Natalie Feng

I know a number of people who travel a lot, read a lot, and well educated, however mediocre. And there are quite a few who think superbly, I feel congenial and enlightened every time chatting with them. In my more native and vulnerable years, I wondered why. The answer turns out fairly simple: What it matters is what you actually absorb and process from experience, not necessarily the experience itself. I was taking face value of phenomena as the underlying nature, which usually greatly differs from façade. This is not too hard to realize, but it can take some effort to apply in reality, especially in social and competitive situations.

Years ago, Djokovic and Federer were in a deciding game, with multiple game points switching back and force. Djokovic won that round at the end, it was not because his tennis skill is better than Federer (they are both great world class players), besides luck might be a factor, it was more a matter of concentrating under pressure, ability to be mindful.

But how? We all experience it at a time or another, the dreadful feeling when your brain goes blank while presenting to your boss at work, or being too stressed to take on a challenging task. Of course, it is all about confidence, which is the prerequisite to become mindful, yet confidence is not the answer to where we shall start from. Knowing you need to trust your ability is not enough to overcome emotional arousal brought by certain circumstances. At that moment, we subconsciously put a false equal sign between boss’s feedback and out work value, another false equal sign between task accomplishment level and our ability, it would be shocking if we weren’t feeling stressed out under such assumption. The feedback and tasks are merely façade, it doesn’t change the underneath value as it is.