mindset Archives - Working Mom's Balance

What is Mindfulness and Why Practice It

April 6, 2021 | Leave a Comment

Mindfulness is about living in the present moment. When we are practicing mindfulness we put all of our attention and focus on where we are and what we are doing. When we bring all of our attention to the thing we are engaged in, we can accomplish more and achieve greater results. This makes logical sense, if you are fully focused on the task at hand you will be more efficient and effective. However, in our modern world, we are often distracted, multi-tasking, and easily lose focus. Practicing mindfulness on a regular basis can help improve productivity at work and home. When we regularly practice being mindful during simple tasks we will become better and better at being mindful in all of our tasks.

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness can be defined as a mental state in which a person is entirely focused on the present moment. When we practice mindfulness, we become aware of how all of our senses are experiencing our current reality. We also calmly notice, acknowledge, and accept all of our thoughts, feelings, and sensations.

Mindfulness is not the absence of thinking, but rather it is like a concentrated form of thinking. The goal is not to remove ourselves from thoughts, but to remove distractions from our thoughts. We become conscious of our present moment. We let go of the past, the future, our worries, and fears, and everything else. When we are mindful, we aren’t worried about the outcome of our work, our focus is on the present moment in the process.

Why practice mindfulness?

Mindfulness has been shown to reduce stress, decrease depression levels, improve physical health, and help people cope and recover from illness. It can also help with emotion regulation, increase productivity and performance, build resilience, and decrease burnout. The benefits apply to every single person, from young children to the elderly.

In our busy world, full of distractions, staying mindful in the present moment is not something that many of us are really good at. In order to improve our ability to be mindful, we must intentionally practice mindfulness on a consistent basis. You cannot experience great results simply from practicing one time in order to learn the process. It is something that builds and develops over time. Mindfulness is a skill that must be learned and consistently improved upon for the most benefit.

Practicing Mindfulness Can Increase Productivity

One of the most helpful things that practicing mindfulness can do for us is to help us become more focused and engaged in what we are doing. When we are fully and completely engaged in our present moment we are better able to ignore distractions. By practicing mindfulness we learn how to use our brain as a spotlight. We can learn to shine our spotlight on exactly what we need to focus on so that we can let everything else go. This can help us to become more fully engaged in our work and become more productive.

It is good to practice mindfulness in our work to help us become more engaged. However, when we are first starting out, it may be easier to learn and practice mindfulness in the simple and mundane tasks of life. As we build our “mindfulness muscle” these skills will automatically expand into the work that we are doing. We can learn to become more mindful in each and every moment of our day. Ignoring distractions, stilling the useless chatter in our mind, and fully experiencing our present moment and experience. This is truly living, actively engaging and noticing the moment we are in.

Today’s Action Step

Take a few minutes to bring your full awareness to your current moment. Notice what’s happening in your mind, pay attention to how your body feels. Look around you to discover things you may have otherwise missed. Pause all considerations for the past or future and just fully engage with this current moment. Do this several times a day to help you begin to build your mindfulness muscle.

Additional Resources

Aaptiv, the app that I use for exercise programs has a lot of helpful meditation “workouts” that can help build your mindfulness skills.

The Confidence Gap: A Guide to Overcoming Fear and Self-Doubt by Russ Harris – this book covers a lot of mindfulness practices and can help you understand what mindfulness is.

Episode 18 of The Working Mom’s Balance Podcast – How to Get Yourself to Do What You Want to Do

Episode 19 of The Working Mom’s Balance Podcast – Taking Action, Even When You Don’t Feel Like It

What is mindfulness and how can we use it to improve our lives? Mindfulness can help us fully engage in our present moment to become more productive and successful.

3 Gratitude Practices to Improve Your Life

November 20, 2020 | 1 Comment

Gratitude has been called the mother of all virtues. Practicing and experiencing gratitude encourages the development of other virtues like patience, humility, and wisdom.

The practice of gratitude has been shown to increase energy and alertness, help build resilience, and strengthen our ability to cope with stress. Gratitude helps us develop more secure relationships, increases our self-worth, our confidence, and our sense of purpose. Gratitude makes it more likely that we’ll be successful in reaching our goals and it makes us be more generous and helpful to others.

Grateful people also experience better physical health. Research shows that they have stronger immune systems, lower blood pressure, decreased inflammation in their bodies, less aches and pains, and they can sleep better.

There are some incredible benefits to practicing gratitude.

What is gratitude?

There are two parts required for gratitude. Gratitude involves recognizing that you have received something positive. This could be a tangible gift, an experience, a situation, essentially anything that you perceive as positive or good. When we are grateful for something there is something about it that makes it really valuable to us.

The second piece that is involved with gratitude is the recognition that this gift or outcome has an external source. You received or experienced something good and you’re able to identify the source of that goodness outside of yourself. It is also not something that is necessarily earned or deserved. We are grateful for things that are true gifts to us.

Practicing gratitude helps to remind us that there is good in the world. It doesn’t mean that there are never challenges or bad situations in life, it doesn’t ignore or deny the hard, it simply helps us to acknowledge that even in the midst of the worst hard, there is also some amount of goodness.

And that goodness doesn’t stem simply from our own selves. It’s great to acknowledge the goodness in ourselves and to appreciate the things that we are able to do, the work and the goals we accomplish, but gratitude isn’t about pride, gratitude turns our focus outward to remind us that we are humbly dependent on others. The goodness we experience in life isn’t only attributable to ourselves.

Gratitude teaches us that other people and God, provide us with gifts and goodness that enrich and enhance our lives.

It teaches us to recognize that we are not self-sufficient. We need other people.

Gratitude Practices to Try

There are several gratitude practices we can implement to help us practice and experience more gratitude in our lives. Gratitude must become a practice, something we work at each and every day. Some days will be easier than others, but over time, our brain will begin to notice the good in the midst of the hard.

Gratitude Journal

The simplest gratitude practice is a gratitude journal. At the end of the day or the beginning of the next day, write down at least three things that you are grateful for. These don’t have to be huge things, be grateful for the small gifts too. The main rule is that you can’t write the same things every day. Find something new to be grateful for each and every day.

Identify the thing you are grateful for, and the person or source of that gift, and then take a few moments to just sit and feel the gratitude and other emotions that come from being thankful for that gift.

The longer you do this, the more your brain will start to notice the good, even when you’re not sitting down to intentionally think about things you’re grateful for. You will have started building the pathways in your brain to start always looking for gifts. The more you look, the easier it will be to notice.

Gratitude Reappraisal

Another gratitude practice that can be really helpful is a practice called grateful reappraisal. This is when you consider an unpleasant experience or memory. Think about a difficult circumstance that you have gone through and consider with the benefit of hindsight what positive came out of that situation. Or how did going through that experience helped to prepare you for the future or teach you something that helped you grow in a meaningful way.

Reframing and processing our challenging times can help us to rewrite our stories. In episode two of the Working Mom’s Balance Podcast, I talked about one of the pillars that support a meaningful life is the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. We can choose the perspective we take when telling our stories.

Grateful reappraisal practices help us to rewrite our stories to help us recognize the good, the ways we’ve grown, the strength we’ve developed, and how the hard times have led us to the good things we have.

Gratitude Visit or Gratitude Letter

A third gratitude practice that I’d recommend is also the one that you’ll probably feel the most uncomfortable with. This practice is known as the gratitude visit or gratitude letter. Three times during my Master’s degree program we were assigned to write a gratitude letter and share it in an in-person visit. Each time I felt nervous and uncomfortable getting started, but the experience was incredibly valuable and these came to be my favorite assignments.

A gratitude visit is one of the most effective ways to deepen gratitude and it has been found to be even more effective than gratitude lists and other practices. It can help increase happiness and decrease depression for up to 3 months after you do it.

Write the letter

For this practice, think of someone who did something for you for which you are extremely grateful. You want to think of a situation where you never expressed your gratitude in a meaningful way. Ideally, you want to pick someone that is still alive that you can meet with. It can be very meaningful to write a gratitude letter to someone who has passed away, but the exercise is even more enhanced by the visit experience, so at least for your first attempt, try to pick someone still alive and available to you.

Write a letter to that person expressing your gratitude. Be specific about what the person did, why you are grateful, and how their actions affected your life. The letter doesn’t need to be long, about 300 words are usually recommended.

Share the Letter in an In Person Visit

Then, once you’ve written your letter, plan a visit. Obviously, in our current reality, you’ll likely need to schedule a Facetime call or Zoom meeting for most people but get as in person with your person as you can. And then read your letter to the person. After you read your letter, talk and reflect to discuss any feelings and reactions with each other. Make sure the other person gets to keep a copy of your letter. It will likely be something that they treasure.

This practice has been found to be incredibly meaningful for both the giver and the receiver. There are so many benefits that come from fully expressing our gratitude to the important people in our lives in a tangible way. I highly encourage you to give this practice a try. As I said, you’ll probably feel uncomfortable at first, but press through the discomfort because it really is such a neat experience.

Today’s Action Step

Gratitude is an incredibly powerful practice that has been shown in numerous research studies to increase our well-being and life satisfaction. If you want to be happier, train yourself to become more grateful. It takes work and intentionality to teach your mind to notice and appreciate the good around you, but the work is worth it. Over the coming months take some time to try each of the practices outlined above. Let me know what your experience is like with these ideas in the comments.

Resources for Further Study

Book: Thanks! How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier by Robert Emmons

Podcast Episode: The Practice of Gratitude

These gratitude practices can help to deepen your gratitude, increase your happiness, and lower your chance of depression.

Managing Emotions During a Crisis

April 9, 2020 | Leave a Comment

During a crisis, many people feel overwhelmed and out of control because of their emotions. We are flooded with primarily negative emotions that make us feel like we are drowning.

It is important to remember that your emotions don’t have to control you, you can control and manage your emotions. They are within your power. You can use your brain to control the way you feel. When you begin to accept and believe this, it empowers you to start feeling better. If the emotions you are feeling are based on the aspects of your situation that you can’t control you are giving your control and power away. Circumstances do not get to control how you feel unless you let them.

When going through a crisis it can be easy to let our emotions control us, but we can manage our emotions and choose how we feel.

We don’t want to suppress, bury, or ignore emotions. If we do, they tend to build up pressure and explode later on and we lose control of ourselves.

(If you prefer to watch and listen as opposed to reading, feel free to watch me teach this message on my YouTube channel.)

Notice and Acknowledge Your Emotions

Instead, it is important to notice and acknowledge your emotions. Whatever feelings you are feeling are real, they are valid, and there is nothing wrong with them. You have full permission to feel whatever emotions are coming up for you in this current situation. Don’t shame or beat yourself up and don’t compare your emotional experience with someone else’s. Everyone is experiencing this situation differently. We aren’t playing Emotional Olympics. You get to feel what you are feeling and it is true and real.

Recognize Your Power Over Your Emotions

With that said, remember that you also have power here. You can control your emotions and therefore change the way you feel.

Ruminating over negative emotions in which you feel powerless is not helpful. Feeling anxiety, fear, worry, anger, and frustration over things you cannot change does not serve anyone.

There are times when negative emotions are helpful. When we can use them to motivate us into good decisions. When we feel fear and avoid continuing in the path of a lion, that is helpful. But when we are buried in anxiety about things we can’t control, it is not helpful. What may be helpful is to focus instead on what we can control and on the good parts of our experience.

(Find out more about how our thoughts create our emotions in this post.)

Are Your Emotions Serving You?

Acknowledge your emotions, and as I’ve talked about before, consider if they are serving you or not. If your emotions are not helping you to take steps to improve your situation in ways that you have control, then let’s stop ruminating on those emotions and focus on better things.

Change Your Thoughts to Change Your Emotions

When you focus your thoughts on positive things it will help you experience positive emotions.

One of my favorite Bible verses says “Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise” (Philippians 4:8).

God knows that ruminating and dwelling on negative things we can’t control doesn’t serve us. Instead, he invites us to focus on things we can change. Things that are good.

When you notice yourself in a thought spiral, dwelling and ruminating on the negative, take some time to pause. Take some deep breaths, and purposely choose something good and lovely to focus on instead. Go find some funny cat videos or silly memes if humor is your thing. Go outside and look for something beautiful in nature. Take a minute to talk about silly jokes with your kids. Shift your mindset to looking at what is still good. There is still plenty of good to focus on.

(For further information on how to develop a healthy mindset, check out this post.)

There are also a few distancing techniques from the world of psychology that can be helpful in regulating our emotions. Just like we practice social distancing, we can also distance ourselves from negative emotions.

Psychological Distancing for Managing Emotions

Psychological distancing is the distance you feel when your friend tells you about a situation they are going through. You can feel empathy for them and their situation, but you don’t actually feel their pain or their experience because you are distant from the situation. You aren’t in the situation, so you have the psychological distance to see things from a different perspective.

It can be helpful to find someone who can provide this psychological distance with us when we are going through a crisis because our friends are able to provide some unbiased advice and support since they are not in the middle of the situation. Find a friend, counselor, or coach who can listen to you and hold space to help support you in challenging times.

Temporal Distancing for Managing Emotions

Use temporal distancing to help in managing your emotions by imaging a brighter future.

Temporal distancing is another helpful strategy. This is where we get to play some mental time travel and remember that now is not permanent. We will overcome this. We have to remember that our world, our species has faced global crises before. We’ve been through global pandemics and we’ve survived and continued on. It may not have happened in our lifetimes, but it has happened.

Temporal distancing gives us the chance to imagine a better future. Use your brain to remember that this too shall pass and focus on the hope you can find in that. Temporal distancing is when you use your mind to imagine a brighter, better future after the crisis has passed.

Questions to Help With Managing Emotions in a Crisis

Take some time to get out a pen and paper and journal through the following questions to help you with managing your emotions in the midst of a crisis.

What emotions are coming up for you during this time?
Make a list of 10 things that are good and true and pleasing and lovely that you can meditate on when you find yourself ruminating on negative thoughts and emotions.
What friend, counselor, or coach you can talk to when you are having a hard time distancing yourself from your overwhelming emotions?
Write out your best hopes and brightest vision for our better future. When this is all over, what do you dream for our world and for your life? Play some mental time travel and create a beautiful vision of hope.

When we are facing a crisis it can feel like we are overwhelmed by our emotions and life feels out of control. We have power over our emotions. Learn how to manage emotions.

How to Cope with Change Effectively

April 8, 2020 | Leave a Comment

Life is a little different for everyone on the planet right now. Day to day life has changed, for some more than others, but no one has escaped change. The coronavirus is a global pandemic that is causing huge shifts in the ways we live our daily lives.

One of the hardest parts of all of this is that we have no idea when this will end. And when it does end, our world is going to look a lot different, possibly forever.

Change is something that we have all been dramatically, drastically, and suddenly thrown into in recent days. And change is not easy for most people.

(If you prefer to hear and watch this message, you can watch my YouTube video on this topic through this link.)

Change or Lose Your Mind

to cope with change we must learn to face the changes and learn to cope with those changes effectively or we will lose our mind.

When someone is diagnosed with heart disease, they can’t just go to the doctor for a pill or surgery and then move on with their lives as they were. Instead, heart disease patients go home with a long list of things about their lives that need to change. They must change the way they eat, exercise, their sleep, their stress levels, and more.

For heart disease patients, the choice that they face is to change or die. If they don’t make the changes that the doctors are recommending the heart disease cannot be fixed and they will eventually die, much sooner than if they had made the changes. And what we know about heart disease patients is that most of the time, the changes are too hard. They fail to make these long-term, major lifestyle changes because the changes are too drastic, sudden, and difficult.

For all of us, around the world, right now, we are being forced to make changes to our lives in incredibly drastic, life-altering ways. While many of these changes may be temporary, we will still be living in this temporarily different lifestyle for many weeks. We still have to deal with the reality that our lives are incredibly different from what they were just a few weeks ago. And the choice we are given is not necessarily “change or die” like heart disease patients. For most of us, we aren’t going to die during this crisis. But the choice we are facing is to change or lose your mind. And we’re trying to avoid that here.

The 3 F’s That Don’t Work in Change

In the world of change management, researchers have discovered that there are three approaches to change that rarely work. They are known as the 3 F’s – facts, fear, and force. Right now, we have a whole lot of facts, fear, and force that are trying to cause us to change. We are allowing our choices to be led by facts, fear, and force.

Facts

We have facts coming at us from every angle every time we look at our phone, turn on the TV, or talk to our friends. Facts are good. There is nothing wrong with facts, and it is quite helpful to understand the facts of a situation to make good decisions, but facts cannot be the main driving force to motivate us to make changes in our lives.

Fear

There is also a lot of fear going on in our current situation and there are so many “what ifs” that we could worry about. The truth is, there are so many things we just don’t know, but we can’t allow our fears to motivate us either.

Force

The third “F”, force, is also largely at play in our current environment. The schools are closed so you are now forced to teach your kids instead of sending them to school. The government is “forcing” you to stay at your house. Or if you’re an essential employee, you are being “forced” to put your health on the line and go to work each day.

These three “Fs”, facts, fear, and force are driving most people right now. But we know that these are not healthy or effective ways to make changes in our lives.

The 3 R’s to Effectively Cope with Change

Fortunately, there are three approaches to change that actually do work. These are known as the 3 R’s – relate, repeat, reframe. Let’s examine how we can use these three ideas to positively and effectively cope with the changes in our lives that are needed to stay healthy and thrive during the COVID-19 crisis (or any future crisis we might face).

Relate

Our first idea is to relate. Relate is something that is both really hard and really easy right now. The easy part is the fact that everyone on the planet is dealing with COVID-19 right now. Most of the time in a crisis situation, you feel alone and isolated, but in this situation, we are all in this together. None of us are dealing with this by ourselves. The challenge of our situation though is that we aren’t able to relate in person right now. This is somewhat unique. We can’t meet for coffee to talk about our challenges. We can’t give each other hugs and build that sense of in-person community that is so important to help us get through challenging times.

We must find new ways to relate to each other during this crisis. We cannot relate in our usual ways, but we can find ways to build those relationships and that community that we all need, even as we practice social distancing.

Many people are using basic social media for their relationships right now. And while social media can be very valuable and helpful in this situation, if the only relating you are doing with other people is through likes and comments on social media posts, you are not going to be able to build the depth of community and relationship that you need during this time.

Instead, we can use technology options that allow us to relate with each other with more depth. This would be things like text messages, phone calls, FaceTime, Zoom, Voxer, and the like. The more it feels like you’re connecting face to face in person, the better. It is a tremendous blessing that we are going through this challenge right now when we have the technology that allows us to connect by 2 way video through the device that is constantly in most of our hands. Find creative ways to relate and build community. Meet and connect with your extended family, friends, and small groups in this way as much as you are able.

(Learn more about how to build strong friendships as an adult in this post.)

Repeat

The second idea to help us manage change is to repeat. Let me give you a very simplistic explanation for how our brains work. Think of your brain as a roadmap. There are certain pathways that your brain uses all the time and no longer even has to think about. Your drive to work, for instance. Your brain can take you to work almost on autopilot, you don’t have to consciously think about the route you take. These types of activities and thoughts are like a superhighway in your brain. They happen quickly, easily, and don’t take much energy for your brain to travel across.

And then you have those thoughts and activities that are used sometimes. These might look like a regular highway in your brain. It’s pretty easy to go down these, but not quite as easy and fast as those superhighways. You also have smaller roads and pathways for things you do even less often.

(This post can help you understand your thoughts and your brain a little better.)

What is happening right now is that everything is new and different. All of those superhighways your brain has built over the years are no longer working. Road closed, can’t get through, must build a new path. This is making our brains freak out because there is nothing reliable for our brains to depend on. There are no easy paths.

So what we want to do here is to build some new repetition into our lives to give our brains some things to depend on. We’re going to be in this “new normal” for at least several more weeks. We want to quickly take some time to build some new habits, new routines, and new thoughts that we can repeat over and over to help our brains build some reliable roads and highways that it can rely on during this time. We can help our brain not freak out by providing repetition to give our brains some easier paths when everything feels like it is chaotic and always changing.

Reframe

The third thing we want to do to cope with change is to reframe. We reframe when we take the time to see our situation in a fresh and new way. A lot of us are currently using the news, the changes, and the unknowns to freak out. We’re experiencing a lot of anxiety and fear about things that we can’t control and this is not serving us or helping in any way.

Instead, we need to consider the thoughts and the perspective we have on our situation and question whether it is serving us. How are your thoughts helping or hindering you right now?

If your thoughts are not serving you, this isn’t the time to feel guilty or experience shame for these thoughts. The purpose is just to get curious and recognize what is happening in our brains. Because one of the few things we can control in this crazy world is the thoughts that are happening inside of our own brains. So take the time to notice what thoughts are running through your brain and then decide if those thoughts are helpful. Are your thoughts allowing you to thrive or causing you to suffer?

If the thoughts aren’t serving you, take the time to reframe your thoughts to get a new perspective. Figure out what you can think about your situation that will help you see it in a different and more positive light.

(For a helpful guide on changing your anxious thoughts, check out this post.)

Self Application – How to Effectively Cope with Change

Now we understand the three ways to effectively implement and cope with change in our lives. We have to find people we can relate with during difficult times, use repetition to give our brain something it can rely on, and reframe our thoughts to see our situation from a helpful perspective. Below are five questions for you to journal through to help you deal with the changes you are currently facing. They are written for the current COVID-19 crisis that we are facing, but if you are reading this post sometime in the future, change the “coronavirus crisis” words to whatever change or challenge you are currently facing.

In what specific ways is the coronavirus crisis affecting you?
What are your thoughts about the coronavirus and the ways that it has impacted your life?
How could you reframe some of those thoughts that might not be serving you to see your situation in a fresh way?
What can you do today to find support, community, and relationship as we practice social distancing?
Take some time to write out some new habits and routines you could implement to help your brain be more at peace in the coming weeks.

What is Mindfulness and Why Practice It

What is Mindfulness?

Why practice mindfulness?

Practicing Mindfulness Can Increase Productivity

Today’s Action Step

Additional Resources

3 Gratitude Practices to Improve Your Life

What is gratitude?