Propelled By Excellence

By Dr. William K. Larkin on July 30, 2012

We are most propelled by our association with the best and with excellence. It speaks most to the creative human spirit, and we easily find ways to be our own better and better and then best selves.

Our encounter with what is positive is like our encounter with what is excellent. It moves us forward, it moves along the path of becoming more essentially the best of our nature. It causes us to move in the direction of aligning with what most motivates and inspires us.

Excellence is like transcendence. We forget ourselves in the encounter with excellence and we forget our limitations. Excellence is something like being one with the music. It gets us to think in tune with our own inner better and best.

Where do you seek out excellence? Where do you seek out the best? Where do you expect, if not demand, to experience what is the top of the top?

The current Olympics are an experience that is something like that. We see and experience moments of excellence that move us beyond ourselves, perhaps even to tears. Competition moves athletes to perform at a level of excellence. What the athletes will experience is also a oneness with their competitors. Some will move beyond medals and national identification and realize that only split seconds have separated gold from silver and bronze, or no medal at all. Some will set new world records that will move the mark really only seconds further. But it is always moving forward and further.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to see the winning athletes mount the varying levels of the medal award platforms, that were, in fact, on the same level and find flags of the world over their heads hanging at the same level and listen to the same world anthem?

The bottom line is that we are watching excellence shrouded in the trappings of nationalism for the sake of creating a greater sense of the oneness that excellence can create.

It is often competition and achievement that shrouds this deeper need for what is excellent. What these athletes encounter, at some point, is that experience goes beyond the desire “to win.” It becomes the desire for excellence.

We are not made for mediocrity. There is an inner restlessness that moves us toward more and greater experiencing. We are not made for a tepid experience of life.

We are somehow created to experience richness and abundance and fulfillment of desire. And if we do not, if we fight it and insist on sameness, orneriness and disease will take us out.

Our rub with excellence causes us to want more, to be more, to know more, to understand more, to encounter and experience what is better, better and best.

Just one example. The world’s encounter with excellence in the products of Apple has created 600,000 apps and the uses are still pouring in. When you create excellence and put it in the hands of people, creative excellence results.

We are always moving in a helioptropic ascendance to the light of better, better, best - to excellence and to the diverse and multitude of ways that it can be experienced. As much as we lobby in our lives for sameness, familiarity and safety, we are driven beyond it.

We are all moved to “feel good” and we are also moved to feel better and better, and to feel our “best.” Anything less than our “best,” however that is experienced by us subjectively, is not satisfying. We experience it as boredom, ho-hum, or tepid. There are times when we need to be left alone by the desire for better, better, best, and excellence.

It leaves us alone for periods of time so that we can catch up, catch our breath, or just rest. But these periods do not last until we again become restless for more of what is better and best. We are just made that way. We are always moving toward the positive experience from which we create new things or new thought.

It is not so much that the brain is made to think so much as it exists to evolve toward what is better. How are you cooperating?

CONTINUING EDUCATION FOR COACHES

1) Describe how your ANI training has propelled you to the practice of “better, better, and best.” What research and tools have awakened in you the personal pursuit of excellence? How do you presently define excellence for yourself? Tell us your story and give us personal examples.

FOR OUR LARGER BLOG COMMUNITY

1) Describe a situation when you felt that you were at your “personal best.” Reflecting on this experience, what did you come to believe about yourself? Your natural strengths and talents? Recounting this experience, what emotions best capture how you were feeling then, and how you feel now as you recall it?