From the Book: Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff
Part 23. Experiment with Your Back Burner
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23. Experiment with Your Back Burner
Your back burner is an excellent tool for remembering a fact or bringing forth an insight. It's an almost effortless yet effective way of using your mind when you might otherwise start feeling stressed out. Using your back burner means allowing your mind to solve a problem while you are busy doing something else, here in the present moment.
The back burner of your mind works in the same way as the back burner of a stove. While on low heat, the cooking process mixes, blends, and simmers the ingredients into a tasty meal. The way you prepared this meal was to throw the various ingredients into the pot, mix them up, and leave them alone. Often the less you interfere, the better the result.
In much the same way, we can solve many of life's problems (serious and otherwise) if we feed the back burner of our mind with a list of problems, facts, and variables, and possible solutions. Just as when we make soup or a sauce, the thoughts and ideas we feed the back burner of our mind must be left alone to simmer properly.
Whether you are struggling to solve a problem or can't remember a person's name, your back burner is always available to help you. It puts our quieter, softer, and sometimes most intelligent source of thinking to work for us on issues that we have no immediate answer for. The back burner is not a prescription for denial or procrastination. In other words, while you do want to put your problems on your back burner, you don't want to turn the burner off. Instead, you want to gently hold the problem in your mind without actively analyzing it. This simple technique will help you solve many problems and will greatly reduce the stress and effort in your life.
Life Is Like A Kitchen, And You’re The Chef
Imagine a kitchen that is equipped with the best cooking equipment, cookbooks, and fine china that money can buy. Imagine the fridge and cabinets full from top to bottom with all of your favorite seasonings, meats, vegetables, and more. Now picture yourself having three hours to make five different meals for five of your closest friends.
That’s it, there are no other instructions, no rewards, no incentives, nothing more, and nothing less. Do you think you could do it or do you think that you would need more time? Does the mere thought of this stress you out?
If you find this scenario upsetting then life may stress you out as well because this is an example of how life is. Sometimes we have everything around us that we need, but just don’t realize it because we have too much stuff on the front burner to see it.
In life, not only are we cooking everything on the “front burner”, we have the nerve to be stir frying, which requires constant attention! We have to learn to slow it down and use the front burners as well as the back burners, the oven, and the Crock Pot too!
I hear a lot of people say that they “can’t cook”, I’ve found that most of the time what they’re really saying is that they don’t know how to time the food to be done at the same time.
There is an art to having everything done at the same time, a simple art, yet an art. I call it simple because it’s just a matter of knowing how long something should take to finish. When we understand that, we understand when we should get started on the dish.
Life is the same way, we don’t have to give every problem our immediate attention, some things can wait a couple of days before we tackle it. Mastering the art of timing in life is difficult, but it’s something that we can get better at.
One thing that will definitely help us get better is asking ourselves the focusing question provided in Gary Keller’s book The One Thing. “What is the one thing that I should be doing to make everything else easier or unnecessary?
Til next time, make today a great day and learn to use your “back burner”, ya dig?
~Matthew
Let’s make today a great day and and Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff.
