The Magic is in the Process

If you find yourself reading this article, chances are you have been stumbling from one task to the other, with a fixed goal in mind and working hard to reach your objective. For a moment, sit still and breathe slower. Become conscious of what is happening inside you. Suddenly, you become aware of your own presence reading this article. Not your autopilot, but the real you. You may start noticing other experiences, such as hearing the buzz of your computer, or the laughter of a colleague, in the distance, perhaps some children passing in the street, depending on where you are, you will even hear the birds and the sound of the trees moving with the wind. Those are sounds you heard many times before, but now you become aware, you are listening to them.

The awareness of where you are and who are at this very moment, can be very powerful in your life.

You may be thinking that I should be writing this article in the self help or metaphysical section. So why are you reading this when all you were looking was for some business and career advice?

So this is how this article can help you.

Do you have a plan?
Do you have a real concise plan for your life?
Have you actually ever drawn it on a large paper or does it sit in some corner of your mind?
Is your plan a flat line with a series of A to B to C to Z, or a more complex staircase with timings and experiences and a signal at the top of the staircase that indicates your “goal"?
Is your plan something that you bring along with you to career discussions with your supervisor to indicate that you really have a plan, and you are not just simply going with the flaw?

I met some very incredible people with a very concise plan. It feels as if they have perfect control of their careers, they know where they are going, they know what they want, they know what they need to achieve, they make adjustments to their master plan with incredible discipline, and they get there, it seems a lot faster than their fellow without the plan. But when I looked closer to their lives, their lives were pretty miserable in many other ways.

I have also met some other very incredible people with another vision. They still have a plan, they are intelligent and have goals and aspirations. But they don’t have the stairway to their heaven. There is no staircase, because every day, every minute shapes their life. They live pretty much for the moment, they enjoy or dislike what they do each minute of every hour of every day. They are so focused on the very moment before them, which, for some reason, things do end up falling in place as they should. Not necessarily as per plan, but certainly in the way that they were meant to be.

Earlier in the year I learned a very powerful lesson during a meditation session with Dr. Steven Farmer, a powerful shaman who teaches you how to connect with your power animal and obtain guidance and wisdom. My power animal is the unicorn.

The unicorn teaches you that the magic is in the process.

Every time that you look at the end-result, some of that magic goes away. The creative process is most rewarding when you concentrate on the task at hand, when you don’t think about the end-result, when you don’t judge yourself about how what you are doing will look at the end. It is about giving your very best, about working with love and commitment, on that moment. Nothing can fail when done in such a way. You are meant to be successful and the result is meant to be wonderful. I am not saying work without a vision, I am only saying “let the vision become your inspiration, not your goal”

I carried my staircase to success printed on an A3 paper for many years. I had clear ideas and timings and very ambitious plans. I never reached the top of the staircase, but I felt so exhausted in trying, that it felt as if I would have climbed my own plans using only my finger nails to hold me in place.

Since I apply the principle that the magic is in the process, I found myself totally relaxed and happy. My life has since been an explosion of opportunities filled with amazing adventures that I never would have even considered in my large A3 staircase to success. Like the day I walked in the streets of Sitka in Alaska, only to find Saint Michael's church and the same tiny candles that I had found years before in a small church in Moscow near the red square. I never thought I would ever find those candles again. I gave up on my search for them years ago because I had only seen them in that church in Russia. But I found them in Sitka, Alaska. And it was never part of the plan.