I can’t tell you the number of times I have sat down and meticulously planned a week so that I can get my work done, see all my clients, get to the gym and do my yoga practice, and been really excited to achieve it. But then it is Monday morning, or Tuesday afternoon, or any time in any day and I just don’t feel like doing whatever is scheduled for that time. I remember that the washing needs doing or that I really must get through my emails, or that I ‘need’ to do absolutely anything else.
Whatever your goal is, you need to understand your motivation in order to be truly committed to achieving it. Rather than think you want to eat more healthily, be stronger, fitter, lose weight, spend more time with friends or whatever else it is that you are striving towards, take a step back and think about what you will gain by achieving it. For example, if you are hoping to lose weight, what will be the impact of that on your life? Perhaps it will improve your confidence or allow you to be more active? What are the results that will make a positive difference to you? Once you start to understand why you want to achieve something, you have a much greater level of motivation to spur you on if it gets tough at any point (and the chances are it will at times).
So often we resolve to make changes because there is something we don’t like in our lives. The trouble is we then tell ourselves that we will be happy once we make this change.
This mindset of changing because we don’t like where we are poses a problem if we don’t see results: it can be pretty frustrating and we bring ourselves down or feel as if we’ve failed if we don’t get exactly where we wanted to be. If you can make a conscious decision to accept yourself first, everything shifts a little. It’s so much more positive to make healthy changes to your lifestyle because you want to care for the amazing body and mind you have and look after them the best you can, than to make changes because you feel negative about yourself. It may be easier said than done, but it makes everything so much more manageable if you can accept yourself for who and where you are right now, before you embark on creating change.
Finally, allow yourself to be a beginner, to make mistakes, to figure out some things quickly and find other things much harder. Don’t expect everything to fall into place straight away; in fact, try not to expect anything at all. This isn’t about miracle cures or overnight success; it’s about taking care of yourself, and learning exactly what you need.
— 01
Like most of us, you probably go through each day without really noticing what you are thinking about.
Recently ‘mindfulness’ has become a bit of a buzzword and there are all sorts of programmes, apps and concepts that enable us to become more efficient in the workplace, develop a positive mentality and generally become happier. This can all seem a little strange if you didn’t feel as though anything was ‘wrong’ in the first place. But no matter how comfortable you already are in your mind and thought processes, mindfulness can benefit all aspects of your life.
Your mind is a wonderfully complex thing, and each of our minds works in an individual way, making understanding others and ourselves a life-long adventure. For a lot of people the mind ticks away without them really giving it any attention. Others may choose to try to understand a little more about how it works, how it influences their actions and how it is connected to the physical body, through practices such as yoga and meditation.
Put simply, being mindful means being aware of the present moment and having a conscious understanding and acceptance of the way you feel. I guess the thing to realize is that a mindfulness practice doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing to each person. While some people consciously commit to a specific exercise to connect with themselves in a certain way, others may have a subconscious mindfulness practice that they include in their daily habits without even realizing or planning it.
As I shifted towards my current lifestyle and left old habits behind, I made a decision to accept that I can’t predict where life will take me and I began to think more deeply about what I really wanted. I came to the conclusion that I wanted to be two things – healthy and happy – to give myself the best chance of coping with and enjoying the twists and turns of the future. So what did I need to do to equip myself to deal with whatever might come my way? What did being truly happy mean? What constituted health? Did that include my mental health as well as healthy attitudes? Suddenly there were a million things to consider and it all seemed fairly complicated.
As these thoughts developed, I asked myself what really makes me happy. I realized that, like many people, I often associated happiness with something that I didn’t have. Most of us probably set goals in our lives such as promotions, aesthetic triumphs or other personal and professional achievements, and we tell ourselves that when we’ve reached them we’ll be happy. In reality, it seems to be that when we do reach a goal, we have already found something else to focus on, shifting the goalposts again. It is so easy to end up in a cycle of chasing happiness, but never allowing ourselves to reach it. I’ve seen it in myself. I guess it’s a little like the saying ‘the grass is always greener’ – if we condition happiness on a future state, there is always going to be something else to achieve, meaning that happiness is indefinitely out of reach.
For many people, setting goals is a tool for self-development – but you have to be wary about resting your happiness on achieving goals. If you constantly chase an end goal, you lose out on so many days of feeling fulfilled by where you are right now. You have to reframe your thinking in order to find happiness on the way towards your goals. It is also necessary to appreciate that you are not in total control: sometimes you can have your heart set on something that is, due to external factors, simply unachievable.
Being Present
You know when you are having a conversation with someone and they are there physically but they’re not really ‘there’? They’re reading something or watching something, or they’re otherwise focused so they can hear what you are saying, and may even be responding, but they’re not actually listening. I always notice this and try hard not to take offence. I remind myself that I should try never to do this to someone else. However, in truth, I know that sometimes I can be that person, too.
Think how often you are sitting with a friend and your phone beeps on the table in front of you. You distract yourself for a moment by looking at your phone and suddenly you are caught up in a totally different conversation. You might still be engaging with the person you are with, but are you really being present? How much of your attention are you really giving that person?
I remember vowing to commit fully to the company I’m in as much as possible after a friend once commented on my lack of attention on one particular occasion. It stuck with me, and while there are, of course, still times when I don’t manage to keep it up totally, I have come up with a few things that I find make it easier to give my attention more fully to the physical (as opposed to virtual) company I’m in.
It is OK to be busy. If you are meeting a friend and an email needs