Gina Stoner has spent the past fifteen years as a featured speaker at corporate seminars as well as conducting individual groups on the subject of effective living. Her approach is far removed from the predictable positive thinking and self-promotional gee-ups found in most business manuals and sales force boosting presentations. That is why in her unusual book (Talks With Al—available from Buzzword) her radical suggestions come disguised as a teenage fable. We asked Gina to write us an article based on one of her seminar subjects. She refused but came up with what follows. Note: don’t miss the special offer at the end of this post.People want many things: status, security, sexual fulfillment, health, power and adulation. So money, possessions, celebrity are worshipped beyond the point of sanity.
Wants are related to fear and both fear and hope drain life energy. Yet it’s rarely understood how off-centre hope can be. The effective person cannot afford to be weakened by hope.
Hope is projection, not fact. And effective living must be built on fact.
The effective person has one possibility – to stay precisely with how things are. No elaboration, evasion deviation. No agenda or opinion. Because any need, expectation or fear tips us from the present back into time.
The fabled “zone”.
You will have heard about athletes who attempt to “stay in the zone”. The phrase is an attempt to explain a moment when they are able to do what is needed supremely well. In this “zone” it is impossible to have inner distraction at all. The prerequisite is to be purposeless or, as a Taoist might express it, “empty”. The empty person has the possibility of seeing things exactly as they are instead of through the mired lens of wants, opinions, resentments and beliefs. All these have to be removed from the equation for the response to be total and effective.
