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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)