Decide the time

From the Bizcoach fundamentals, ungated for this pack.

Removes: "I did all the work. Why am I not seeing results?"

Because there is a large difference between checking boxes and doing the work, and from the outside they look identical. Both produce filled-in boxes. What differs is what the answer was given: a decided amount of time and a real wish to change, or the first thing that came to mind. This page is about what you do before you answer.

One of the most important Buddhist skills, maybe the most important, is deciding how you are going to use your time. At the grandest scale that is one decision: how am I going to use my life. That is a big commitment and most people never make it. At the smallest scale it is this: I am going to meditate for five breaths. Anyone can do five breaths. For the next five breaths, even if a caterpillar walks up my sleeve, even if my wife asks for my attention, even if I badly want to open my eyes, I am meditating. You can make that commitment with yourself, and you can keep it. The skill is the same at both ends; only the length changes.

Here is why it matters. We set out to do something, and then we feel like doing something else, and we stop. Or we set out to do it and discover we don't really want to, and we stop. We have no credit system with ourselves; our own word doesn't hold. Most of that, I think, comes down to undecided time. Look at quitting smoking. People account for the cigarette and forget the twenty minutes around it: walking out of the apartment, opening the pack, the smoke, the little walk after, coming back. Quit, and all of that time goes void. If you haven't decided what fills it, what do you want to do in it? Obviously, smoke. When you introduce a change into your life, deciding the time is not a detail. It is the change.

So time commitment is a category, and it runs across every scale. Fifteen minutes of meditation. Two weeks in a place you decided to travel to. Three years at a company, whether you like it or not. A hundred-day practice; a thousand-day practice. Different lengths, same act: I am going to do this, for this long. You are practicing one skill every time you do it, and it compounds.

What this has to do with the worksheets

Everything in the Bizcoach study track has boxes to fill in. Here is how most people fill them in, and I am not saying you do this, I am saying it is the default: read the question, take the first thing that comes to mind, type it, done. Which of the three problems am I working on? Relationship. Name one person in your world who needs help and hasn't asked. My wife. What will you give them this week, unasked? I'll cook something she likes. One true thing about you your audience doesn't know? I have a happy trail. Technically, every question is answered. Nothing happened.

The work in this program is not the knowledge in your head. I keep saying feeling, I keep saying lived experience, because that is what is actually responsible for your behavior. A surface answer leaves the surface where it was. So what I am asking, in terms of time: sit with the question for the time you decide. Fifteen minutes, not one. If I asked Allie to show me how she tends her garden in thirty minutes, she would have to rush, skip the details, teach me the shape of it. If I said I am coming to Utah for a few days because I want to learn how you do this, she could take her time, explain something, explain it again, walk it twice. The question is the same. The room you give the answer is different, and the answer marinates in that room.

Otherwise it is the Starbucks conversation. How's your day going. Good. Venti macchiato. Have a good day. Sure. That is not the same as holding someone's hand and saying: life is hard right now, the times are chaotic, nobody is giving anyone much grace because we are all tired, and I really want you to have a good day. Same words, almost. One of them was given time.

The instruction

Engage with these questions sincerely, and sincere is a loose word, so here is what I mean by it: dedicate a decided amount of time to the answer. For the next ten minutes, or thirty, or an hour, this question only. The phone rings, it waits. Someone wants your attention, they wait ten minutes. The answer you get at the end of that is a different object from the one you get in sixty seconds, and it is the one this program runs on.

Every write-in below has a small "Sit with it" control: five, fifteen, or thirty minutes. Pick one before you answer. The box locks until the time is up, and then it opens. That is the whole feature, and it is here because the teaching is worthless if the page lets you skip it.