Wellness Tip of the Day: Get clarity on where your thoughts are holding you back. Not to judge yourself, but to get empowered to create the body—and life—you want.
Tag Archives: clarity
Wellness Tip of the Day
Aside
Wellness Tip of the Day: Get clarity on where your thoughts are holding you back. Not to judge yourself, but to get empowered to create the body—and life—you want.
Wellness Tip of the Day
Aside
Wellness Tip of the Day: Today, expect and look for abundance, joy, love, laughter, signs of wellness, confidence, clarity, and people and things to appreciate.
Mental Stress Relief
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Last weekend, I was listening to a teleclasses while eating breakfast, checking and responding to email, contemplating a client session, and reviewing and taking notes on a white paper written by Bruce Schneider on spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical energy.
As I read a passage in “Driving Engagement: Sustaining Success Through Core Energy Dynamics and the Core Energy Coaching Process” suggesting that multi-tasking, stretching oneself too thin, doing too many things at once, and having conflicting demands may impact mental energy, I literally laughed out loud. Guilty on all counts.
How often do you catch yourself focused on or doing more than one thing? Do you ever have conversations where you are so distracted you can’t remember what was discussed? Do your conversations jump around from topic to topic? Do you ever forget what you set out to do because you got distracted by something else?
Often, people blame this on aging or outside influences. In truth, we are fragmenting our own mental energy creating mental stress.
According to Schneider, mental energy involves how much brain power you have available at any given moment, your ability to be present in the moment, and to be alert, focused, and clear. These are necessary for harnessing your mental faculties for decision-making, idea generation, performance–truly all areas of life.
Mental engagement is a matter of focusing your brainpower on a specific goal, role, project, or task. You know you are fully mentally engaged when you are in the reputed “zone” or “flow” where you lose track of time, physical needs, and are totally and joyfully absorbed in what you’re doing.
In a society that encourages split mental focus, is it any wonder that many people are often mentally stressed? Mental stress can be caused by either being too mentally stimulated, or not being mentally stimulated enough. When the mind is stressed, concentration, clarity, focus, creativity, and decision-making suffer.
Fortunately, engaging mental energy—and reducing mental stress—can be learned and practiced. Just like working out you physical muscles improves strength, working out your mental muscles improves clarity and focus.
Ways to work on your mental muscles are to focus on being present in the moment and on doing the task at hand. These can be improved by meditation, setting reminders on your cellphone to return your focus to the moment, or using a mantra, such as my personal favorite, “I’ll feel awesome when this is done.”
Other suggestions are to create clear action plans and remove or minimize distractions. (Hello email, Facebook, and other social media!) The clearer you are about what you need to do to accomplish a goal or task, the more present you will be and the more you can engage your mental faculties.
This is one of the reasons why creating meal plans and workout schedules improves your ability to achieve wellness goals. It reduces mental stress by eliminating ambiguity and improving focus.
How can you identify and eliminate things that keep you from being fully present? How can you practice concentrating on the task or goal at hand? What difference might reducing mental stress have on your ability to meet your goals?
Together we can do it!
Photo by Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
You Have Response-Ability
I’ve been struggling with writing an article all week. The more time I spend on that article, the further I fall behind on meeting my other deadlines, which results in a feeling of stress that zaps my energy and makes writing the article even harder.
How often do you get caught in this same kind of negative catabolic-energy spiral? Maybe what you want to accomplish is working out, but you’re too tired or busy and you miss it, and then you start beating yourself up, which makes getting in your next workout even harder. You can insert any task that you’re struggling with into this type of catabolic-energy loop.
It’s time to stop this crazy train!
What I know is that I have the response-ability for bringing my purpose, commitment, and spiritual connection into everything I do. So yesterday, I put aside the article for a bit and thought about how I want my sense of purpose to support me in this task. I also wrote out a list of all the reasons I love writing for a living.
Taking the time to shift my perspective helped generate a more positive anabolic outlook that allowed me to tap into and be supported by my spiritual beliefs and connection. Taking the time to do that helped bring me some clarity and focus, so that I was finally able to make some significant progress on the article, which I will finish this morning.
The task I was faced with didn’t change. What changed was how I felt about doing it.
It doesn’t matter if the task you’re facing is a mountain of laundry, a million-dollar deal, or being the best parent you can be to a rambunctious kid. Think about how you can bring your purpose, commitment, and spiritual connection into everything you do.
When you stop expecting the task or situation to change or go away, and instead use your response-ability to shift your energy, focus, and feelings, you begin showing up as the person you want to be.
Together we can do it!
Photo by Suat Eman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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