Seen Jumping from a Moving Car…

We live where others holiday (it was recently suggested to me that I’m simply say this to annoy people – but it’s relevant to what follows!) – on skis in winter, with bikes and boots in summer. And the only people who are stressed or fighting around here… are the holidaymakers!

This article’s headline refers to two “adults” having such a blazing argument that, when the car slowed down to go around a roundabout, the passenger jumped out… still screaming at her husband! This isn’t a one-off – a couple of weeks back a husband simply got out and walked away from his car which was sitting at the top of a line of traffic… his wife sat calmly in the passenger seat whilst he marched down the road with the keys in his hand!

Are these people crazy? Well, I’ll come back to that in a moment. But one thing is for sure, they’re out of their normal comfort zone and, as an hotelier friend of ours says, “When people come on holiday, they leave their brains at home” (but that’s another story… really!) – we easily lose our bearings when we’re out of routine.

But let’s answer the key question. Yes, they are crazy but they are normal. From Stanford to Harvard and back, research strongly suggests that over 95% of us don’t have control of our own state of mind – and that’s as sure a definition of madness as I’ve ever heard. The opposite take on that research suggests that 4% of people achieve “uncommon success” because they are in control!

You could put it another way – most people are mindless and will stay mindless until they do something about becoming mindful. This is a binary, black and white – no grey areas – situation: you’re either mindful or you’re mindless. And that is why the case for developing mindfulness is so compelling.

Mindfulness is not about simply being happy – that never put bread on anyone’s table and it certainly won’t cut it in business or, in reality, in life in general. Mindfulness is about being present, here and now, to do what you need to do to get you to where you want to go. As humans, we’ve always been expert at this – the only problem is that “where we want to go” is home, safely, at the end of a day hunting and foraging!

There are only two things you need to get what you want out of business, life, the next meeting, the diet you’re trying to follow, whatever… the presence of mind to be present and a solid (in other words, subconscious) idea of what you’re trying to achieve.

Let’s end this article, though, where we started, on a light note! A good friend and client, a HR Director, remarked to me many years ago that understanding that most people are crazy makes dealing with them so much easier!!