You’ve got everything coming at you daily, from routine tasks that you must complete for a successful day, to the unexpected roadblocks that hit us from time to time. Too many times, your routines can get you derailed as you try your best to juggle important aspects of your day. You’ve noticed lately that your main problem is taking up valuable real estate in your subconscious. You’re having daily interactions that leave you feeling depleted and dissatisfied with the quality of your life. You find yourself overthinking the outcome of every group interaction at work, and every one-on-one interaction with friends and loved ones!
You may need to bring those mental roadblocks to the forefront of your mind. Consider a mental overhaul for more productive interactions between your ‘self’ and the rest of the world.
Toxic relationships are taxing – they can leave you feeling distracted and unproductive before you even get through the midday…
No one wants to be left gasping for air and wishing you had some assistance to deal with their unsavory contributions to your days. Well, here’s some tough love for you: maybe, just maybe, you’re contributing to the poor quality of these interactions. It’s not really a matter of who’s at fault. Bad habits sneak into our personalities and before we know it we’re making excuses for them and blaming others for all that goes wrong in our lives.
So, what can you do about the myriad occasions in which these relationships seem to plague you? Even better, what can you do about the part that you’re contributing to these undesirable relationships? Well, even Mother Theresa had to create her mental toolbox to deal with the waves of worldwide personalities around her!
A great place to start is to ponder a bit about the many workshops and training sessions you’ve been to for work, in which you were taught how to manage stress, and how to be in touch with your senses and feelings. It turns out, if correctly done both of those strategies can prove to be very effective. They bring clarity to aspects of your personality that others may be able to appreciate better than you can, objectively.
A mindfulness routine can work wonders for you as you demonstrate for others how you want to be treated, and you simultaneously teach yourself needed self-esteem strategies, self-confidence, and better ways of communicating and interacting with others.
Let’s explore a few aspects of mindfulness that enable you to dig deeper in your subconscious mind, so that you can become more aware and more in control about how you’re showing up for your daily interactions.
Introspection:
When you’re carefully focusing in, and looking into your own thoughts, you’re engaging in introspection. Observing your own thoughts, your emotions and behavior, and your reactions to those situations will result in your learning key aspects of your personality and character. A simple example of this type of awareness would be to notice that you become very irritable if you go more than four hours without consuming food. This would be an important quality to know about yourself if this condition is happening when you’re in the company of others.
Prediction:
Once you have learned to get yourself to this phase of self-focus, you may then, be able to see patterns in the ways that your emotions are engaged, and reactions are demonstrated through your behavior.
Making a note of the patterns in your reactions to certain triggers can aid you in predicting how you’re likely to respond to similar conditions, in the future. Developing this skill of prediction will also be a great tool for determining how you would prefer to respond to those conditions moving forward. An example of an effective use of prediction is when you find it difficult to back out of tasks that you know you’re unprepared for or unable to perform, but you’re typically coerced to take on. Practicing prediction can truly be an effective strategy for developing a behavior modification process for yourself. If the process feels initially daunting and you’re feeling unsure about going through it on your own, you can enlist the assistance of a behavioral specialist. The ability to observe your own behavior as an individual on the outside looking in, takes a little bit of time and intentional practice, but it is well worth the positive outcome.
Self-Realization:
After practicing the concepts of prediction, self-realization involves developing a stronger understanding of your purpose and your potential to be the person you really want to be. The keener understanding of yourself truly brings a better sense of fulfillment in this consciously informed way of interacting with others.
On a more spiritual level, leaning in to your self-realization can free you from attachments to beliefs, attitudes, and things (like materialistic possessions) that society has dictated should be important to its members, but may now be less important to you, at your core.
Self-realization doesn’t mean that you overhaul your entire being and become someone unrecognizable to others. Yet this could possibly be the result of this practice if you’re seeking to show up in your world in a manner that leaves you feeling positive about how you’re regarded – because you’re now teaching the world the way you want it to interact with you.
Self-Actualization:
By the time you have tackled and achieved this phase of introspection, you have learned quite a bit about yourself, about others around you and out in the broader world, and you have pretty clear ideas about the tools that you need and that you will employ in your day to day living, moving forward.
You’re less concerned about what people think of you and the way that you do the things that are important to you. You’re better able to receive and react to disagreements and criticism from others, as you now understand certain principles concerning the ‘self’ and other entities outside of your ‘self’. Now, you understand clearly that each human being is an entirely separate bowl of emotions, beliefs, convictions and behaviors. This deeper level of understanding greatly shifts the way you see others reacting to the world; the way in which they react to you! The way others act according to their own life interactions and experiences becomes clearer to you and you now have the ability to quickly and in each moment, assess them objectively and compassionately, as the situation warrants.
Going into every conversation, every socialization and every assessment of the world around you with this new knowledge, now guides your existence and is completely freeing. You are now beginning the journey of a critical step - your true self-actualization.
Coach Mandy S.
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