Doing and Knowing

• Do you know more than you?
• How much more do you know than you do?
• What do you know about health and fitness, great ideas that would tremendously improve the quality of your life, if only you could get yourself to implement them?
• What do you know about business, career, or money that is also fabulous ideas or principles that could transform your life if you could incorporate them into your daily action and decision making process?

Most of us know so very much more than we do. Isn’t that true for you?
And, isn’t that frustrating? Doesn’t that bring the palm of the hand to the forehead with perhaps the words, “Dud!?”

So what’s going on here?

What we have here is the knowing-doing gap. We have much more knowledge in our heads about ideas, principles, premises, concepts, and beliefs than we implement in our actual everyday lives. It’s in those when we catch the gap between what we know and what we do that we recognize that knowing is not enough. We have to act on, implement, execute, and follow-through on that knowledge. Only then is that knowledge empowering.

How is your knowing-doing gap? Now, the seductiveness is that often we try to solve the gap between knowing and doing by learning to know more.  “Just one more book, one more class.”  Yet typically. that just makes the problem worse. What we need is more ability to act on our knowledge—to put our great ideas and principles into action.

How do we close the knowing-doing gap?  What do we need to do or say in order to close the gap? We need the power to implement our knowledge. We need the power to coach our body how to feel those ideas so that the ideas and principles move from inside our head down to practical everyday ways of acting and operating in the world. We need to ask and answer such questions as the following:

• If you fully and completely believed that idea, how would it inform your body, face, breathing and induce feelings within you?
• What would you be feeling and experiencing emotionally if you imagined the most positive expression of that idea now?
• What one thing could you do today that, if you did, and did regularly, would begin to make that idea come alive and be manifested in the world?

It’s implementation questions like these that enable us to translate an idea from the conceptual level in our heads down to the practical level of the way we behave. And talking the time to be with such questions empowers our bodies to learn how to feel the idea. Feeling an idea in our bodies means that this is who we are and how we are in the world, it becomes second nature as measured by our actions.

Consider that… feeling an idea. Our mind-body system not only has the potential for doing this, but does this everyday anyway. The only question is what idea or concepts is your body feeling? What principles and understandings are you feeding your body and commissioning it to experience? More typically, we coach our bodies to feel ideas and premises of fear, danger, caution, inadequacy, overwhelm, stress, etc., do we not?

But what if, what if you had choice about what ideas to commission your body to feel and what if you could take charge of that process so that you could mindfully and consciously begin to close the knowing-doing gap? What fantastic ideas do you have rolling around in your head that you’d love to get into your body? What inspiring concepts would you like to coach your body to feel so that they would become your very way of being in the world?

If you want to then take the following simple Mind-to-Muscle process and run a positive principle that you know is sound, realistic, healthy, and ecological through it. Say these out loud until you find the right words for you, the words that just click or sound right, Say each one as if you were fully sold on them.

The Principle: “I understand …” e.g “I understand that health is built day by day by regular exercise.”

Belief: “I believe …” e.g “I believe that I can build a solid sense of health for myself by exercising a little bit every day.”

Decision: “I will…” (“I’m going to… “ , “I choose to…”) e.g “I will exercise a little bit every day to build up a strong and healthy sense of my physical well-being.”

Emotion: “If I fully believed this and was going to act on this, I would be feeling …” e.g “I am feeling more energized, and less tired, and more alive, and excited about the benefits regular exercise.”

Actions: “The one thing I will do today to make this principle real in my life is….” e.g “The one thing I will do today is to walk four minutes down the street and return.”

This is just a beginning, just a way to begin to translate knowledge into action, principle into practice, but it is a beginning. You have read it. Will do you anything about it? Will you refuse to leave the scene of an awareness without doing something about it? The choice is yours, is it not? May you consider, decide, and then say, “Make it so!