Love Notes
Recently my wife Cathy shared a poignant story from her youth:
In 6th grade I confided to a girlfriend that I had a crush on a boy named Steve. The next day, she presented me with a note that said "I love you" which she told me Steve wrote for her to deliver to me. There was no reason for me not to believe her, and I was happy for weeks. Once I found out that she was the one who wrote the note, I was miserable for weeks. Steve, of course, never had a clue that any of this happened at all!
The relationship between our perceptions, our resulting feelings, and our ability to perform is profound. During the Magic of Skiing, I remark to Susan how flowing and free her skiing is - how energetic and confident in her turns, how joyful she appears lately. She responds that one of the other pros had just said the same thing - she had overheard him bragging about her to someone at breakfast. Later, I ask the pro about it. "Oh," he replies, "I wasn't talking about THAT Susan. It was someone from another session."
So what is the truth about Susan and her skiing?
Believing in the "love letter", Susan was feeling good, and she was expressing it in her ski turns. Susan and her skiing are not stilted nouns, absolute, definable, stuck. They are action phrases like verbs, vulnerable to an ever-changing world of perception.
Susan was feeling and skiing great because she had turned her mindset into higher possibility. She was skiing from that possibility rather than from some fixed past belief about herself. True, her mindset was brought on by quirky happenstance, like Cathy's fraudulent love letter, but self-aware people can use all of life's uncertainties as opportunities to laugh and learn.
How do we want to tune up our mindsets? Can we stoke our imaginations to inspire us to greater heights? Can we ski (or live) as if we've just received a tender declaration of love?
Tom Crum
"Imagination is ... the preview of life's coming attractions."
-Albert Einstein
