Creating the foundation of mental rest
Ever felt unhappy about a certain situation that has happened to you? Sure you have! We’ve all felt unhappy … perhaps even frustrated, angry or resentful at times in our lives.
Did you know?… Our cause of unhappiness isn’t from the actual situations that confront us, but rather our inability to ‘Control’ these situations. And as much as we’d like to have the control, the hard-nosed reality of life is that we don’t, nor ever will have control over most things that will happen to us. This thought of not having control can tether us to a feeling of complete helplessness, stealing away our happiness and mental energy – creating a knock-on effect of hindering our level of physical energy as well.
Don’t despair!… There is great news. We all possess the power to break free from this languishing feeling of helplessness, and we can begin RIGHT NOW. But how?… It all starts with the creation of a ‘Foundation of Mental Rest’. Think about it for a moment. You wouldn’t expect to achieve true weight loss success if you didn’t first develop a strong foundation for it to happen – first removing all tempting junk foods from the household. Nor would you expect your house to stand the test of time if it weren’t first built on a strong foundation. The very same is true for creating anything great in life, especially when it comes to the creating of happiness and energy. The two steps required to create a ‘Foundation of Mental Rest’ are:
Step 1 … Making peace and letting go of all things outside of our control
Step 2 … Mastering the three areas of our lives that we do have control over – Personality, Perspective and Productivity
Personality
Our personality is a garner of our behavior, beliefs, values, and appearance. When these are morally and ethically sound; our speech remains congruent to our actions; and we always maintain a neat, healthy appearance – we emit a personality that better attracts and influences those around us. This higher level of attraction and influence brings with it more mental calmness to us.
Perspective
Putting things into perspective allows us to reframe challenging situations into a more positive light. This helps maintain our mental calmness, keeping us in control. By remaining in control, we are better able to come up with solutions to challenges that present themselves. Mastering the power of putting things into perspective begins with working on the little things that seem to plague us and gradually working our way up to being able to tackle larger challenging events. A little thing may be something as simple as accidentally kicking our toe. First … we may take the common route of yelling and cursing at the toe, as if to suggest the toe itself was at fault. But then we can put the situation into better perspective by thinking – ‘Well! At least I didn’t kick the other nine. That would have truly been painful’.
Productivity
On the surface, productivity may not appear to have anything to do with our mental calmness but nothing could be further from the truth. When we fall behind in our work it becomes difficult at best to remain in the present moment; our thoughts being channeled elsewhere. This is by no means a recipe for improving our mental calmness.
There are many ways to increase our level of productivity so that we are more effective and efficient throughout the day, such as:
- Reducing time wasted on things such as Facebook and TV. Allocated time frames should be applied to these and adhered to
- Regularly checking throughout the day that we are in fact working to our schedule and not someone else’s schedule
- Using a daily ‘To Do’ list and placing each and every task on the list under one of four headings – Drop, Do, Delegate, or Delay. This allows us to prioritise the tasks so that we are always working on the ones that bring us the highest pay-offs first
You can’t undo time wasted any more than you can un-ring a bell. Once your time is gone that’s it!
Stay tuned for our second article on increasing happiness and energy levels.
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