The next winter olympics is not until February 2030. For all you winter olympics fans, that’s a long wait, so I’ll give you a fun way to invoke a little “icy” sports business into your current life.
Whooda thunk that people who have access to facilities for golf, tennis, pickleball, paddle tennis, swimming, and cross country skiing would also have the added appetite and time to take on a little curling on the ice.
My friend certainly had the appetite. Learning about her curling team’s competitions and training sessions gave me just enough exposure to the game to develop a decent appreciation for the strategy involved. Over the years since, I’ve found it to be a fitting metaphor for a key life skill that I’ve honed as part of my KindEdge system for unlocking big life change.
Where You Place Your Attention Is Where Your Life’s Story Ends Up
The skill of which I speak is centered around the reality that:
- Wherever you place your attention becomes what your mind begins to see as real.
- What your mind sees as real becomes that for which your mind can devise real life actions.
- It is the actions that your brain envisions that you will carry out in real life.
- The actions you take every day build, brick by brick, the end product of your life.
Life troubles will always scream louder for your attention than anything else you might aspire to achieve. Problems have a sneaky way of jumping to the front of the line in your list of priorities by making themselves seem ultimately urgent and important. When something’s on fire, all your higher purpose aspirations and life goals go out the window, falling into the lower priority quadrants of Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix. (Credit to U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower who delivered the first broadly-known public use of that phraseology.)
That book you swore you would write this year holds nothing to the flaming hot situation wherein, for the fifth time this month, you’re getting bank alerts all night long telling you your spouse is out gambling $10,000 a pop once again, launching you into that usual puppet-on-a-string routine wherein you must run around closing down all your family’s bank accounts just to hold the fort for just one more day.
This KindEdge life skill of maintaining a curling mindset empowers you to defend your true life’s purpose against the uninvited “urgent and important” problems that seek to hijack progress on the bespoke gifts you were put here on Earth to express and share with others.
Bad events will happen, but you are in the driver’s seat in terms of choosing how much of your attention will be siphoned away to the chaos makers.
Watch the Doughnut not the Hole
Do you recall the toe-tap-inducing song called “Watch the Doughnut not the Hole,” made famous by the singer Burl Ives? It’s an oldie but a goodie that has stood the test of time because the lyrics still ring true today. Focus your attention on the doughnut, the real thing that stands before you in real life; the thing that is useful and that you can take hold and bite into today.
The metaphorical hole in your life might be any trouble that pulls you backward or keeps you circling and stuck. Bad events come in the form of weather, accidents, disasters, bad business deals, manipulative people, usury employers, or situations that just don’t fit your needs for your life.
Investing your attention into trying to somehow mold those bad situations into something that is more fair or fitting is a fruitless Sisyphean effort. No matter how hard you push the boulder up the hill, it will continually prove to be dead weight and will roll back down the minute you loosen your grip.
So when trouble hits, the choice is all yours. Pick a lane & ride.
The choice is all yours in terms of selecting which path sounds like how you want to spend the remaining minutes in your life.
Where You Have No Choice: The Passing of Time
The one thing you don’t have a choice about is time. No matter what path you take, the minutes in your life will only count down. The day trouble hits, take a look at the calendar and ask yourself:
On this day next year, do I want to have invested my best efforts and my best gifts and the best days of my life into a black hole? Or do I want to accelerate my higher purpose mission and commit to suffocating this problem strategically so I can protect 99% of my days to serve my greater goals?
What story will your life write?
As we’ve discussed, attention becomes reality which becomes the actions you take which builds the story of your life.
You can see that these two differing approaches result in very different stories being told about your life:
- Ruthless fighter, victim, martyr, sufferer, vengeance strategizer, pain endurer, sympathy receiver, long-haul battler, whack-a-mole-er
- Creator, builder, wrangler, re-birther, re-imaginer, simplifier, learner, transform-er
Only one of these two sounds like a hero’s tale to me.
If you double-down on managing, controlling, or fighting a toxic situation, you keep central to your life for longer. Your brain will see your attention on the toxic as your reality. You will begin to focus all your planning and actions on the fight. In the middle of the night your brain will wake you up with the thought “And, oh yeah, here’s another thing that jerk-y person or organization did, so I better make sure to fight them on that point too…” Your brain will understand its job to be delivering you fuel for the fight which you can take action on. You’ll be up night after night e-mailing new lists to a lawyer or drafting righteous emails. You will become the war machine your brain believes you want to become.
Getting wronged by someone never feels good. We all get tempted to over-invest in our pursuit of that moment of justice we crave so badly. But life is too short to let pursuit take you away from your forward-focused better path where you can actually do things that leave your bespoke mark on the world.
The moment you identify that something or someone is toxic, there is no benefit in wasting more time rolling around in the mud battling with it. Your best bet is to give it minimum attention while you take the formal steps to untie from it. Whether you are leaving an employer, getting a divorce, or negotiating yourself out of a bad deal, let that difficult process roll forth, but turn your attention out in front of you.
Invest in Better Things than Lawyers
The curling mindset has helped me weather many storms. One practical example relates to two real storms: the back-to-back hurricane-floods of 2024, Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. The storms were only the start of the chaos. The real chaos was generated by a toxic, disordered Homeowners Association that, for over two years, has mis-managed, mis-stated, and mis-spent. They hired barely legal contractors and both the insurance proceeds and the contractors have disappeared with work less than half done. For some owners, this issue has become a black hole into which they dove head first. Because I’ve seen plenty of examples of how these battles roll out, with no party 100% happy in the end and with all parties’ attorneys much much richer, I’ve given the issue only the amount of time and money investment that would drive actual outcomes and key junctures.
And from day one of the first hurricane that flooded my home, I saw the future clearly. I could see ahead by one and two years, and I knew I needed to ensure that, in each of those 730 days, my higher purpose would remain the main show.
Leveraging the mindset of curling, I made sure to devote 99% of my attention toward that which I could build and create for that which I care about most. In these last two years I’ve focused my attention on supporting my sons, investing in my health, and on writing blogs like this, for you. Because you are part of my higher purpose. I wake up each day knowing that I could die tomorrow. It is my mission to get all my scritch-scratch paper notes about my practical learnings for KindEdge handed over to people who can use them.
So even when some big blobby messes in life take a long time to get cleared up, you can use that time to get out in front, like a curler, to dig in new grooves, smooth out the path ahead, and create a little heat by investing your energy into exciting new ventures that will matter to you in the end.
Some Bad Events have No Bad Guy: But They Steal Your Attention All the Same
Some life events are pure accidents. You might be a professional triathlete who tears a hamstring and has to stop training for a long period. In your heart you can battle with this hardship. But after some valuable work to experience and digest the pain of that loss, you can look ahead and think, how can I focus my attention on building something that is a greater, and longer-lasting and more impactful expression of all the good things I’m trying to do as a triathlete? There might be an opportunity to learn new skills around mindfulness, meditation and self-compassion, and these might be tools that other athletes might want to learn too. As the triathlete in this example zooms out to the imprint they want to leave on the world, they might see a new opportunity to blend their expertise in physical training with their newly-gained expertise in mindfulness and create an entire system that could help other athletes enjoy longer, more sustainable racing careers.
Regardless of what battles you might be dealing with today, how might you focus some of your attention on the good things you want to see happen in your future? What actions could you take today to make that more real?
- Could you introduce yourself to a new network?
- Could you get trained in a new skill?
- Could you start some new life practices like changing your daily routines or wake-up times?
We Three Heroes
For twenty years I lived the life of a puppet, with strings on me that chaos makers and disordered people could pull at any time, ripping me out of my skin and out of my life to respond to their latest unpredictable destructive actions and threats. My willingness to repeatedly respond to and wrestle with these chaos makers kept those puppet strings tied fast to my skin. I did not know it was not my job to leap and respond when my strings were pulled. It was my job to simply cut those strings.
The night of this pleasant, joyful Christmas party, my puppet strings were pulled once again. But this time, I sat still and let those strings finally be cut.
After living my life as a fixer-solver catch-all throughout twenty years of lying, gambling, disappearances, drunk driving attempts, cheating, and more, I decided on this night that I would not jump or respond, no matter how ruthlessly my strings were pulled.
As the photographer was arranging my sons and me for this photo, I was yet again being triggered to leave this happy peaceful moment to run out the door and fix the bad that a chaos maker was doing. To cut the strings, I instead sat calmly for the photo, knowing very well that every “ding” and “buzz” I was hearing on my phone was the familiar endless stream of bank alerts telling me that my now ex-spouse was out gambling again. It was the repeated series of $10,000 withdrawals that generally triggered the bank alerts. “Bing! Bing! Bing!” went my phone. “Boom, bang, bust” went my bank account.
“Say cheese,” said the photographer. I smiled the most knowing smile, well aware of the continued fierce evil underway, but more aware of how free I felt. I’d spent twenty years working to build and amass solid savings. And you know what that tells me? I can do it all over again. And I can do it better without the dead weight and destructive chaos I’ve managed for two decades. If the strings of abuse and control that a chaos maker chooses to pull are rooted in my own fear of losing money, then I gain power by letting go of that fear. It is my job and opportunity to let go of chaos by letting go of any fear that keeps me tied to it. I have since proven that I can build more and build better by letting go of chaotic dead weight.
In that moment I knew that I did not need to save money. I needed to save my life.
Later that year, on the witness stand, it was an oddly painful pleasure to have the chaos maker read aloud to the court the amount of joint funds he’d gambled in that one small snapshot of time: $194,000. Poof. Gone.
There was no real justice for that or the hundreds of other transgressions.
What mattered was that by finally cutting those puppet strings, I regained a life of purpose vs. a life using my best energies and best works feeding a black hole.
If you will permit me to speak as Pinocchio in a modern day form, I’ll say:
I cling to nothing.
I am confident and free.
I have no g-damned strings on me.
So what am I giving you as a takeaway?
Key Takeaway: Make use of the concept of curling by consciously drawing your attention out toward the goals that will move your own intentions forward. As you focus on that future, maintain a bias for action every day.
TIP: Want begets want, action begets results
Sometimes we think we’re pursuing our goals when we are consuming content about other people who have achieved the thing we seek to achieve. You may feel that you are doing research and learning, but when you stay in the research mode for too long, your brain shifts away from “I can do that” to the mindset of “I want that, but it’s out of reach for me, because there’s nothing real in this current day that I grab onto and make it real.”
The research mode is a tempting danger zone. The longer you are there, the more you get comfortable in how safe you feel living vicariously through others who have done the thing. The research mode lets you imagine the perfect future without getting into all the messy, risky realities.
It is valuable to envision the far off end results, but it is more critical to dig into the near-term actions required to get yourself in motion on that path. When you take actions in real life, you accelerate your learning as your work through the nitty-gritty hard work and complex decisions you need to make.
So don’t spend six months following along with gurus who write or talk about the process of publishing a book, or training for a triathlon, or launching a charity, or turning your hobby into a business, without also doing those things in your daily life.
Consider these two modes as parallel workstreams in your KindEdge Project of You and you will avoid the “want begets want” trap that will never lead to results.
TIP: Let the threat of the bad things become the fire that propels you forward.
You no longer have the luxury of thinking “Well, I’ll start that project on January 1.” When an unexpected emergency or an uninvited battle interrupts your life, the frustration you feel about this distraction is a good one. You may have thoughts like:
Seriously? I don’t have time to deal with this. I was just about to get started on my big project and now this happens.
This is the red hot reminder you actually needed. For the past five years you’ve waited around for a “perfect day” when everything was calm and predictable so you could start your new business, or write that book. You’ve already waited patiently for too long. And though you believed things were just getting calm enough for you to launch your project, you were still living in a fictional belief that you could only get started if everything else was handled and wrapped up in a little bow.
The truth is, that day will never come. Only you can make the choice to pile drive your dream through the neverending water hose of unpredictable events that tend to happen in real life.
So this new bit of chaos is just a reminder that you must launch your Project of You and recognize that you must keep it running while other life events are playing out as a side show to your main show.
In fact, I use distracting, uninvited events like the mechanical rabbit that is used as a lead in greyhound racing. The more the madness seeks to take over my time, the more I consider that the one to beat. I keep it in my peripheral view to help me race harder, protect my time more, and double down on how seriously I respect my right to invest my gifts into things that matter to me.
Never waste a crisis: I’ve set up my Google Home network to repeat certain wisdoms to me every morning. The first one is “never waste a crisis.” When huge, disruptive change is underway, we must capture the opportunity to make transformational change. When you are booted out of “business as usual” mode, go big and make everything unusual. Re-choose everything to be a balls-out amazing fit for what you need to succeed going forward.
P.S. While I was working on this blog, a barista said “You look like you’re plotting a bank robbery… if so, I’m pulling for ya.” LOL. I’ll take that as a compliment. I’m a bit of a nerd, but as I’ve said before, I’m also a rebel with a cause. So if I get a reputation as the strategic nerd of bank robbery project planning, I’ll wear that rep as a badge of honor.
