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Looking around, you can see that people live in many different types of lives. But so many of them aren’t really present in the lives that they’re living. Plus, they’re not taking the steps that they could to create the best life possible.

By using mindful motivation, you can create a life that brings you great relationships, enables you to meet your life goals and sets you free from negative emotions.

How To Be Present: What Is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness means that you’re specifically in the present. When someone is mindful, they’re aware of and paying attention to the moment that they’re in, not mired down in the past or future.

When you practice mindfulness, you focus your mind purposefully. Have you ever driven from one place to another and at the end of your destination, you weren’t aware of the sights you saw or how you arrived there?

VIDEO: 10 Minute Meditation for Motivation
and Building a Positive Mindset

This is a guided meditation with motivating, positive affirmations. This is a great way to start your day. This meditation will help you make stay motivated and confident. Affirmations are most effective when practiced on a daily bases. Headphones recommended for the optimal experience.

If so, you weren’t practicing mindfulness. It’s the same concept with every area of your life. You can go through life on autopilot. This means that you can sit down and have a meal, but because you’re not practicing mindfulness, you won’t even be aware of what you had to eat in terms of a portion or even the pleasure of tasting it.

This is why you can eat something and then wonder later on what it was that you had for dinner. You have to stop and think to remind yourself. The reason that you can go through life and miss things is that the mind has a tendency to blank or go through the motions when you’re doing something you’ve done numerous times before.

Mindfulness is putting a stop to allowing the mind to simply wander unchecked. It means that you direct your mind back to focus on whatever it needs to focus on. When you don’t practice an awareness of your thoughts, you can go through life and miss out on having the best life you could have.

The art of using mindfulness has its roots in Buddhism and the practice has been around for thousands of years. Not only was it practiced to enhance spiritual connectivity, but also to bring calmness, focus, and improve the brain’s ability to think.

Today, many studies have shown that there are multiple reasons why practicing mindfulness can help you create your best life. There are physical health and emotional well-being boosts that can be had when you practice mindfulness.

6 Incredible Health Benefits Of Mindfulness

When you become aware in the present moment, it can soothe your emotions and help strengthen your immune system. The use of mindfulness is tied in with many forms of meditation that are designed to bring self-awareness and rid the body of negative thought patterns.

Mindfulness helps center the user and cause him to choose to live fully active in today rather than focus on the past or get caught up in what might happen in their future.

Practicing Mindfulness To Make Better Life Choices

You might be surprised to learn that some of the choices that you make in life, you’re making without being fully aware of the present. When this happens, the choices that you make aren’t really the ones that can give you the best outcome.

This can impact your entire life. But when you practice mindfulness, you can make better choices and change your life to let it become the one that you’ve dreamed of living.

One of the areas where mindfulness can help you make better choices is in the area of eating. Plenty of people eat countless times a day without ever giving a second thought to what it is that they’re doing.

This is because it’s easy to eat while you’re busy with things unrelated to eating. You don’t have to focus on putting fork to mouth in order to accomplish this task. You learned how to do it at a young age, so you can multitask easily.

It’s easy to eat while you’re reading, while you’re talking on the phone or while you’re watching a movie. What happens then is that you miss being in the present while you’re eating.

Simple Mindfulness Techniques: How Can You Be More Mindful?

It means that you miss out on the taste of the food, the pleasure that you could derive from it – and this can also lead you to make poorer food choices in terms of the types and quantities of food that you’re consuming.

Plus, when you eat without practicing mindfulness, it can be easier for you to not connect the emotions to what you’re eating. That means if you’re an emotional eater, lacking mindfulness can cause you to eat more and not be aware of what it is that you’re eating that could be sabotaging the health or the body that you want.

But if you practice mindfulness, this practice can help you learn not to link your emotions to food.

Another area where mindfulness can help you is in your relationships. When your relationships are good, it can help make you feel better physically, lessen stress and contribute to your happiness. Mindfulness can help you have harmony in your relationships.

This is because you won’t feel as stressed, so whenever there’s an issue, you won’t immediately react to what you perceive is going on. By being mindful, you’ll be focused on being present during the interaction with the people in your life.

What this will do is help you better understand what someone else is saying and feeling. It helps eliminate the defensiveness that can be at the root of many relationship problems.

Mindfulness can help you respond to relationship interaction in an appropriate way. You’ll be able to be in the moment with the other person, not throwing out the past, or burdening the two of you with what might happen in the coming days, weeks, months or years.

You’ll be focused on that one moment, giving them all your attention, rather than having your mind be a thousand miles away. Mindfulness helps you tune in to the people in your life.

Being mindful helps you be more empathetic, which makes you more in tune with how the people in your life are acting by seeing the emotion behind the action and behind the words they speak.

It helps you not be as defensive and not react with ingrained thought patterns that can be so damaging to relationships. You’ll be able to leave your personal baggage at the door and interact with the other person based on truth, not personal perceptions.

When you practice mindfulness techniques, it can also help you make better choices that impact your productivity. By using mindfulness, you can stay aware of the present rather than focusing on what’s coming later. Being aware of where you are right now and working to increase your focus. When you’re unfocused, it’s too easy to let your mind start to think about what else is coming your way that you have to get done.

Can Mindfulness At Work Improve Your Career and Your life?

Mindfulness helps you accomplish tasks by keeping you on track. It can be easy to start working on something, only to start thinking that maybe you forgot to respond to a phone call, or you forgot to write an appointment down on the calendar.

So off you go to deal with these other tasks and before you know it, you’ve lost productivity. When your mind jumps from one thought to another, you can end up not being as effective and causing a rise in your stress level because you haven’t been able to get things done.

Staying in the here and now is what mindfulness can help you with. When you can focus, you’ll make much better productive choices and you can create the best life for yourself.

How To Be Mindful: Natural Therapy for Improved Mental Health

For the brain, mindfulness can be an action that can help keep the mind focused on the good rather than letting it dwell on all of the negatives.

Do you know how an untrained puppy will run around when you take it outside?

It doesn’t want to listen because it’s not focused on you. There are too many exciting things outside – like the wind pushing a leaf across the grass, the neighbor’s dog, a car passing on the street or kids out playing.

In a flash, the puppy takes off after the leaf or the neighbor’s dog or heads toward the street. Because the puppy hasn’t been trained to focus, anything goes, and he could very well end up with some negative consequences.

Just like something detrimental can happen with an untrained puppy, a mind that doesn’t practice mindfulness can also experience negative consequences. When you allow your mind to go off on any thought process, you can bet those thoughts won’t always bring you a positive return.

What Has Mindfulness Studies and Brain Research Shown Us?

Your mind will start to think about situations that caused your anger in life. You’ll start thinking about wanting to get even. You’ll feel sorry for yourself that your life isn’t like someone else’s, who seems to have everything.

Before you know it, you’re on a cycle of negativity because your mind was allowed to go there, to dwell on thoughts that produce negative feelings. Whatever the mind dwells on can either help you have good feelings about your life or it can introduce bad ones.

When your mind isn’t practicing mindfulness, it can wander off into thinking about things that cause you to feel stressed out. It can cause you to feel anxiety. You might experience a rise in anger and become bitter.

Left alone, the mind that’s not focused with mindfulness can lead you to bouts of depression. Practicing mindfulness is something that can help you focus on being present and can alter how the past affects you.

Mindfulness keeps you centered on today, not yesterday and not tomorrow. There are various techniques using mindfulness that can help improve mental health. Among these are mindfulness stress reduction and mindfulness cognitive therapy.

Practicing Mindfulness With Common Meditation Techniques

There are several techniques that you can use to harness mindfulness. The first one is meditation. Most people are familiar with the basics of meditation. To practice mindful meditation, you need a comfortable place to sit down.

Be aware of how you’re breathing and center your focus on the moment that you’re in. Concentrate on your breath, paying attention to your inhaling and exhaling.

5-Minute Mindfulness Body Scan Meditation Script & Mp3

Mindful meditation is different because when thoughts pull you away from the moment, you concentrate on your breathing, stop and refocus. During this time, you should have a non-judgmental attitude toward whatever it is that runs through your mind.

It might be hard to keep your mind focused if you’ve had a habit in the past of allowing your mind to wander when you’re trying to concentrate.

Besides meditation, you can choose to practice the mindfulness technique of deep breathing. Taking breaths isn’t something that a lot of people are aware of. We do it without thinking about it. But when you practice deep breathing involving mindful techniques, this can relieve stress, boost your energy levels and help you achieve calmness.

One technique is achieved by breathing through the nose in short breaths for a few seconds. This practice can help to give you a mindful awareness that returns your focus to the present.

Another technique is to count the deep breaths that you take for a few seconds. You would focus on breathing in through the nose and exhaling slowly through the mouth.

COMPLETE GUIDE: Deep Breathing Exercises To Alleviate Stress

The object technique is used in mindfulness to help raise the level of focus that you have. To do this practice, you pick out an item near you and focus on that item.

Your awareness should only be about that item such as a vase or a chair or whatever other objects you choose. You keep the focus until that item is all that your mind centers on.

When your thoughts start to drift away, you consciously pull them back to the item that you’re looking at.

Walking is another technique used in mindful practices. Make sure that you’re in an area where you can walk unimpeded. Place your focus on what’s around you. Take in the five senses that are present in your surroundings – such as what you can hear or smell or see.

Breathe normally and be aware of how you pick up your foot and put it down as you take a step. Focus your thoughts on how your feet feel as they connect with the walking surface.

Pay attention to how your body is working as you walk. Keep your focus on the movements that you make as you walk, including swinging your arms, the speed you walk, and more.

How To Live In The Present: Snapping Yourself Out Of The Past or Future Focus

What’s already happened is long gone. No one can change the events or emotions that have already passed. It’s human nature to look at the past and feel nostalgic, or even fearful or angry – but the trouble comes in when we focus on the past and let it guide our present actions, rather than living in the present moment.

When that happens, you miss the chance to create your best life and you’re settling either for the pain or the glory of what used to be. A life of potential fullness can easily be lost by looking at life in the past.

In the same way that focusing on the past can limit your ability to have your best life, so can focusing on the future. The future isn’t here yet. You don’t want to waste the quality of the present on what might happen in the future. Usually, what you focus on for the future, when it arrives, is different from what you thought it would be. To have the best life possible, you need to aim for keeping your focus solely on the present.

It’s true that everyone can have times where the past or the future seems to be all they can focus on. But you can change that. You change it by living in the now.

Top 9 Mindfulness Life Lessons From 100-Year-Olds

When you’re working on something, don’t work on several things at once. When you’re eating, don’t do anything else besides eat. When you’re spending time with someone, don’t split your thoughts by trying to pay attention to the other person while at the same time opening mail or answering an email.

Don’t always be thinking about what’s coming next. Be in the present fully aware of your actions. Slow down. Don’t try to zip through life at full speed to get stuff over with.

Stop overcrowding your day by multitasking your way through everything. You’re not really getting more accomplished because you’re not able to give one single thing your complete attention.

Stop packing so much into your life – because too many things will cause you to suffer from a mental frenzy. This happens when you take on so much that you feel as if you don’t have time to think.

Take a break on purpose. It’s rare that people simply be instead of doing. For a set amount of time every day, stop. You might have heard the phrase “take the time to stop and smell the roses” and this is the same principle.

Take the time to stop and be present. Don’t do anything during your time of stopping but drink in your surroundings. Notice the day. The scents on the air. The beauty around you.

When you take the time to practice mindfulness, it allows you to not only create the best life you could ever dream of, but you get to savor it, too.

When you begin practicing this process, you’ll notice how many others are not living in the present, and you’ll be grateful that you’re no longer chained to the old way of living.

The way that you conduct yourself in your personal and professional life begins with how you use your mind. You can teach your mind to accept yourself and gain empowerment – or you can stay stuck in self-defeating behaviors.

You are what you think. When you want to introduce change into your life, you need to first accept and empower yourself before you begin altering anything. Your mind is the greatest tool that you have for living the best possible life that you can live in.

Countless studies have shown that the brain is constantly working. Your brain can be wired to think or cause you to act in a certain way based on how you handle your mind’s ability to tap into your subconscious mind.

What Has Mindfulness Studies and Brain Research Shown Us?

You will find a “Short Guided Meditation Script” to release the need for control at the bottom of this article. This Mindfulness Meditation will teach you to live in the moment without expectations or judgments.

When you practice mindfulness, you can empower yourself and fine tune the subconscious abilities that you have. Using mindful strategies, you’ll be able to focus better, lower your stress and boost your confidence and self-esteem.

Once you learn to accept yourself, you’ll be able to have compassion for yourself, too. This will defeat any negative internal talk that you may have been practicing. Meditation is a strategy that you can use to achieve mindfulness in order to accept and empower yourself.

How Can These Mindfulness Strategies Create A Better Life?

It helps users quiet the mind so that they can be fully in the present and accepting of the emotions and thoughts that they have. Choose a place where you’ll be comfortable so that you’ll be able to feel relaxed.

Some people choose to sit while meditating and others prefer to lie down. You can also practice mindful meditation while you’re walking outside or in your home. Relax and focus on what’s around you and how you’re inhaling and exhaling.

Be aware of the sensations you feel and the emotions that you’re experiencing. Another strategy that’s often used is deep breathing. You can start this the same way that you would with mindful meditation where you find a comfortable place and begin.

But you can also practice deep breathing while you’re active at home or at work. You focus on drawing in deep breaths and slowly releasing them. You can also use mindful replacement techniques.

These are strategies that call for you to be aware of the thoughts that you think about yourself rather than simply letting them pass through your mind. Whenever any negative self-talk pops into your mind, you make a conscious choice to stop and correct the thought.

You correct it by replacing it with affirming words that help you accept yourself as you are. This helps you reprogram your thoughts to enable you to feel empowered rather than listening to words that hinder you and create self-doubt.

Mindfulness In The Workplace – Increase Productivity Through Mindfulness

If you want to increase your productivity, you can do that through mindfulness. Studies have shown that people who practice mindfulness have a greater output than those who don’t.

Plus, using techniques involved in mindfulness can help you maintain a clear focus and lead to the ability to make better choices for productivity.

When you practice mindfulness, it helps to unleash the intuition that can influence your choices for the better.

That means that you’ll focus on thoughts, ideas and take action that allows you to accomplish the goals that you set for yourself. Mindfulness prevents you from having to overthink situations.

This frees you up from the chains of inactivity. You’ll be able to bring your thoughts back to the task at hand. When you’re working on something and it causes you to feel frustrated and to think negatively about the task, mindfulness can center your thoughts and give you calmness.

This then helps you to be able to give whatever you’re doing your full concentration. You’ll also be able to see what needs to be done more clearly. When you practice mindfulness, it keeps you from spacing out and losing focus on what it is you’d like to accomplish.

Plus, this focus lessens anxiety which can derail productivity. It allows you to keep moving forward. Mindfulness enables you to find an inner satisfaction with whatever it is that you’re doing which lets you be fully engaged in the task.

Can Mindfulness At Work Improve Your Career and Your life?

This will make a difference not only in what you get done but in how you get it done because your interactions with others and with yourself will change for the better.

You’ll gain a greater sense of commitment for the follow through. Mindfulness is a technique that can be used to improve your cognitive skills. This unleashes your thought processes to free your creativity.

This enables you to see other ways that you can get something done other than the way that you’ve always done it. Sometimes when you’re working on something at home or at the office and you need to be productive, you can feel pressured to perform and to get it done.

Mindfulness can eliminate the pressure and give you the freedom to calmly think through the steps that you need to take. The reason that this works is that mindfulness allows you to recognize the emotions that you feel, but to focus on what needs to be done in a non-judgmental way.

So you learn to act rather than to react. With mindfulness comes a greater sense of confidence in your abilities and in your skills. Rather than think negatively and have a can’t-do attitude, you’ll learn to foster a can-do attitude toward whatever you’re doing.

Overcoming Low Self-esteem – A Mindful Method to Boost Confidence

Having confidence means that you view yourself favorably. You know that you can do what you need to do, that you have the skills and talents to be able to handle yourself.

You trust that your instincts, thinking, and abilities are sufficient. When you don’t have confidence it means that you struggle to accept who you are. You’ll lack the confidence to do things because you simply don’t trust that you can.

You go through life feeling as if you’re not educated enough, skilled enough, smart enough, talented enough, pretty enough, or handsome enough. You judge yourself, often thinking of what you could have, should have said or done, and you always fall short.

What mindfulness does to help you change this and build your confidence is to replace the feelings that you’re not enough with the trust that you are. Using mindfulness calls for you to not dwell on your past or on any negative experiences where you feel that you failed or fell short.

It helps you to not focus on the future or on what you hope to be and it helps train you to focus on who you are right now and see that who you are is good enough. You learn to accept yourself – and with that, strong confidence in yourself is built.

6 Incredible Health Benefits Of Mindfulness

Practicing mindfulness can also boost your self-esteem. Mindfulness can lead you to a life settled in the present. With living in the present comes a non-judgmental acceptance of who you are.

So many people have an internal voice that’s extremely ugly. This internal voice has been conditioned to speak this way by us. The disturbing results are that when we allow this internal voice to have a negative say, we can trigger stress, anxiety and even depression.

This self-talk has a direct impact on how you feel about yourself. Learn to be aware of this negative self-talk. If you call yourself names, that’s a sign that you’ve been engaging in the negative self-talk that can lower your self-esteem.

Some people call themselves stupid or an idiot. When they consider doing something, this internal self-talk always tells them why they can’t. You’ll tell yourself things like “I’m not smart enough” or “I’m too dumb to do it.”

When you allow these thoughts to run rampant, you can get into the mindset that you can’t do something – that you’re unworthy – and then your feelings follow that internal self-talk until it becomes a belief.

This habit can be so ingrained within you that the negative self-talk plays constantly in your mind, so much so that it becomes like white noise. What mindfulness does is bring your attention to the inner dialogue that’s eroding your self-esteem.

You learn what this internal conversation is doing to you and how it’s impacting your emotions. Mindfulness helps you learn to accept who you are without expectations or blaming. You’ll gain skills that you can use to learn how to raise your confidence and acceptance of yourself.

4 Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Techniques

Recent studies have revealed that mindfulness is a useful anti-depressant medication, relieving mounds of anxiety, stress, and depression.

In one study, Lancet researchers sampled a group of 424 UK adults who were at high risk of experiencing further depression for study.

Half of the adults were put in a mindfulness-based cognitive therapy where they were guided through meditation and mindfulness methods while the other half was placed on medication for two years. Later, the researchers compared the progress of the two groups.

Then, the progress of each cluster was assessed. The study found that a similar number of individuals from both groups had relapsed. Experts explained that mindfulness provides long term useful skills hence putting you in control of your life unlike relying on anti-depressants.

Mindfulness is the cognitive ability to pay close attention to your feelings at the moment without judgment, fostering emotional resilience. It also helps you to develop positivity in life by helping concentration in class, work, and even home.

With the benefits of mindfulness now known in medical settings, perhaps you might want to learn how to practice this technique to relieve anxiety and stress. The techniques are easy to follow, and you do not need any special equipment; you just need to a few minutes.

5-Minute Mindfulness Body Scan Meditation Script & Mp3

The following are ways to practice mindfulness to reduce stress and improve concentration.

1. Mindful Yoga

Spend at least fifteen minutes of your time in a quiet and open environment for meditation and yoga. Meditation helps you to bring your full awareness to both your emotional and physical sensations as you try various poses. These feelings will bring about relieving tension and even reduced pain in your body, helping you to relax.

2. Body Scan Meditation

Like yoga, this technique involves spending your time in a secluded place, sitting in a comfortable position without feeling disturbed. During the exercise, you close your eyes and focus your concentration to your toes. Try to bring close attention to every part of your body starting from your toes, feet, ankles, calves, knees, hands and even up to your head.

3. Mindful Eating

During your mealtime, find a serene place where you will not be distracted. As you take your meals, try to eat slowly while you also engage your senses of taste, smell, sight, touch, and sound. Try to finish all your meal by chewing and swallowing slowly.

4. Mindful Breathing

Mindful or conscious breathing is another great way to eliminate stress and tension. Take at least five minutes in a convenient location, like the shower or subway and shift your concentration to breathing in and out. To concentrate during the exercise, you can pick one aspect to focus on.

Nothing else has the potential to boost your relaxation the way mindfulness can. Give it a try; you might be astonished what it can do for you.

Short Guided Meditation Script To Release the Need for Control

This Mindfulness Meditation will teach you to live in the moment without expectations or judgments.

(Beginning Of Script)

This guided meditation on the breath will help you to simply be…

I invite you to join me to enter a state of simply being…

release the desire or need to control or do and simply be…

Allow your body to become still and relax and bring your attention to your breath…

Become aware of the movement of your breath as it enters through your nose and leaves through your nose or mouth…

Simply allow and observe your breath…

Do not try to manipulate or change your breath in any way simply be aware of it…

And be aware of the feelings that connect with your breathing…

And now observe the depth of your breath…

Notice how your chest or stomach expands on the in breath…

And notice the fall of the stomach or chest on the out breath…

Staying in the moment with each breath…

Simply being with your breath

Not trying to do anything or go anywhere

Give all attention to each breath… as they follow one after another…

Simply observe and allow

You may notice that your mind may wander to thoughts… simply allow them to pass and return your focus to your breath…

Anytime you notice your mind wander simply bring your focus back to your breath at the tip of your nose and observe your breathing…

Every time you find your mind wandering off the breath gently bring it back to the present moment and continue to observe the flow of your breathing…

It is perfectly natural to have thoughts and even self-talk passing through your mind… do not allow yourself to interact or become distracted

Simply observe these thoughts…allow them to pas and gently bring your awareness back to your breath…

Notice the rise and fall of your chest as the air goes in and releases out…

Simply stay with the breath

You may find yourself becoming aware of sensations in your body…

As you stay with the present moment you may want to observe some of these sensations…

You are free to experience and notice these…expand the field of your awareness to include the sense of your body as you stay with your breath…

Feeling your body from head to toe and becoming aware of all the sensations of your body…

Now you are observing the sense of your body as a whole along with your breathing

And again whenever you notice your mind is wandering off bring your awareness back to your body and your breath as you sit here just simply being…

Not going anywhere or doing anything just being…

Allowing your awareness to return to your breath… allowing your awareness to stay with the breath… the fullness of the in breath and the out breath…

Just being with your breath and sitting still and remaining present just as it is simply allowing and being right here in the moment.

(End Of Script)