brings us inner peace and a wonderful sense of mastery and self-confidence. We are mastering ourselves by staying in the process and mastering whatever activity we are working on. This is the essence of proper practice.

Why are we so poor at all of this? How did we learn to process life in such a contrary manner, one that screams that the product is the only concern? This mentality pushes us harder and harder, with no end in sight. By not
staying in the proces
s, our minds dash all over the place all day long, the horses running free with no one at the reins. We think too many thoughts at once, most of them the same thoughts we had yesterday and the day before. We are impatient with life, and anxious.

We must accept that, to a certain extent, such thinking is human nature. If you read about any of the great world religions and philosophies, you will find that at their core is the subject of our inability to stay in the present moment. They all speak at great length about how overcoming this is everything in realizing and experiencing true inner peace and attaining real self-empowerment. Hence the millennia-old story of the chariot driver.

In the West, we can blame at least a certain amount of our product orientation on the way our culture operates. This weakness in human nature is repeatedly taught to us and incorporated into our personalities, which makes becoming aware of, let alone overcoming, this crippling perspective all the more difficult.

In sports, we focus on who won. In an art form such as music, a new student asks, “How long will it take me to play like that person over there?” as if every moment up to that point will be drudgery that must be endured. In education, as we will discuss, what we truly learn is at best a footnote, because in the end ict a school’s output of high grades that determines its future funding. For most of our culture, focusing on the process is almost frowned upon; it’s seen as missing the point.

The idea that the end
product is all that really matters starts when we are very young. Even if we do not remember exactly what behaviors we observed in early childhood to instill this idea into our personalities, it is surely there for most of us by the time we get to school age. If any of us are lucky enough to fail to acquire this perspective before that time, you can be sure that our educational systems will work to instill it.

To expand on the point made above, school is the beginning of what I will refer to as hard, fast
markers
that define who we are. These markers are, of course, grades. Grades, when functioning properly, should inform the educational system about how well the present method of teaching is working. However, whether they actually accomplish this is up for discussion. Grades in school have been around for a long time, and people still get everything from As to Fs on their report cards. Standardized Achievement Tests are another form of grading our performance in academic matters. They heavily influence which colleges we get into and whether a particular school will even consider us as potential students. During our school years, our grade accomplishments very much define who we are and what we are worth. They can greatly influence not only how far we will go in life but in what direction we will head. They speak much to us about our sense of self-worth. Someone who scores mostly Cs feels that he is “Average.” An F student is a “Failure,” and an A student is, of course, “Excellent.” During our school
years, we begin to dev
elop a bottom-line belief that states, “Results are everything,” regardless of how we achieve them. Why else would people cheat?

I am not here to promote a New Age scoring system that makes us all feel that we are head-of-the-class material. That would be beyond both the context of this book and my ability. What is within the context of this book is how the grading system affects our attitudes toward making the
product
the priority, rather than the
process
.

All through my school years I found math to be a most difficult subject. Even at a very early age, certain aspects of math just didn’t make sense to me. The teacher would go over something new on the board, and I would listen intently and try to follow, but to no avail. I would start on the new assignment with a resolve to overcome my lack of understanding with hard work, but it never seemed to help. I was very much a creative-minded child, not an analytical one in the mathematical sense. My grades always reflected this, and my report cards consistently showed I was somewhat of a B student, with an A sprinkled in here and there, except in math. In subjects that were more right-brained, such as creative writing, I was usually the first one done with assignments. In math, I was working after the bell had rung and most of the other students had left. Some of my trouble was probably due to poor instruction. I say this because there were one or two math teachers who presented the material to me in a way that was very clear, and I could manage at least a B
or C grade in those cl
asses, but they were the exception to the rule.

What I learned about myself through the experience of school and grades illustrates how the product becomes the priority instead of the process. Most of us heard phrases during our school years that were actually rooted in the correct mindset of “process, not product.” I am speaking of encouraging words such as “just try your tandist; that’s what is important” and “do your best; that’s all anyone can ask.” These phrases were very good advice, but somehow most of us knew they were empty, bogus statements. In regard to math, I can honestly say I did try my hardest, but that never consoled me when I got my report card. I would immediately skip through the Cs, Bs, and As that were scattered through the columns and go right to “Math Comprehension,” where the D (most likely a gift for trying hard) sat as big as life. I was very fortunate to have parents who were unimpressed with academic achievements. They were always encouraging, despite the low grades I received. Still, in those elementary school days and all the way through college, I carried an inner perception that those grades were who I was and a measure of my self-worth, at least as far as math went. I learned to dread math of any kind, and I felt inadequate in my ability to overcome that feeling.

I was not alone in this perspective, by any stretch of the imagination. Some people, perhaps those whose parents were very invested in academic achievement, had an
even stronger commitme
nt to the power of the grade. An example of this was when I took a music theory course at a local college when I was twenty-five years old and living on my own. I owned a business that supported me, and the decision to take the course was strictly my own. Because I was self-employed, I had the luxury of not having to take a night class. I could get right into the day class with the fresh-out-of-high-school kids.

One of the assignments in this class was to work on a computer whose program tested us on all the material that was covered in class. It graded us on each area of the work, and it did not allow us to advance to the next lesson until we had passed the one we were presently on. The Big Brother nature of the whole system made things worse. We worked in a lab full of computers, as you would expect, but they were all centrally networked. The professor could log into our lessons any time he wanted to and see exactly where we were in the curriculum. This was before the days of the Internet and household networking, so the concept seemed very futuristic and somewhat daunting. As if all this were not enough, we had a time element to contend with. We were allowed only so much time to give each answer. What was particularly bad about this was that our class was unknowingly a test group. We were being timed, but a sister class covering the same lesson plan was not. We however did not know that we were the only ones with a time constraint on our answers.

I won’t go into how I uncovered this secret, but what
I learned was that someone in the college wanted to see if the students would learn the same material faster if put under a time constraint. This was an interesting idea, except that, since we were the first attempt at this procedure, the faculty didn’t really know what a reasonable amount of time would be to give a student to calculate the answers to the computer’s questions. They grossly underestimated, and no one was able to answer the questions in the time allotted. A correct answer that took too long to type in was considered wrong by the computer, and hence a failure. Our frustration was compounded by the fact that the computer-lab work counted as 33 percent of our final grade in the class.

On the first day of class, we received a schedule sheet describing our expected progress on the computer on each day. Virtually no one could come even close to meeting this schedule, and the farther behind students got, the more stressed they felt. One day the professor made the mistake of stating rather casually that people were not keeping up with their computer work and reminding us to not forget the impact of this nternet aade. The unexpected reaction he received was frighteningly reminiscent of the old westerns in which an angry mob hunted for a good rope and a tree to go with it.

At this point, the faculty did not realize that they had put students in a no-win situation. They assumed that the time allotment was sufficient and fair and that the reason for the students’ difficulties was that they were not putting
in enough time. Studen
ts, in reality, were putting in way too much time, and were even neglecting other classes in an effort to catch up in this class. Some of them were visibly distraught.

Yet I was immune to all this angst because I was an adult student. I had paid for my class and I really didn’t care about the grade I received. I was interested only in information that would be helpful in my musical composing efforts. I didn’t have to mail a copy of my grade home to my parents, because I was on my own. Because I was older than the rest of the students, I also had the perspective that this class wasn’t going to make or break my life. I had failed tests before and I was still here. I felt almost like a wizened parent watching children react to something that, to them, was so important and yet at some point down the road would seem so insignificant.

The point of this story was how the other students resolved the problem. In short, they cheated. They very blatantly cheated. Anyone could go into the computer lab at any time. It was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and the professor was never around. Once the students found out what the questions would be, they would write down all the answers on a memo pad and walk into the lab, setting the pad on their laps. Before the computer finished asking the question, they were typing in the answer. They caught up on all their work, received perfect scores, and felt very justified in their actions. Unfortunately, they learned little to nothing about music theory.
When I was working on
an assignment at a computer and talking to them, I would hear the same thing over and over again: “This class and this computer are not going to ruin my grade.” The
grade
was everything; the knowledge was nothing. They finished the course with a piece of paper that had an A on it that meant nothing. They had learned almost nothing during the three months (the process), but they felt that they had won because of the grade they had received (the product). But what did they really gain that was of any lasting value?

On the other hand, what choice did they have? Our culture is a bottom-line, results-oriented society. Corporations will hire a 4.0 before a 2.0 every time because they feel the 4.0 has more to offer. To them, the 4.0 is who you are and what your future potential is. With regard to this particular situation, if a student had instead said, “Forget the grade,” and expended all her energy on just learning as much of the material as possible, she would have had no valid way to represent what she had accomplished. Our culture does not recognize the value of being process oriented, even though we see so much evidence for it in the work produced by countries that do.