“Mindfulness moves us from reacting in fear to responding with love.”
Something that is fundamental to my life and personal development is my mindfulness practice. Simply put, mindfulness is just being aware of your thoughts and feelings. It can be achieved through advanced meditation or by taking one deep breath, and it brings you back to what you’re experiencing in the present moment.
From a performance standpoint, mindfulness helps us raise our awareness so that we can be more effective professionals, but from a wellness standpoint it helps you to clean the stress, anxiety, and overwhelm that seems to cloud up our minds.
Overall it’s a practice of creating consciousness so that we can improve the way we navigate our lives.
Megan Whitney , a mindfulness coach and friend, has a powerful quote that goes “Mindfulness moves us from reacting in fear to responding with love.” Embedded is the idea that consciousness helps us choose what we want.
Our unconscious predisposition, that we’ve inherited from evolution as a means to keep us safe, is to react with fear. Those who were most prepared to quickly address a potential threat survived. This means that unconsciously we continue to have a bias toward a stress-response. And given how the modern world consistently presents us with things to be worried about that don’t actually threaten our safety, as a collective we’re chronically stressed and our health is deteriorating because of it.
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With mindfulness, we can be aware of what’s happening and choose a more empowering response, like love. We can choose to attach a new meaning to an event so that we replace stress with empathy, compassion, and gratitude. These are the raw materials to love, and the only thing that needs to change is our level of awareness.
For those of us who want to be extraordinary people, do extraordinary things, and make an extraordinary impact, it’s critical that we practice mindfulness.
And if you’re looking for practical, tangible, effective ways to integrate more mindfulness into your day, I’m actually recording a session live with Megan Whitney here on LinkedIn to discuss the topic of mindfulness in detail.
If you want to be a part of that conversation, ask questions, and join us in adding more mindfulness to our lives, click here to can register for the free event!