Mindset Management for Wellbeing
Albert Einstein said, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its life believing that it is stupid.”
This quote sets the scene beautifully as we look into the importance of mindset management for wellbeing.
The simple fact is that if you take control of the way you approach your life from the point of view of what goes on in your mind, you’ll not only improve your health, but you’ll also improve your relationships, and your prospects of a happy and healthy future. It seems to me that the combined influence of the education systems most of us come through, the families most of us are brought up in, and more generally the world we live in, sets us up to struggle with the kind of crazy reference points the quirky quote above typifies. The upside here is that the ball is in our court in terms of being the one (and in fact the only one) who decides how we respond to the kinds of cultural/psychological undercurrents that we’ll experience in one way or other as we move through life.
The bottom line really, is that taking the time to look under the hood and see what’s going on in your mind on a daily basis will take you a long way in terms of being able to avoid wasting time on mindless thoughts and actions that can generate a lot of stress, and even spiral out of control into obsessions or addictions if the conditions are right for those conditions to take hold.
I’ve included an exercise at the end of this article to you get started with unearthing some of the negative beliefs that might be sitting in the unconscious part of your mind. The problem with negative beliefs is that they are incredibly effective in filtering our experiences in a way that only let us see our deficiencies, rather than all of the ways in which we are great. ‘Not good enough’ thinking or Impostor Syndrome as it sometimes manifests itself, is surprisingly common. It’s really quite perverse. I see clients in my coaching practice who’ve achieved fabulous things, but still manage to worry about being ‘found out’. It seems that the prospect of being made to feel inadequate in general, and stupid in particular, is one of the biggest fears that way too many people spend their life running away from.
An Exercise in Futility
What I want to say here, is that worrying about being a fish who can’t climb a tree is an exercise in futility and a license to be miserable. With concerted effort and focus a number of years ago, I was personally able to swap that kind of license for one that cleared the way for me to be for the most part happy and well. The strategies around mindfulness and mindset management that I used as I was going through a period of burnout in 2010, literally helped me to breathe life into my future.
Prior to that, because I hadn’t taken the initiative to manage what was going on in my mind, my mind was essentially managing me with its default programs. One of these default programs involves compulsively thinking. Another one adds in automatic negative thoughts that seem to spring up out of nowhere.
If you find yourself in a similar position to the one that I was in in 2010, I want to assure you that there is a way out. Recognising what’s going on is the first step in taking control back. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy is one well known approach that has been proven to be effective in helping people to bring their mindset back into balance. For my part, mindfulness in general, and regularly connecting with my breath in particular, are the tools that I rely on these days to maintain a healthy outlook.
I’ll be honest with you though, having to do something in the way of managing my mindset was a bitter pill for me to swallow back in the day. I was one of those people who had lived their whole life in their head. So the problem for me was that I was trying to solve the problems I was experiencing with exactly the same tools that had created and continued to perpetuate them. In fact, thinking back on it now, I can see how easy it would have been to have given up and told myself that feeling at best unsettled, and at worst regularly verging on anxiety attacks, was ‘just the way it was’. In other words, I could have easily stayed in a victim mentality. But I guess because I’d picked up enough understanding of the way the mind works through my initial coaching training, I knew on at least some level, that it’s not the world ‘out there’ that stops us from experiencing peace and contentment in our life, but our own habits of mind like perfectionism, as well as the tactics we might choose to use like blame, justification, numbing, and denial, that serve to keep us blind to the truth about what is holding us back from living the kind of life we deserve to be living.
The Importance of Feeling
Another thing that keeps us stuck is compulsively ‘doing’, rather than ‘being’. This entails never slowing down to feel into our feelings, and to check in with our body to find out what’s really going on. Starting to experience life on the level of feeling rather than just experiencing it on the level of thinking was a real game changer for me. I now know that one of the keys to wellbeing is to regularly feel into my body for clues about what’s really going on.
I want to invite you now to pause and take a moment to feel into your body. This exercise will allow you to take a snapshot of the tone of your current mindset. To prepare yourself for this exercise, just sit comfortably and take a couple of nice long, deep breaths, and notice any tension in your body. Then notice what happens to that tension as you ask yourself the following questions.
- Where am I applying perfectionism in my life?
- How do I feel about that aspect of my life right now?
- In what ways am I doing really well in this aspect of my life right now?
- In which other areas of my life am I doing really well?
- What drains my energy?
- What could I do to limit this drainage?
- How do I show myself respect?
- How else could I show myself respect?
- How easy or hard have I made it to feel good?
- What could I do to make it easier to feel good?
- When do I numb myself?
- How do I numb myself?
- What has numbing myself cost me so far in my life?
- What could I replace this behavior with?
- What do I say to myself when I’ve made a mistake?
- What’s a more empowering thing I could say?
- What do I say to myself when I’m tired?
- What’s a more compassionate thing I could say?
- What things could I do to cultivate more self-compassion?
Adopting practices that involve deliberately checking in with your body, and developing awareness around what’s going on in your mind, will set you up for a more peaceful and joyful existence than you would otherwise have. I’m living proof of the fact that it’s well and truly worth the effort.
About the author
Jane Turner
Jane Turner is the Director of the Wellness Coaching Collective. Jane uses NLP and Negative Pattern Clearing to help her clients fast track their way to their goals.
Jane holds Master Coach qualifications through the Behavioural Coaching Institute, and a Diploma in Counseling for Health and Social Care through the Medical Register of Australia. Jane will complete her Transpersonal Coaching qualifications in 2016.
In addition to her Wellness Coaching Programs, Jane also runs her Simplified Book Writing Program that enables her clients to get the information out of their head and onto the page in an easeful way.
