Wonderfully Mei Designs

Mindfulness is a millennial trend that is quickly creeping into our everyday lives, whether you are in business or otherwise.

Looking after your mind is important. It is one of the most important aspects of your well – being, along with making sure our bodies are well fed, rested and nurtured.

Mindfulness and deep reflection allows us to make better and bolder decisions.

Often we have many different tasks, projects and thoughts and ideas to sort through. It drives us into this state of insane overdrive, and results in being burnt out. I can’t say how many times I’ve been in this super, hyper-drive state and ended up burning out more times than I can remember (about four times to be exact).

Here are some tips, tricks and techniques to get you on your way to a healthier, better and more mindful way to approach business. Here’s to your mental health!

How to Implement Mindfulness into Your Everyday Business

• Create space and time in your schedule for reflection at the beginning and end of the day and particularly at the end of the week. Often we want to do as much work and in as little time as possible. Incorporating mindfulness will help maintain and allow for a better flow of thought throughout your day.
  
• Have your mindfulness techniques noted down and on-hand, just in case you are in need of getting to that place of peace and tranquillity. This might be in the form of Sticky Notes, a digital post-it note app for your laptop, where you can note down things on virtual stickies or a small notebook that you carry around with you.

Mindfulness Techniques

• Mindfulness app – follow the helpful steps in a mindfulness app like Headspace.
  Hundreds of themed sessions are available on everything from stress to sleep, bite-sized meditations for busy schedules, SOS exercises in case of sudden meltdowns.
• Thinking of one thought and letting your mind focus on that thing and let that thought fill you up. Much like how they teach the students in Hogwarts how to fight the Dementors;
  

  In order for it to work, you need to think of a memory. Not just any memory, a very happy memory, a very powerful memory… Allow it to fill you up… lose yourself in it … 

  Thoughts that could be included, include sitting on the beach from that holiday, one time in the South of France, or that freeing, elated feeling of being a child when you were younger and having the time and space to just be. Whatever helps you ground yourself in the moment, evoke feelings of freedom and peace and more importantly, clarity. That is the key.

Picture taken from the Daily Mail, 6 June 2013 Here

In the film After Earth, a father and son are left in a desolate post-apocalyptic nightmare. Kitai is trying to get back to his father but he is remote and far away from the spaceship that his father is in. Cypher is only young and doesn’t know how to get back, so is having to rely fully on the instruction of his father. At the beginning, Kitai is panicking and is ovewhelmed with the task ahead of him. Cypher advises his son, with a method to help him stop panicking and the following is a great mindfulness technique in order to ground yourself. This is to the point, and entirely helpful to get in touch with your core and connecting to the moment.

Cypher Raige: Kitai, calm down. Take a knee. Root yourself in this present moment now. Sight, sound, smell. What do you feel?

Kitai Raige: My body feels heavier.

Cypher Raige: Very good. Earth’s gravitational pull is different than at home. Very good. Now let’s go.

• Fear is a big thing that can crop up, especially when your business is up-levelling and you are not quite sure if you are ready for this shift. It’s scary, I know. And so that feeling of overwhelm is natural. It comes in unsteady waves of self-doubt, crippling paranoia, and feeling like one big emotional mess. This is linked to mindfulness, and can help you focus on wedding out the unecessary fears when tackling aspects of businesses, especially the potentially larger decisions that can affect you and your business overall in a larger way.

As Kitai (the son) says;

The only place that fear can exist is in our thoughts of the future. It is a product of our imagination, causing us to fear things that do not at present and may not ever exist. That is near insanity. Do not misunderstand me danger is very real but fear is a choice.”

We can often think, what if, but why not?

So they are my tips, tricks and prompts to implementing Mindfulness

What Mindfulness techniques have you implemented in your own life and business? Anything that is absolutely vital that you would like to share?