Welcome to the SIMHA Emotional Wellness Minute. We've been talking about the challenge of being scattered brained, or Pizur HaNefesh/being all over the place. Yesterday we gave two techniques from the Elder of Kelm for how to overcome that. Today we'll discuss a technique mentioned by his student, Rav Yerucham Levovitz, in his sefer Da’at Torah on Bereshit (page 280). He says the way to get to Menucha (which is the opposite of Pizur HaNefesh), to be calm and at peace with yourself, is to always have in front of you, one goal.
The Mesilat Yesharim starts off his book with this- we should be clear on what our mission is in life, and we have to put our focus on that. That way, you always have one focal point, and you don't get broken from switching from situation to situation or task to task. There's only one task: your main focal point, your mission statement. That is why everyone has to have their own mission statement, which every thing else falls under.
What exactly is accomplished with a mission statement? We can see from a story that I heard from Rabbi Yaakov Sadigh in a training course I took a few years ago at Torah U’Mesorah. He was at Disneyland with his family, and they were waiting on a long line to buy some ice cream for his six year-old daughter. After paying about $8 (or whatever the price was) for her ice cream, they walked 20 or 30 feet to sit down on a bench. But just as his daughter was about to eat her first spoonful, a bird came swooping down and took the ice cream away from her. She started to cry and her father started thinking - After waiting on that long line, was he going to have to go back? Just then, the man who was working at the ice cream stand came over to them with a new cup of ice cream, and said, “I saw what happened. Give this to your daughter.” The Rabbi was amazed. What a kind, caring, compassionate man! The Rabbi was intrigued. Where'd this come from? How was this man trained? Rabbi Sadigh was a principal in a school, and he wanted to know how he could apply that sort of culture in his own organization. He asked, “Could you explain how they trained you to do that?”
The man answered, “We're at Disneyland. Our mission statement is that it’s the happiest place on earth. That means that's our goal. Our goal is not to make money (although it is). Our goal is to make it the happiest place on earth. And if a little girl is crying after a father bought her an ice cream, that's not happy.”
So that was their mission statement: Be the happiest place on earth, and that gave him his focus.
Now, consider a wedding. If you ask the father and mother of the bride or groom what their mission statement is, they’d probably say, To get this couple married in the happiest and most stress-free atmosphere, while keeping the guests happy (That's also part of the story. You want to have happy guests. You don't want your guests to be miserable).
But what happens when everyone has to wait an hour or two for the photographer to take pictures- which are really meant to remember the wedding (But when you’re so busy with the photographer, the wedding never really happens). What's the focus? What's the main thing? What are you getting caught up in? When little things don't go right at a wedding, people get frazzled because they miss the big picture. So what if the flowers didn't match the bride's bouquet, or whatever little silly thing people get caught up in that ruins the wedding.
What is the wedding? As Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People wisely says, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” If there’s one main thing, you can ask yourself- am I losing focus?
You have to have a mission statement to help you know what to focus on. Of course I’ll be frazzled if I don't know what my focus is.
When you have the children over for the holidays, what's the focus? To have good family time. So if you’re missing one dessert or there’s one less dish, or something didn't go perfectly right, is that the focus? When we don’t have a focus, we get ourselves frazzled and caught up in the minutiae. As they say, we miss the forest for the trees. We have to be able to look at things in a more global way and say, What is my main focus here, and then focus on it. If I don't have a main focus, I can't focus. In whatever we're doing, it will help us to ground ourselves by creating a focal point.
Have a wonderful day.