(Now excuse me while I dig my own out and give to someone who might actually use it….)

You’re right, of course, it does immediately feel better once it is over but this time I had also made a conscious decision to change my focus and it reduced the fear. When we were talking about it beforehand, I was apprehensive but not gut-wrenchingly terrified like I had been.

And you are also right about the real battle, alas, you are being judged on how you battle your opponent not on conquering fear – otherwise I’d have about 15 gold medals for sparring on Saturday.

I’m glad you feel I did well, thanks! And I’m glad you liked my post.

PS – for anyone else reading this conversation, my good friend Kevin is in TKD with me (he’s a red belt) and he invests a lot of time in helping me figure out my patterns.

A tae kwon do compitition is more about your battle with your fear and nervousness than the battle with your opponent.

You did great today. Keep it up.

Loved the article.

I’m not close to Chopra’s enlightened approach either, I’m still ‘grasping’ at my desired outcomes. And the snarky side of me thinks it is easier to let go of expectations about outcome when you have a financial cushion that makes many decisions less weighty – not to say his position is not admirable, but that it may not be attainable for many.

I look forward to whatever other thoughts on this topic your brain percolates. Thank you again for the process vs result insight, it’s been tremendously helpful to me since we had that conversation.

I’m trying to think about it like writing anything else, I should write what I want to read. I like reading the short, snappy posts from people but I immerse myself in the long, thinky ones and those are the ones I most want to write.

Thanks for the encouragement.

I wonder how much of the helpful vs. unhelpful “unreasonable-ness” comes down to focusing on the process rather than the outcome.

In other words, maybe it’s good to be unreasonable – but only as long as we can keep from making it about the results. Which is really damned hard.

Recently I saw Deepak Chopra on Conan and he (Chopra) said that nothing ever goes wrong for him because he never expects things to go one way or another.

Needless to say I am not there, yet. Not even close.

I dunno…but I feel like there’s some kind of something percolating that I can’t quite articulate. Thank you for sharing this!

xox

I thought that’s what NaNoWriMo was about, writing your basic story and then fleshing it out later. I only found out afterwards that most people don’t do it that way.

Once I do some more editing, you can read it. How are you with urban fantasy?