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Article: Degrees of Rightness
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Degrees of Rightness
Recently my wife had decided to grill a duck. She went out, got it setup, and started it grilling, and then came back inside to check on something else she was cooking. Within a few moments, I smelled something burning and told her. When she went outside, she found that grilling the duck was not turning out the way she envisioned. The fat on the duck had ended up charring the surface of the duck. Feeling really frustrated, she told me, she’d cooked the duck wrong.
While it was clear that grilling the duck hadn’t exactly worked out the way she thought, we did find that the meat, underneath the skin, could still be cooked. Although the fat had charred the skin, it hadn’t burned much of the meat. She was still upset however over “doing it wrong”, because she believed that everything had to be done absolutely perfectly in order for the duck to be a success.
I gently asked her if she’d really done it wrong, if the duck could still be cooked. She admitted that perhaps she hadn’t. I then asked her if she’d learned something new as a result of grilling the duck and she conceded she had. I asked her then, if she had learned something, had she really done anything wrong. She considered this and decided that perhaps she hadn’t. I suggested then that in each situation there are degrees of doing something right. For instance, you may not do something exactly right, such as grilling a duck, but you can learn something from the situation, and by learning from that experience, you are doing something right.
It’s very easy to focus on what we are doing wrong. But when we focus on what we’re doing wrong, we’re not present and open to what we’re doing right or how we can change the situation. And doing something wrong can sometimes spiral into feeling that who are is wrong, which has its own issues.
Learning to view a situation in terms of what you may have done right, or what you could do right next time helps you open yourself to the possibilities available to you in that situation. Whether you’re grilling a duck, doing a task at a job, or learning how to invest your money, each experience you have provides you opportunities to learn what you have done right and what you could do right next time. Instead of focusing on what went wrong, frame the context of the situation in terms of what you did right, and what you could do differently next time to build off the success you did have.
My wife ended up baking the duck in a hunter’s sauce and then using the rest for soup stick. The baked duck tasted great and she learned how to take the situation where she grilled the duck and turn it from an event of “failure” into a event of success where she saw the possibility of baking the duck and also learned that grilling a duck would probably involve taking different steps next time she tried it. By learning to focus on what she could do right, it no longer was wrong.
Every situation has a degree of rightness in it. It’s a matter of adjusting our perceptions so that we can find it and work with it.
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Five Principles of Wealth
When: Tuesday July 1st, 2008
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In this teleclass, I present five principles of wealth that are needed in order to build a successful foundation for wealth in your life. Becoming wealthy means learning about what wealth is and how you know when you have it. If you’ve ever wanted to be wealthy or simply wanted to know you were living your life to the fullest, this free teleclass is for you.
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Three Methods for unblocking your Creativity
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Are you feeling uninspired in your creatively lately? Do you feel like your source of inspiration has dried up? In this class, I present three methods for unblocking your creativity so that you can get in touch with your muse, and get your creative juices flowing.
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How to get your book published, and then market and promote it.
When: Wednesday July 15th, 2008
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You’ve got some great ideas and you have friends who tell you that you should write a book. But is that all there is to the writing industry? In this teleclass, published author and life coach Taylor Ellwood offers his own experiences working as both a writer and a managing non-fiction editor for a small press. I’ll tell you of the importance of promotion, marketing, and of course writing. If you want to get a book published, come to this workshop.
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