Strategic Concepts
These are just brief overviews, introductions to the concepts, will go into detail in the following outlines…
Values – Intrinsic/Direct/Immediate Value
- Be in the moment, presence – One of the Progressions Strategy key values is about giving you balance, state of mind, a method for staying in the moment
One of the key values of the Progressions Mindset is staying in the moment, being present. I know, we hear this all the time. We “know” how valuable it is. But we tend to treat it as some elusive perfect wave we either catch or miss. Like the weather. It’s either good or bad and mostly out of our control. We might be able to be present for a moment, we don’t know how we got into it and we can get knocked out of it just as easily, without a way to get back into it because we don’t know how we did it in the first place! So we tend to dismiss or devalue “being in the moment” as a method or tool because in our framework it’s not useful if we can’t control it. But being in the moment or “flowstate” is a controllable ability, is a tool for us to use, and crucial for adopting the Progression Mindset.
- No Judgment – Releases you from judgment, competition, comparison – accept that you are where you are and be good with that
Another important value of the Progression Mindset is to stop judgment. Stop judging yourself. That’s any kind of judging thoughts, ways of thinking, habits, things you say and do that is a form of judgment. Judgment is a habit so stopping it cold turkey isn’t going to happen overnight. But the first thing to be able to to do is to know when you’re judging yourself or others. We might do it so casually, a judgment just pops into our heads and we don’t realize it’s a judgment or give it a second thought.
So what kind of judgments are we talking about? First, stop comparing yourself to where you are and where you think you should be or comparing yourself to others. It’s a natural tendency to make everything a comparison or competition but as humans we can curb that tendency. You are where you are, not better, no less. This might be hard to see, but see yourself not as a point on a map, but see yourself as the entire path you’ve travelled – then you can see where you’ve been, where you are and bits of where your’e going. And can appreciate the journey as a whole.
Second, not everything we do has to be a value between good or bad. We could probably remove many things we label as good or bad and would help us stop judging. And I’m mostly talking about things that we do, say or act. Our inner critic tends to either over-estimate or under-estimate our own self worth. So we’re always having an inner-dialogue, telling ourselves what we did was either good or bad. This creates a rollercoaster of self-doubt and pride. We feel pride or accomplishment when we do something “good” or we’ll feel inadequacy when we do something “bad”.
And let’s agree that obviously we’re not talking about doing things illegally or morally wrong. Let’s keep it in the scope of, for example feeling guilty for not getting anything done, streaming videos or doing something “unproductive” all day or labelling a “good” day because you got a great workout and the day was so productive. Now of course that probably was a “good” day and there’s nothing wrong to feel good about it but the goal is to be mindful of how we’re using “good” and “bad” in order to help us stop using them as modes of judgment. I’m not advocating maybe a cold approach of not appreciating the “good” times. This is a topic for a later discussion but I’ll touch on it briefly here, what I am seeing it as is maybe the “good” times is more a definition of how frequently, easily or deeply we were being present or in the “flowstate” of what we’re doing.
Third, stopping ourselves from judging others or thinking we got them figured out. Maybe we see their actions, their patterns and it’s so easy to say they’re this way or that, maybe we think they’re rude, impatient, lazy, indecisive, jealous, awkward or incompetent. Outwardly we’re judging other people, it’s critical and harsh but we act like we’ve got them all figured out. The problem is, the reason why we’re so sensitive to other people’s “flaws” is because there’s something about what they’re doing that makes us defensive about our own insecurities, prickles our own self-judgment. How harshly we judge others we’re judging ourselves even more harshly. The old proverb is true. Our Ego can play games with us, convincing us we’re different or we’re nothing like that, the specific action is most likely different but if you look deeper, are honest, humble and open the motivations come from the same fears.