Applied Mindfulness

Due to the dramatic rise in mindfulness research, there has been an increasing awareness about its applications across various professions. Elite-level leaders from corporate executives to Navy SEALs have discovered personal transformation and performance enhancement through this important inner work.

Experts across various domains (professional sports, military skills development, acting, meditation practices, traditional martial arts, etc.) have and continue to adapt long-established mindfulness methods to meet their needs.

While deep, long-term mindfulness training can be a very worthwhile pursuit, my approach to coaching on mindfulness is to take the wide range of related practices and distilling them down to what is most directly applicable to the working professional.

This is what I mean be applied mindfulness.

Here are a few key ideas:

1. Truly know yourself

Understand your values, your purpose, and your beliefs. Know your “why”s. Take a look for any long held beliefs and narratives that you’re carrying around that may no longer be serving you. Through deep and honest self-reflection, you will gain the necessary perspectives for understanding how to live purposefully and effectively.

A great little book on better perspectives: Useful Not True, by Derek Sivers.

2. Build mental fitness:

While doing the intellectual exploration explained above is a good start, it is also important to do the deeper work of building mental fitness. This is what most people miss, and therefore reach plateaus. The ability to reliably notice and let go of disempowering impulses and emotional triggers in the moment is what truly enables us to live purposefully.

Our nervous system has inherited survival programming designed to keep us safe. But in our modern world much of how this programming expresses itself is actually maladaptive. Disempowering impulses like fear of failure, excessive people-pleasing or perfectionism can affect our decisions without us even knowing. Mental fitness can be learned and strengthened.

More details including recommended resources -> here

3. Develop interoceptive body awareness:

The ability to sense and work with internal signals from the body is key to regulating emotions, reducing stress, and increasing general well-being. The practical applications of interoception skills at work and in life are immense. When we have a healthy mind-body connection and have the techniques for interpreting how to work with internal signals, we emerge with calm wisdom and confident performance.

A brief explanation of the science of interoception -> here

4. Expand your comfort zone:

Seek eustress. Work on stretching outside your various comfort zones incrementally every day. Be creative. Do at least one action every day that is scary but aligned with your goals. Growing your comfort zone will build self-awareness, boldness, capacity and effectiveness.

5. Be non-attached to outcomes:

Cultivating non-attachment from strong desires for specific outcomes is one of the most powerful ideas that is often overlooked. When our ego is attached and we ruminate on fear of failure, that can make us less likely to achieve our goal. Knowing what we’re after but being truly in the moment and focused on the performance of the correct action is what leads to great execution.

Non-attachment does not mean you don’t care about results. It just means you know what you can control and what you can’t. You focus on and care greatly about your art, but are indifferent to the outcomes. An optimal balance between goals and non-attachment can and needs to be achieved.

More details in my article published on Medium -> here

An unusual exercise for exploring the skill of non-attachment -> here