Experience "The Shift" & Build a Daily Gratitude Practice

Anything in life, from a successful marriage to a well-rehearsed dance routine, requires practice. Truly, those that do make it to the upper echelons of their respective fields (and consistently) have one thing in common — they’ve experienced “The Shift” in their thinking. 

What’s “The Shift,” you ask? 

The Shift is a change of perspective, a recalibration of our mental lenses from focus on outcomes to focusing on the process. Put simply, it is seeing success less as a result and more as a practice. 

Everything in nature moves and changes. Nothing stands still, even the crust of the Earth has give and flexibility on its own level. What this basic principle of change implies is something even more profound — that nothing exists as a singular, isolated object in a slice of time (like a picture), but rather an unfolding of pictures throughout a process. 

Consider how we name and label everything around us. When you see a tree, for example, you perceive it to be a stationary object. Even the word “tree” in our minds refers to a picture of a tree rather than a movie of a seed growing into the plant over time and eventually dying and reuniting with the Earth. This labeling mechanism is a mental convenience that makes less work for the mind, but it is a perceptual error that reinforces the fundamental problem we need to overcome in order to truly be successful — that reality does not exist as stationary pictures or outcomes, but as a process that is continually unfolding. 

So, what exactly is the problem here? What’s the impact of this perceptual error on our lives and what we want?