I was standing on the shores of Lake Champlain.

It was a beautiful winter day, and I was looking out at the ice flows, amazed at what I saw. It really was stunning.

Now, I had warm clothes on, so I wasn’t cold or anything.

Suddenly though, as I was admiring the view, a voice in my head said:

“Well… better go now!”

And I thought:

“Okay.”

Then I turned around and started to walk away.

But, because of my training and practice in mindfulness, I was able to stop myself and ask, “Wait a minute! Who said that?”

I realized that it wasn’t my voice.

It was the voice of my dead grandma — one of them anyway. She was always nagging me about staying too long out in the cold.

Stuff like this happens to us all the time.

It’s a lack of mindfulness, and it often manifests as procrastination.

We’re slaves to our impulses because we have a fragile awareness of our own thinking. We don’t think about thinking.

Our minds work on autopilot, and most of the decisions we think we make are actually made for us — by our impulses.

Result?

We get sidetracked.

We stall.

We burnout.

We give up.

Yet, when you understand that you are not the thoughts in your head, and if you learn to distinguish between your thoughts and your will, you’ll be able to get in action, stay in action, and achieve great things.

There will always be voices in your head — from your dead grandma, an abusive schoolteacher, some naysayer you met briefly, or maybe even something you heard on the TV years ago.

These voices come to you as thoughts, and they try to sidetrack you, or make you stall and give up on your dream.

Unless…

You become the master of your thoughts, rather than their slave. Then, thoughts become something you have, rather than something you are.

You’ll have the power to recognize when you’re about to be sidetracked, so you can stay in action, achieve your goals, and make your life count.

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