Effective Planning and Strategy vs. Controlling Life Out of Anxiety

(Video above)

Building awareness of:

• trying to control life which comes out of states of fear and anxiety, or

• creating effective planning and strategy which comes out of states of feeling confidence, abundance, excitement and other positive energy.

Our most effective planning comes from an awareness of our emotional state. This often requires giving ourselves time and space to notice. Mindfully reflecting on what we are feeling in the moment taps us into our creative energy and gives us that flash of inspiration, insight, and vision of the future that we need to move forward.

Accepting vs. Resisting

In this video I touch on:

• feeling difficult emotions with presence and acceptance

  • how this allows us to be more flexible and creative and make a decision that can help us in the moment.

  • not judging the emotion as good or bad and allowing the energy of the emotion to come and go.

• creating prolonged suffering by fighting/struggling/resisting the emotion

  • how this binds and constricts us, getting us stuck and miserable to be around!

  • how this causes physical exhaustion in the body and eventual disease/physical ailments if we hold onto these emotions over the years by creating habits of negativity. These habits create deeper and deeper grooves in the brain. We are much more likely to go down the same groove when it has been traveled often.

Build Your Brain 101: 8 Immediate Benefits of Mindfulness

Some common symptoms and problems that you may be experiencing in our modern world as a man:

• Excessive anxiety and stress, and you internalize and absorb this stress

• Can’t get out of your head / mind spins in circles

• More often than not analyzing / thinking / evaluating future tasks or past problems

• Becoming increasingly angry and irritable and snap at small, trivial things

• Can’t make decisions / procrastination

• Weak work performance

• Motivation not what it used to be

• Lost that joy / contentment or purpose

• Have trouble in intimate relationships and / or simply socializing

• Body aches / body is not what it used to be / getting sick often

• Taking on too much responsibility and being resentful for it

Mindfulness is a powerful tool to help begin to reduce these symptoms.

So what is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is:

• Being completely tuned into the current moment

• Sensing and feeling instead of thinking in your head

• Being non-judgmental of whatever is happening, and just noticing / observing

• Intentionally using your attention vs. checking out / numbing / letting your mind go wherever it chooses

• Embodying your experience – knowing what your feel in the physical body in the moment

• Accepting what one is feeling vs. struggling against it

Some of this is so incredibly foreign to guys.  Our conditioning as men has led us to believe that getting in touch with our feelings will make us weak, and to tune and sense into what we are feeling in the moment and in our body is often not even on our radar. 

When emotions light up, so does the whole body.  Emotions kick off an entire biological complex that involves neurochemical activity in the brain and physiological action of the nervous system, respiratory and circulatory systems.  They are a part of us whether we like to acknowledge them or not. If we check out from this whole process, we have lost an incredible amount of resource and energy. We just need to learn how to utilize them in a way that is helpful so we don’t have all of these negative associations with our emotion. This is where mindfulness comes in.  

 Below are several ways mindfulness actually makes us stronger, more effective, and more productive.  

1. Mindfulness helps us make better decisions.  

   If we are always in our heads our decision making actually gets worse.  Thinking about problems only goes so far. We need to compliment our mind with our gut level feelings. Believe it or not wisdom can come from our emotions but we must learn how to tune in and listen to them. If you have ever been working out and suddenly have this insight bubble up in your mind you may get what I’m talking about. You were engaging the body and your mind responded appropriately, in the moment with what you needed to hear. If you’ve ever tried to chase a thought and the more you try to remember it, the farther it is from you, then you also may know what I’m talking about.  When we think too much, we end up going around in circles with little progress. 

2. Mindfulness helps us become less easily triggered into anger and irritation.

   Things don’t get to us as quickly when we have been practicing mindfulness.  If we spend all day fighting / resisting / struggling / avoiding what we are feeling, we create a much bigger problem. We now have a wound that has not been dealt with, and any stressor will act as an immediate irritant, poking at this wound. 

3. We get more energy because we are more connected to our emotions, and this brings more clarity and productivity.  

   We can’t thrive when we are stressed, anxious, and shut down in fight or flight mode. Fight or flight is a defense and it keeps us from engaging the positive energy that is underneath. When we calm and center, we eventually contact the positive energy that drives motivation.

4. We become more creative.  

   Similar to above, when we are stressed, we leave no room to discover new thoughts and possibilities. We become stuck in habituation, unable to step out of our circumstance and create new experiences. When we have calmed the body and tuned into it in the moment, we allow the natural flow of creativity to emerge.  

5. We become more adept socially.  

   When we don’t know what we are feeling, we become the monotone dude with nothing to say.  Why?  If you are not connected to yourself – if you don’t know your inner world of feelings – you will have a really hard time relating to anyone else. Empathy comes from our own understanding of emotions, pain, and experience. We “get” others when we have spent some time with ourselves.  

6. Our bodies are more healthy – we have improved memory, improved sleep, and better heart health.

7. We are more happy – we enjoy life, both the good and bad – because we know how to be present with it in a way that gives us energy and not in ways that drain us.

8. Because of all of this, we end up getting more of what we want, we just go about it in a very different way than before.  Instead of forcing and controlling others and ourselves into what we want, we start a process and way of being present with ourselves to know what we need in the first place. And when we do that, we are much better in asking and receiving these needs from others.