How to Live Passionately In the Present -

Feeling stuck in the past or anxious about the future? Don’t let life pass you by. Live in the present and make each moment shine. In this episode, Adam Hill shares three simple things anyone can do to make every moment shine and live obsessively in the present. Through stories from his own life and lessons from his cello teacher, Adam illustrates how being fully present and making each moment count can help anyone rise above anxiety and fear.

Here are some power takeaways from today’s conversation:

The importance of living in the present
Making every moment shine
Three things to help you make each moment shine
How to practice gratitude
Leveraging the power of your breath
The 5% step

Episode Highlights:

[01:28] The Importance of Living in the Present

Anxiety, fear, depression, and negative thoughts often arise when we dwell on the past or future instead of focusing on the now. Living fully in the present allows us to rise above these difficult emotions and see the beauty that exists right now. It also helps us make the most of each day rather than wasting time worrying about what has happened or what is to come. Practicing gratitude, breathing exercises, and breaking big tasks into small steps can train our minds to stay present. Overall, living obsessively in the present helps us appreciate life as it unfolds and progress toward our goals one step at a time without anxiety or regret.

[06:48] Making Every Moment Shine

In the pursuit of mastery, it becomes clear that discipline and consistency are not the only elements needed to excel. Being fully present in each moment is the missing piece that allows for true greatness to emerge. Just like a note that must shine, every single moment in our lives deserves to radiate with its own brilliance. By intentionally living in the present, we can transform even the most challenging or painful moments into something beautiful.

Taking inspiration from Adam’s experience with mastering the cello, he discovered that when he played each note as if it existed in its own infinite universe, the entire composition took on a new level of beauty. It was no longer just a technically well-played piece but a truly mesmerizing work of art. Similarly, we can apply this concept to our lives. But how do we make every single moment of our lives shine? It won’t be easy, as life presents us with difficult and sometimes tragic situations. There will be moments of fear, discomfort, and pain where we may long for them to end. However, through practice, consistency, and effort, we can learn to live in those moments and find their hidden beauty.

[10:53] Three Things to Make Each Moment Shine

The three main things Adam recommends to make each moment shine and live obsessively in the present are:

Practice gratitude. Be thankful for at least three things each morning, and truly sit in the feeling of gratitude for 15-20 seconds at a time. Bring yourself back in the moment by actually feeling the gratitude, not just saying it.
Use breathing exercises. Consciously count your breaths in and out through exercises like 4-second inhales and 7-8-second exhales to keep your mind focused on the present moment. Breathing works the body and relaxes the mind, helping to reduce anxiety or negative thoughts.
Chunk big goals down into the smallest next action step. Focus on just the next tiny task you need to complete in the immediate future. The very next thing that you’re doing – whether it be taking one step on your run, or putting your foot into a shoe – is how you get into the present.

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Transcript

How to Live Passionately in the Present: Making Every Moment Shine – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7VLPkv2qjk
Transcript:
(00:00) if we want to live in the moment we need to be grateful for certain things and nothing can bring us back into the moment and out of a funk more than gratitude and this is more this is about more than just giving gratitude lip service which is you know maybe a lot of what we hear today well I’m grateful for sleeping in my bed I’m grateful for my family I’m grateful for you know that’s just giving it lip service and trying to think through words that want to come out of our mouths but true gratitude comes from this idea
(00:32) that not only do we say it not only do we verbalize what we’re grateful for but we sit with that moment for 15 to 20 seconds hello everyone and welcome to the flow over fear podcast where it is our mission to help you to rise above fear and realize your ultimate potential in leadership and life I’m your host Adam Hill and it is my goal to share with you the human side of high performance my guests share their experience with fear anxiety struggle Challenge and most importantly despite all of it how they
(01:08) Rose above it to achieve incredible results so if you’re ready to rise up let’s get started hello everyone and welcome to flow over fear and this episode of three things and today I want to talk about how to make every moment shine how to live obsessively in the present in the present moment you know we hear a lot about the idea and I think we intuitively know that living in the now this is where life is this is where we are and this is where Beauty exists you know in the present moment there really isn’t
(01:44) anxiety there isn’t fear there isn’t there isn’t uh uh anticipation there’s just living in the now and one of the things that gets us caught in our own minds gets us feeling afraid feeling anxious feeling depressed is when we’re thinking about anything outside of the present moment thinking about the future too much or thinking about the past and things we can’t change you know it’s often said in the rooms of sobriety that if you have one foot in the past and one foot in the future well you’re pissing on the
(02:18) present and at times that’s true I think and you know there’s a time and place of course there is a definitely a time and place to think about the past and think about the future I mean I have a vision reflection Retreat and exercise that does just that it focuses on the Winds of the past and how you can do that if you can do that intentionally you could set points of reference for what you can achieve in the future and by looking at visualizing in the future the thing that you want to be and what you want to achieve that can
(02:54) help you to bring you closer to that but for the vast majority of the time that we’re spending in the future in the past is often not doing that in a healthy way a lot of times it’s saying oh man I wish I was here or I need to get here I need to do this I need to I have to I have to I have to and we stack on top of each other all of these have to’s have to’s need to’s that we overwhelm ourselves and then we get anxious about it we get anxious about what we need to do to get to that point
(03:23) in time in the future or we get depressed about what we did or what we said or what we what we feel shame about in the past that we can’t now change but instead we can learn from instead of you know instead of looking at those as learning experiences and how to improve we maybe look at them as shameful experiences and or or things that we should have done or missed opportunities or regrets or resentments and it makes us depressed and living on those two sides of the coin we neglect to see the beauty of the
(03:54) present moment you know I woke up this morning you know and I wake up every morning with some sense of anxiety of like I have to I should I should you know those kinds of things those kinds of things going through my mind and you know I work on that every day in the morning and one of the first things that I do is I just look outside at the beautiful morning that exists if the sun is shining even if it’s raining I just think of the very present moment I try and put myself in the immediate present when I grew up
(04:24) I played the cello um growing up uh I started playing when I was probably about eight or nine years old and I was pretty terrible about terrible at it for a very long time I you know mostly sat in the last chair uh Shadow bowing my way to quiet Glory and uh and you know I didn’t didn’t really apply myself very well in those in those times and you know just didn’t really put a lot of effort into it but something lit a fire under my butt when I was a freshman in high school I I remember seeing the first chair
(04:59) cellist in our high school orchestra and how great he was how amazing he was he was he was part of the all-national uh uh Orchestra which was like the pre like like the premier Orchestra Youth Orchestra in the United States and I think he was going to go to Berkeley or something like that and study music and he was just incredible and I was so fascinated by what he was playing and it made me it was one of those first experiences that made me aspire to do something better and so my goal that year was to move up
(05:30) from that first chair and actually start to get good at the cello and I I did I worked really hard over that summer between my freshman and sophomore year I got a new music teacher one of the best music teachers in in uh in the United States her name was Joanne Lundy and and she was an amazing cello teacher and I ended up getting up to first chair the very next year of my sophomore year and uh and you know becoming president of the orchestra making it to Allstate doing all these great great things that cello even
(06:03) getting a scholarship to the University of California in Santa Barbara and uh and but you know there was this there’s this moment that I had that was a very very important life lesson Joanne Lundy taught me a ton of life lessons beautiful life lessons in her own eccentric way about you know relative to music but that that applied to life and one of them was this I mean there you know she she gave me the foundational tools on how to really Master anything you know with the idea of consistency and discipline and and those kinds of
(06:41) things not only led to Mastery of the of the cello as an instrument but it could lead to Mastery in Triathlon and in other musical instruments in business and in health and all of these things and I’ve applied that lesson to anything and and one of those lessons was she she she told me here’s a here’s a piece this is called the Cecil Cello Concerto uh and it’s you know one of the more difficult pieces for uh high school cellists to learn and you’re going to learn it and I want you to take each passage she basically took
(07:14) every line of the music she said I want you to play each Passage 10 times through every day uh for the next 10 days and I said okay got it and I um for that whole weekend so that that was the consistency and discipline part of it like you know really mastering anything just takes repetition and consistency but I missed a certain part of it that was that um which which is a lesson that I would learn later because I went home and I practiced each of those sections 10 times through I did it with discipline I I was consistent with it every single
(07:50) day practiced for two hours a day got back for the next week played through the passage and I thought I nailed it and she said now that was terrible that sounded terrible and I said why you know I practiced I did exactly what you said she said well because you’re playing each note as if you’re as if you’re aggressively trying to get to the next note you’re playing each note as if you’re trying to trying to rush to the very next note to just demonstrate that you could play it what I want you to do
(08:26) is play it and let every single note shine let every note be the star let every note demonstrate itself for the beauty that it exists in it so when you take this home and you practice it ten times through every single day you play each note with intention to let that note be the star of the moment Let each note shine and that in and of itself was a very powerful piece that was the missing piece to that Mastery element of of how I was going to master the cello it wasn’t just about discipline and consistency but being absolutely present
(09:07) in that moment just like the note needed to shine every single moment of Our Lives needs to shine so we let every moment shine we get intentional about living in that moment and so I went back and I and and I played every every note is if each note lived in its own infinite universe and the beauty of the piece exponentially changed it made it so that it wasn’t just a well-played technical piece but it was a beautiful piece of music that existed in every moment because every note shined how can we apply that to our lives
(09:57) how can we make every single moment of Our Lives shine you know it’s it’s not going to be easy because there are going to be hard moments there are going to be times when we’re in fearful situations where we’re in not so great situations where we’re in where we’re in tragic situations where we’re in painful situations where we want those moments to end but I’ll say this that with the right practice and consistency and effort if we could live in those moments even we can make even those moments beautiful
(10:30) in the same way that a tragic piece of music might be beautiful as well or sad song might be beautiful as well and the way that we can do this is I want to share three simple things that we can do to keep ourselves to to have that discipline to keep ourselves in the moment and help every moment to shine and the first one that I want to share with you is one we hear a lot and you may just roll your eyes at this one because you hear it so much that yeah we need to practice gratitude but that is it gratitude if we want to live in the moment we need
(11:08) to be grateful for certain things and nothing can bring us back into the moment and out of a funk more than gratitude and this is more this is about more than just giving gratitude lip service which is you know maybe a lot of what we hear today well I’m grateful for sleeping in my bed I’m grateful for my family I’m grateful for you know that’s just giving it lip service and trying to think through words that want to come out of our mouths but true gratitude comes from this idea that not only do we say it not only do
(11:39) we verbalize what we’re grateful for but we sit with that moment for 15 to 20 seconds and this is a valuable lesson I talked about a few weeks ago that I learned from my business coach um where he said that he learned studies that uh about how we can shift our focus into the positive and uh and and all it takes is us sitting in a moment of gratitude or positivity for 15 to 20 seconds at a time so when you have that moment of all right I’m grateful because it’s a beautiful day outside you sit in that
(12:13) moment you feel the sunlight on your face you feel the wind blowing through your hair you feel the the light as it kind of penetrates your eyelids and you just hear the sounds of the and that’s it you just spent 15 seconds in gratitude and you do that three times every morning and that’s just kind of the practice you have is is bringing yourself back in the Moment by actually feeling the Gratitude not just saying it feeling it so feeling the gratitude that is that is number one on how we can make every moment shine and live obsessively
(12:50) in the present the second way to stay in the present is through another is through our biofeedback through how we use our body and specifically with our breath now we can we can actually bring ourselves in the moment too by by dancing around or exercising or doing something that is that that kind of is physical in nature but the breathing I find is really powerful because if you can breathe intentionally and have a breathing exercise and count the seconds of each breath in count the seconds of each breath out not only are
(13:27) you working to relax yourself in the moment but you’re focusing on something that is absolutely free something that we should feel grateful for something that empowers us and gives us life that life bringing energy of breath it’s absolutely free to us if you can’t be grateful for that I mean that’s that’s the starting point of gratitude but that breath piece if you could breathe in and this is what I would suggest is you just simply breathe in for about four seconds hold it at the top for maybe another two to
(14:01) four seconds and then let it go for about seven or eight seconds and then that just that rhythm of counting the breath in doing that 10 times will bring you into the present you can also use other forms of breathing techniques like uh like the Wim Hof breathing which also you know reinforce counting and things like that but those kinds of things bring you to bring you to the present attention and and help you to stay present they put you in that meditative State without having to like just sit quietly with your own thoughts
(14:36) um this gives you something to focus on it’s like a totem to focus on is is your is your breath and then the next thing the the next way to make every moment shine is uh is to chunk down the big big things that we need to do or the goals that we have or or whatever that is down to the very very next small step and I call this usually like the five percent step but this could even be like a one percent step right in front of you depending on where you’re at but just the very very next step and you may be thinking to
(15:12) yourself well isn’t that the future Adam and I’m like yeah of course yeah so we’re getting into semantics here but what I but that very next step is the thing that you are going to be doing in the present the president encompasses the immediate future of what we’re what we’re going to be doing and so the very next thing that you’re doing whether it be uh taking one uh taking one step on your run putting one foot into a shoe that is going to be your running shoe that is how we get into the
(15:47) present and literally just thinking of that next step as we do it that puts us into the present moment helps us to be obsessively present and you find that when you do those things this this thing that is wildly uncomfortable that you might hate meditation which I hate by the way um becomes somewhat pleasurable because you’re actually able to do that in an active way that keeps you in the present moment gets you out of the future gets you out of the past and it gives you the time to actually do the very next thing which is which is
(16:22) important and it even helps you to be and when when you practice these things gratitude breathing and just that very very next step it puts you into a more positive more um more attentive mindset more self-aware mindset where you can start to do things in the present that help you to progress things like visualizing the future and what I would say is that when you’re visualizing the future or you’re reflecting on the past those are activities if you’re being intentional about them if you’re intentionally setting your mind on how
(17:05) to visualize into the future uh what you want to achieve and how you do it you’re actually living in the present I know that sounds kind of counterintuitive because you’re thinking about the future you’re actively thinking about that but you’re doing that for the benefit of today you’re actually doing that exercise of visualization as if it’s happening in this moment and it is giving you a point of reference to what you can achieve same with with reflecting on the past you’re reflecting on those past moments
(17:39) those past wins so that you can give that point of reference to this moment now on what to be grateful for or what to be happy about all of those all of those points of references for the exercises that I’ve done have led me to this moment where I can be grateful that I’m the person that I am today that’s how you can live truly in the moment while also reflecting on the past and visualizing the future so that instead of living in frustration about what we’re not yet about about we’re not where we want to
(18:18) be because where we are in the future it doesn’t reflect where we’re at now or um or we’re not where we want to be or we’re overwhelmed by all of the things that we have to do or we have all of this anxiety running around in our minds because of everything that needs to get done instead of all of that we’re allowing to make every moment shine by focusing on the very next step we’re knocking certain things off of our to-do list and we’re making progress in the moment every moment will shine
(18:53) just like my cello teacher Joanne Lundy said make every note shine we have to make every moment shine we can do that while visualizing in the future while reflecting on the past but living obsessively in the present and enjoying each moment it’s not a perfect thing because we will always fail at it but that’s okay because we’re going to always bring ourselves back there and so that is the last part that I want to share with you um is that you don’t need to get frustrated when you fail at living in the present
(19:30) because you can always bring yourself back there so make every moment shine my friends thank you for joining me today we will see you next time hey everyone Thanks for tuning in to the flow over fear podcast if you’d like to learn more about getting into flow and learn the foundations of flow I have a free video series on my website at www.adamcliffordhill.
(19:55) com called the foundations of flow feel free to go there and download it and start your journey to Rising above fear and achieving greater flow in your life if you like this episode and I’m guessing you did if you stuck around for this long then please do me a favor and hit the Subscribe button and you will receive notifications when I have new interviews new Recaps and new trainings that pop up on YouTube thanks again for joining us