What do you value?
Who do you value and why?
Why do you do the things that you do?
Why do you hold certain opinions and attitudes? Are they true to you and what you really believe?
It’s easy to look at these questions and come up with superficial answers, but when you take time to think a little more deeply it can be a very helpful exercise in developing an understanding of yourself and your values. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of things to reflect upon, but it can serve as a first step towards creating a more balanced lifestyle. Most of us are creatures of habit and sometimes we have to actively examine – and even disrupt – our normal thought and behavioural patterns in order to recognize what we really want and need.
When you spend lots of time with someone who has a different accent to you, you might find that you pick up a little of their intonation or speech patterns. They are not your own, they are just adopted from the environment that you have been in. I’m particularly susceptible to acquiring accents – I’ve never known why, or if there is some sort of psychology behind it, but it has certainly caused a few giggles at my expense!
This applies to more than just how you speak. When you spend a lot of time with other people or in certain environments, sometimes their opinions, traits, habits and attitudes can make your own values a little hazy. Sometimes this will help you to develop your own values and sometimes there will be layers and layers of these ‘inherited’ behaviours and thoughts to remove in order to get back to being truly yourself.
What habits or opinions have you collected along the way? Being influenced by people around us helps to shape who we are, and often this can be for the better, but we need to examine these attitudes to make sure we are still being true to ourselves.
Learning to connect with yourself is probably not the sort of thing you can learn overnight. In fact, I don’t know if we ever can know ourselves entirely – or at least that is not yet within my own experience – but you can certainly do things to encourage the process, and it can be a wonderful and interesting journey.
Understanding Your Feelings
Emotions are something that we all experience in different ways. For some of us, showing our emotions comes more naturally than for others, and there is no right or wrong way to deal with the twists and turns of life. People talk about being ‘emotionally intelligent’; having the ability to understand both your own and other people’s emotional behaviour. We are all wired so differently that the way you react to a situation, or the way that something or someone makes you feel, shouldn’t be classed as right or wrong. What is important is to recognize these differences in order to connect with both yourself and other people.
Being mindful about our emotions allows us to alter the way we behave in future situations. There is a lesson to learn from everything, and all emotions serve a positive purpose. Sensitivity is wonderful if it means that you are able to read situations and evaluate responses. Providing other people with a map to read us helps them to understand how best to support us in our times of need. Of course, understanding yourself better allows you to rationalize your emotions, making life a little less turbulent than it might otherwise be.
No matter how you deal with things, it isn’t about good or bad, but just how you are. You need to accept the way in which you and those around you deal with things, embrace the highs and lows, learn from them and release any judgement and frustration that they may bring.
Managing the Mind
The difficulty with any sort of mindfulness practice or mind exercise is that the results aren’t tangible in the same way that other lifestyle changes are. There are no ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos, nor a number on the scales to go by, so it can be difficult to really understand what is and isn’t working for you.
Becoming ever more conscious of yourself and switching away from living on auto-pilot allows you to be more in touch with who you really are and know what you truly value, enabling you to take steps in the direction that serves you best.
As an adult I have become more and more aware of the number of people who experience symptoms of anxiety or depression to some degree or at certain periods in their lives. I don’t know if it is because people are becoming more open, life is becoming more stressful, or perhaps there are just more people who have the courage to identify themselves as having these struggles, but I find it interesting to consider what leads so many of us down this path, and if there is anything we can do or change to prevent it having such an impact on our minds.
I think many of us try to take responsibility for things that are beyond our control, and as a result experience guilt or other emotions that cause stress and anxiety to build up in our minds. I’m one of those people who takes the weight of everyone else’s problems on my shoulders as my own, without being asked, and I have begun to realize that I feel very guilty about things that are not in my power. So much is ultimately beyond our control and sometimes we just have to let go of that need or desire to solve problems. I have had to learn that I can still be a good friend without knowing all the answers, and that it is OK to put myself first at times.
Worry is another emotion that I find cripples a lot of people and prevents them enjoying the moment. When you worry about the future, you are encouraging your fears to manifest in reality. We can help ourselves by trying to shift away from that focus on the uncertainty of things to come.
You have the power to choose how you feel and react. Of course, emotions are natural and your initial response to a situation may seem beyond your control – but if you take a step back, you can recognize that you have the power to choose. If you can learn not to be at the mercy of circumstance, and instead find a positive in every situation in which you find yourself, you will lighten the load you carry.
Fitting positivity into your day doesn’t have to be time-consuming or challenging. There are simple things you can do to break negative thought patterns or reframe difficult parts of your day. Gratitude exercises can be really helpful, for example. Often it can feel easier to focus on the small proportion of negative instead of the large proportion of positive, so by starting a gratitude journal, you can begin to shift this balance.
‘Of course, it is much easier to come up with a list of things you are grateful for when you have had a great day and things feel as though they are going well, but it is even more valuable when the words don’t come quite so easily.’
Even if the concept of writing down the things you are thankful for sounds a little odd, making a note of a few things when you wake up or before you fall asleep allows you to step back and reflect on the day without being caught up in the immediate moment. Of course, it is much easier to come up with a list of things you are grateful for when you have had a great day and things feel as though they are going well, but it is even more valuable when the words don’t come quite so easily. It is those days when you have to reframe the way you are thinking that can prove most uplifting. Repeating the practice on a daily basis can really help to train the mind to think more positively and can change how you approach your day-to-day life.
A lot comes down to acceptance – acknowledging that not everything will always go just the way you’d hoped, but can still be appreciated for what it is, for the challenges it gives you. Gratitude allows you to navigate each day with a more positive mindset, which helps you to enjoy the journey rather than just anticipate the outcome.
Embrace Imperfection
Negative talk about yourself or other