Mindfulness (11 page)

• Accept and learn from your mistakes. If you think that you've screwed up, instead of making things worse with negative self-talk, identify what you've learned from the situation.
  
• Take a “beginner's mind” approach. Put the past behind you and focus on what you could do differently next time.
  
• Focus on the positive aspects of life; on the things that make you feel good about yourself. Find what you enjoy doing, explore new activities and interests and do them more often!
  
• Make the most of opportunities for social contact. Connect with others through a shared interest. Whatever you enjoy doing, do it with other people.
  
• Make a contribution. Experience the good feelings that come from engaging with and helping other people.
  
• Develop your spirituality. Be aware of what connects you to a purpose in life that is larger and more eternal than yourself.
  

Do you have ideas and plans for the future? Something that you are looking forward to and want to achieve? Maybe you're saving up to visit friends and family in Australia. Perhaps you're hoping to run a marathon, write a novel or start your own business. Maybe you have a project at work that you want to successfully complete or you're aiming for a promotion. Whatever it is, you need clear aims and a focus. You need to identify your goal.

Working towards your goal is not always easy; when the going gets tough – when you face barriers, pitfalls and setbacks – you need something to keep you on track; you need an inner determination that will drive you forward, keep you focused and achieve your intentions and goals. You need willpower, self-control and discipline.

All sounds rather daunting? Not with mindfulness it's not! In this chapter, you will learn how to define your goals and work towards them in ways that will keep you feeling motivated and encouraged.

You will discover a little known fact – that in any one day, we've each only got a limited amount of willpower. All you need to do is use it effectively; to use your willpower mindfully.

Mindfulness techniques can help you to work towards your goals and develop the inner strength and ability to reach those goals. The sky's the limit!

Remember, you are never in the past or future; you are only ever in the present moment. So if the only thing that exists is the present moment, you might ask what the point is of having goals when goals are for the future? The point is that planning and working towards a goal is something you do in the present. You plan for the future, but live in the present.

Think of a goal and then ask yourself, “How does setting this goal make me feel right now?”

Perhaps your goal is to change your career or visit friends in Australia. Maybe your goal is to be healthier.

If the goal has a purpose that is meaningful to you, then you are more likely to feel inspired and want to take action.

On the other hand, you might be worried about the time it is going to take to achieve your goals. “If I leave my job and retrain for the career I really want, it could take years before I'm back earning what I do now.” Or: “If I join the gym now, it could be months before I start to feel the benefits.”

Maybe you're waiting for something to happen in the future before you can start working towards your goal now. Are you waiting for:

• The right man or woman to come into your life?
  
• For a colleague to leave?
  
• For the children to grow up?
  
• For someone else to approve?
  
• For someone to die?
  
• For someone to change their mind?
  
• For someone else to do it?
  

Although events unfold in their own time, simply hoping that future events might occur or worrying that they won't can hold you back and prevent you from working towards your goals. Whether you put a plan into action over the next year or not, that year will pass anyway.

In
Chapter 2
I explained how tunnel thinking can lure you into the future at the expense of the present. Certainly, tunnel thinking is useful for small, short-term goals (see “Set your goals at two levels”, below) or in a crisis when you need to ignore all other distractions and focus your attention on what lies ahead.

But for longer-term goals, the emphasis is not on
where
you will arrive at, it's on what happens and what you experience
along the way
. The emphasis is more on the experience, rather than the result.

It's easy to miss the fact that a large part of the reward is in the journey. Be mindful; see if you can focus your energy and attention on the process – the steps you take – to achieve your goal, rather than the goal itself.

Here are some mindful tips and ideas for setting and achieving your goals.

Set yourself a negative goal such as “stop eating junk” and your mind focuses on the negative words “stop” and “junk”. Goals that contain words such as “don't”, “mustn't” or “stop” are self-defeating. Instead of thinking “I must stop eating junk”, think “I want to be more healthy and slim”.

Positive goals direct what to do rather than what not to do. You are more likely to achieve goals that get you what you want, rather than goals that stop you doing something.

Goals that are framed in terms of “mustn't”, “can't” or “won't” create doom and gloom and do not motivate you! To increase your chances of achieving any goal, it helps to think of a positive goal with a positive outcome. Your mind will be more willing to accept and move towards a positive goal.

This is about focusing on both short and long-term goals. First you create your “big picture” of what you want to happen. Maybe it's to be able to complete a 10 km run. Perhaps it's to go to Australia next summer. This is your long-term goal. Then, you break this down into the smaller and smaller steps to get what you want. To run an extra 2 km each month or to save £200 a month towards your trip. These are your short-term goals.

It can be difficult to meet a long-term goal without first using a series of short-term goals. Working on your goals mindfully means that you recognize that there are steps – a process before the outcome. Short-term goals can be achieved in the present. The first short-term goals should be ones you can reasonably be sure you can reach. Later, short-term goals are those that will build on the success of the first goals. Keep adding short-term goals until you achieve your long-term goal.

Have patience and trust – understand that as you work towards your goal, things will develop and unfold in their own time.

Commit to doing one small thing to further your goal every day (or however often is practical) and your goal will always be part of what's happening now. If you can't do something daily, sticking a picture of your goal on your wall or as your screensaver, or emailing yourself reminders, also help to keep the goal in the moment.

Be aware of and record your achievements, even the small ones. There are a number of ways you could do this; keeping a blog or paper journal for example.

Whatever your goals, record the tasks you've done that relate specifically to those goals. If one of your goals is to run a marathon this year, or write a 45,000 word novel, regularly record how long you trained for, how many words you wrote along with anything else that supports those goals, such as time at the gym or research you did towards the novel.

Look back through your journal or blog and review your progress. It's always nice to look back and see that you've had a productive time working towards your goals, but your review can also help you find room for improvement.

If everything's been going well and you've been recording great progress with continual improvement, you can give yourself a pat on the back knowing that you're well on course.

If you haven't written anything for a specific goal, is that a sign that maybe you need to work more towards that goal? Or maybe that goal wasn't as important to you as you first thought and it's time to reassess?

Be prepared to be flexible and adapt your thinking and your goals. Having goals is important, but when you become overly attached to them, you are stuck with decisions you made in the past.

Beware of the sunk costs trap! Sunk costs can fool you into sticking with something you would be best off ending; you continue to put more time, effort or money into someone or something even though it's plainly not doing you any good.

Your goals may change as time goes on, so adjust them regularly to reflect new knowledge and experience. If a specific goal no longer feels appropriate, then let it go. Acknowledge past decisions and actions,
recognize they were the right decisions and actions then but not for now.

Keep in mind that setbacks can happen. Don't get discouraged and give up. Bring yourself back to the present by identifying what you've learnt from the setback and adjust your goal. All that matters then is what happens from this moment on.

Not sure if you can do it? Feel the fear and do it anyway! You have to take action to feel good about yourself, rather than waiting to feel good about yourself before taking action.

Know that having goals and working towards them is what separates those that do and those that only wish they had!

*****

Do you sometimes wish you had more willpower or self-control so that you could achieve the things you declared that you would? We've all got good intentions; maybe you've promised yourself you are going to stop smoking, fill in your tax form or take more exercise?

Willpower gives you an inner determination that drives you forward. It gives you the ability to keep focused and achieve your intentions and goals; to do what you intend to do even when you don't feel like doing it.

Research by Mark Muraven
⁷
shows that, just like muscle strength, willpower can also be increased and strengthened through suitable “exercise”. Muraven showed that by carrying out simple activities that require
small
amounts of self-control you will soon develop the self-control and willpower to tackle the bigger issues.

Set small daily goals that you often avoid doing and get them done no matter what. By working on small tasks that you are reluctant to do, you can develop the ability to tackle the bigger challenges.

Try one of these everyday for two weeks:

• Are there dishes in the sink that need washing, or does the dishwasher need to emptied? Get up and deal with it now.
  
• Take the rubbish out each night or make your bed every morning without fail.
  
• Answer your work emails by the end of the day– even if it's just to email an answer that says “I'll get back to you on this”.
  
• If your job involves working indoors – get outside for a 10-minute walk every lunchtime.
  
• Only going up a few floors? Don't take the lift, walk up the stairs.
  
• Get off the tube or bus one stop earlier or park your car 10 minutes from your destination and walk the rest of the way.
  
• Focus on sitting up straight every day.
  

Mindfulness techniques can help you to work on those small tasks so you can gain inner strength and develop the ability to fulfil your bigger intentions.

Single-task, don't multi-task! You cannot maintain energy and focus if you are trying to achieve more than one thing at a time. Don't, for example, make yourself wash up, take the rubbish out and pay all your bills online all at once. You'll only overload your brain's limited capacity for attention and get distracted by other things and thoughts about what you need to do. Focus! Do each task slowly and completely. Do each of them in the present.

Don't plan things close together; instead, leave room between activities on your schedule. This way, your day is more flexible and leaves space in case one thing takes longer than you planned.

When you focus on doing just one small thing you don't feel like doing, you will start to feel more in control and more positive.

Reflect on having achieved the small task and be aware of how you feel now, in the present moment, for having achieved it. You'll soon find that you can move on to bigger challenges to your willpower and self-control once you become more successful at cracking the small tasks.

“If I can make myself walk up the stairs instead of taking the lift every day – that means I can also make myself go to the gym.”

Make this mindfulness practice a habit. Remember, the more often you do or think something, the more you strengthen the habit until it becomes automatic.

When you've needed willpower to get on with something, have you said, or thought, any of the following?

• I can't
  
• I've never been any good at this
  
• It's too hard
  
• I'm bound to fail
  
• I haven't got the time
  
• I've got too much else to do
  

Beware these mind traps! As well as doing less and doing it with intent and deliberation, mindfulness also involves acting and behaving without judgement. So beware mind traps and recognize unhelpful self-talk.

Also, aim to replace these thoughts with a corresponding helpful thought. Focus on the benefits, not the difficulties.

Instead of thinking about how hard something is, think about what you will get out of it. For example, rather than think about how you can't be bothered, focus on how good you'll feel when you're done, and how much healthier you'll become if you keep it up. If you have a hard time getting started, imagine you are encouraging a friend who is trying to achieve the same goals that you are. Then, tell yourself those positive words. Phrases such as:

• I can
  
• I will
  
• I can do my best
  
• I can work my way up to doing that
  
• I can give it a go
  

If, at any point, you fail to do what you intended, you need to do so without condemning yourself. Approach more situations with a beginner's mind; put aside your judgements and beliefs about what you can or can't do.

Responding to familiar situations, experiences or events in familiar established ways keeps you out of the present and living in the past. It doesn't allow you to be aware of any new insights.

Instead, develop the habit of being open to new possibilities.

You can really help yourself by putting things into place that will make it more likely you'll follow through with your good intentions.

I often tell the story about my friend, Sue, who gets the willpower she needs to go swimming twice a week by putting her swimming costume on before she gets dressed. “That way,” she says, “I feel so uncomfortable with it on underneath my clothes that I either have to get undressed again, or, head straight for the pool. Of course, I go to the pool.”