The Art of Perfect Timing. Follow Your Internal Clock.

By Gwen

Most “timing is perfect!” enthusiasts don’t need these kinds of tests. They’re constantly aware of their internal timekeepers, respecting information and intimations, preparing to avoid danger or pursue opportunity. By contrast, people who bewail their bad timing often ignore, even actively reject, facts and premonitions that could help them better plan their actions. True, everyone is subject to good and bad events. But the laws of probability mean that extreme strokes of fortune, positive or negative, occur rarely and end quickly. If you ask people how they make decisions, “lucky” people will talk about tuning in to information and instincts, while “unlucky” people often mention pushing away the uncomfortable feeling they were headed for trouble.

So how do you tune in to your timekeeping impulses? Ironically, the only way to access your inner guide about the future is to fully occupy the present. By noticing everything you’re feeling—physically, emotionally, and intuitively—in any given moment, you maximize your awareness of the “exquisitely refined” nonverbal timekeeper nudging your noggin.

These are the strategies I’ve found most effective at keeping me in the right place at the right time:

1. Take a relaxed breath and exhale fully. Before inhaling again, rest in the pause between breaths. Focus on your heartbeat and the pulse in your hands, feet, and scalp. As you return to breathing normally, remain aware of your pulse throughout your body. This anchors you in the present and keeps you calm during the next steps.

2. Acknowledge that you can’t change anything that’s already happened. Sometimes that’s a shame, but it’s just plain true.

3. Accept that many things about the future are unknowable and beyond your control. Scary? Oh, yes—but again: true.

4. Recognize whatever’s happening right now (you’d be amazed how often we try to deny what’s going on). If the present is miserable, this step can hurt—but not nearly as much as living with the consequences of denial.

5. Pull an Eckhart Tolle: Shrink the focus of your attention to this present moment. Are you going through a divorce, bankruptcy, or similarly difficult experience? Maybe—but right now, you’re just reading this. Be here now. When you plan, plan here now. Don’t preemptively grapple with circumstances that don’t yet exist. Living this moment in peace, tuned in to your inner timekeeper, will lay the groundwork for the best possible future.

6. Go back to sensing your pulse throughout your body (this returns you to a peaceful place if you’ve been unsettled), and ask yourself what you feel you should do about each situation in your life. As you begin articulating what you know or suspect about the right course of action, your body will relax. Even if things look scary, accepting the truth brings peace.

7. Follow through on any ideas you’ve had about preparing for your optimal future.

8. Stay alert to new hunches, and change plans accordingly.

–Martha Beck

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The tools that Martha Beck lists here are some of the most simple, yet most powerful I’ve found.  Anytime that I’ve let life get the best of me, begin to feel overwhelmed or that I haven’t accomplished the huge number of things on my mental “to do” list and feel that my “control” is furiously slipping away… I try to remember to stop and take a breathe.   I often repeat a phrase that I learned in counseling, “it is what it is.”  That helps me to remember that I can’t change anything that’s already happened, no matter how very much I wish I could.  And I try to remember to bring myself back to this moment.  What am I doing right now? What am I thinking about right now?  Is it about everything that I anticipate that will happen over the next month – which isn’t here yet, or more than likely everything that has happened in the past – which is already gone.  Then I repeat the quote_______________________