Practices To Handle Anxieties

Meditation is exploring. When we meditate we venture into the workings of our minds: sensations, emotions and thoughts.

Mindfulness meditation asks us to suspend judgment and unleash our natural curiosity about the workings of the mind, approaching our experience with warmth and kindness, to ourselves and others.

“Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally. And then I sometimes add, in the service of self-understanding and wisdom.”

• Breathe before eating. 
• Listen to your body and measure your hunger.
• Eat according to your hunger. You can more mindfully choose what to eat, when to eat, and how much to eat. 
• Practice peaceful eating. It’s not easy to digest or savor your food if you aren’t relaxed.
• If you don’t love it, don’t eat it. Make a mindful choice about what to eat based on what you really enjoy.

• Trip over what you want to do. If you intend to do some yoga or to meditate, put your yoga mat or your meditation cushion in the middle of your floor.
• Refresh your triggers regularly - add variety or make them funny so they stick with you longer.
• Create new patterns. You could try a series of “If this, then that” messages to create easy reminders to shift into slow brain.

• The Mind is not an enemy, which needs to be killed, but something to befriend.
• Creating a calm space inside us can help calm the monkey down. Like a toddler throwing tantrums, you need to calm down the surroundings and minimize activity to keep the noise down.
• Reducing distractions can help calm our Mind. We normally have a thousand things to check or look after throughout the day, be it email, notifications, etc. all of which keep the Monkey Mind jumping.
• We are rushing too fast, most of the day. We need to slow down, pause and get quieter in between our never-ending daily routine.

1. Meditate in the morning, starting with just 2 minutes.
2. Provide yourself intentional space for your focused activities, blocking the time slots.
3. Turn off as many distractions from your entire day, while turning on your awareness towards them.
4. Do not judge or condemn your mind, and keep witnessing what it is doing.
5. Slow down, relax your muscles, and take some deep breaths to calm yourself.
6. Take frequent short breaks, putting space between two activities.

Detachment is the key to effective observation. In mindfulness practice, it requires that you become an observer of yourself. In order to do that, you have to learn to split your attention.

Modern leadership depends on relationships. Meaningful relationships emerge when you know and understand each other. Observing others is essential for effective communication, interpersonal skills, influencing people,  managing group dynamics, and getting buy-in.

If you focus on getting the small stuff done but not the big stuff, or switch between tasks all the time, you’ll be less effective.

Pick one important thing to focus on at a time and learn to evaluate what tasks and projects are of higher value to you.

It's best done by focusing on the smallest first step and practicing just launching into that.

Pick the tiniest first step, and launch into it.

• Recognize when a part of my your is messy and could use more structure.
• Contemplate a structure that would give you a feeling of trust.
• Write out the structure, then put it somewhere you’ll see it.
• Put it into action, as a practice.
• Revisit and revise on a regular basis.

• Financial structure. Create a system so that you are tracking your spending on a regular basis, and have a plan for how to spend it.
• Communication. Create a system for how you handle emails and messages.
• Health. Create a system for tracking how active you are and what will you eat to give yourself a thriving healthy life.
• Physical surroundings. Create a system to asses how messy your house is and how does all of this affect your mental state.

Since gratitude is a relative experience, it’s often useful to recognize how many things aren’t problems in your life, but you just never notice them.

Even if you feel like you don’t live in great conditions, that your friends have better jobs and relationships there were many points in time when things could have been much, much worse. 

The next time you think the average person is better off than you, ask yourself whether you might not simply be ignoring the problems and pains of others, simply because they aren’t as visible as the success people want you to see.

A few ways to rest that feel very replenishing:

• Closing your eyes, lying down, and doing nothing.
• Going outside without using a device.
• Relaxing with someone else. Feeling connection with them.
• Being fully present with a simple activity, like drinking coffee.
• Playing music, creating art, dancing etc.

You can relax while doing something (having a bath, a cup of coffee etc.) You don’t have to be lying down, with your eyes closed.

The key is to make this the one thing that you’re doing. Be all in with this task, instead of jumping around.

Urgent but unimportant tasks = distractions.

Urgent tasks put us into constant “reply mode.” Important work is related to planned tasks that move us closer to our goals.

Anytime you are pulled away from your tasks, it takes time to readjust to them when you jump back in (sometimes it can take up to 25 minutes).

Interruptions (notifications, loud noises, social media, checking email etc.) harm your concentration.