Striving Toward Non-Striving with Mindfulness and Awareness
How do we know when to act and when to let go? When to push for something, whether it’s toward a goal, an achievement, an aspiration, and when to relax and find ease? As humans we are conditioned to stay busy. When we are not doing anything we feel like we are wasting a day. For example, we work so hard to be able to go on vacation and take mental breaks, yet as quickly as we get time away, we feel guilty or uncomfortable doing nothing. When we are not moving, our minds are busier than ever searching for what we could do to feel “productive.” How do we know when to move and when to just be? Mindfulness training and awareness are the keys to finding balance between striving and non-striving.
When you have goals to be successful in life, you must act to achieve this success. However, it’s possible to find balance instead of continuously pushing and striving. In fact, it’s often wise to let go and allow your actions the time they need to develop and become impactful; this also provides space for you to consider the next details of your action plan. You get farther ahead and make greater progress by taking this time to be still.
As you can likely relate, slowing down is tremendously challenging for most people. When we keep pushing and pushing, we become overworked, frustrated that the fruits of our labor are not harvesting as quickly as we’d like.
The antidote to this cycle of burnout and frustration is intentional periods of non-striving in which we condition our minds to slow down. Our thoughts are what create our reality, and the place from which we act. To slow down, we must practice first with our thought trains and learn to detach from our thoughts.
Mindfulness is the practice that provides you with a sense of freedom, whether you are on vacation or in the grind of everyday life. Most people live on autopilot, unaware that their thought patterns are running their lives, scrambling daily to accomplish everything they must do, yet perpetually falling short and running out of time. This cycle is exhausting and leads to burnout. But there is another choice: mindfulness training.
If this feels familiar, I’ve got two simple practices to help you unlearn the cycle of being caught up in your mind’s busyness and practice slowing down, tuning into the present moment.
Alerts Practice: Every time you hear a text message chime, take a moment and turn into your emotions and thoughts. What are you experiencing in your inner world? This practice provides many micro-moments throughout the day to practice mindfulness.
Each morning, place your feet on the floor after waking before getting caught up in the hustle of your day, and simply say “thank you,” thinking of something you’re grateful for as you begin your new day.
Moment of Introspection & Leadership:
On a recent vacation in Hawaii, I set an intention to observe my thoughts and emotions. I quickly began to realize where I placed judgments, as we all do as humans. Some are productive, and some are not; it’s the mind’s way of processing the information we take in through our senses to keep us safe.
It became clear through my awareness that these judgments were being placed out of habit and my default thinking. For example, I observed a man on the airplane working diligently on his computer, saying very little to his wife, asked multiple times by a flight attendant to put the computer away before takeoff; he seemed annoyed (my judgment) to have to stop working. At first I thought it was sad that he didn’t appear to be enjoying life, and even that he seemed like a jerk, disregarding the flight attendant’s requests and ignoring his wife…and that perhaps they didn’t have a great relationship.
Quickly, I realized the story line I was making up in my mind was based off judgments, and I decided to create a new one based on positive judgments. I thought, what if he’s working on a pressing deadline so he can enjoy his vacation with his wife? And that he likely worked very hard to take this trip of her dreams. She was very patient, knowing the deadline was near and they would spend uninterrupted quality time together upon landing.
This new story line made me smile; it was the first time I’ve had the awareness around my judgment in this way to turn it positive and saw how quickly we can change the story in our minds. I encourage you to play with your judgments and observe what you discover in the process!
“The story you are telling yourself is the story you made up. If it is not serving you in a positive way you have the ability to make up a new one. This is how you use your personal power in a good way.”
— Drea Hemmer
REFLECTIVE & DISCOVERY QUESTIONS FOR THOUGHTS & JOURNALING
What thought patterns do you keep repeating to yourself?
What new thought patterns could you think about that include better-feeling thoughts?
FOR YOUR TEAM DAILY HUDDLE
What could we focus on today that would strengthen our performance as a team?