Mindset Monday Challenge - Spread Kindness

This week’s Mindset Monday is inspired by Annie Lennox and Al Green. I won’t subject you to my singing voice but “think of your fellow man, lend him a helping hand.”

Altruism and acts of kindness have been proven to boost our own well-being. If you have all you need you naturally will start to check in on those close to you to make sure they’re doing okay. We can build our sense of abundance by starting with checking in and helping out others. Our brains reason that if we’re doing this, we must be safe and secure.

The simplest way you can do this is by checking in on someone you care about. You mightn’t need to actually do anything to help them. Very often the thing that we’re missing is someone to fully listen to us. And we’re all capable of listening to our friends and family and giving them the gift of being heard.

Or we can share a meme that will bring a smile to my face. This is another preferred method of kindness that’s easy to do, hopefully makes the people you care about chuckle, and puts a little love in your heart.

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Mindset Monday - Are you looking for truth or validation?

This week let’s ask ourselves if we’re looking for the truth or validation, if we’re looking for what’s right, or to prove we’re right.

We can use this approach when we’re conversing with ourselves and our thoughts. And we can also use it when we’re talking with someone. Drop the desire to be correct and instead enter conversations with an attitude of curiosity, seeing what you can learn and understand rather than proving your point.

It’s our ego that needs to be right. Sometimes this is very important, like we know it’s right to cross the street. Other times, it’s not so much. And it’s this need to be right that can cost us in connections, growth and opportunity.

Take the time this week to question your motives. Seek less validation and spend a little more time looking for what’s right and let me know how you get on.

If you’d like support with this strategy, reach out!

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www.thementalhealthplan.com

Mindset Monday - Drop The “Yeah, But…”

This week’s Mindset Monday Challenge is aimed at improving your communication, and it involves dropping “yeah, but” from your speech.

Therapists like to say everything before the but is BS. When we say “yeah, but” we’ve really dismissed the other persons point of view, and are more interested in being heard and getting our point across. At the very extreme it shows that we might not have even been listening all that much.

When we hear “yeah, but” do we feel listened to, respected and understood? My guess is no. We feel like we’re in an argument of opinions, and it’s an adversarial style of discourse.

You might be thinking “yeah, but I really need to get my point across!” To that I’ll ask if you think your point will be more or less received without that phrase?

So what’s the alternative? To repeat back to the other person what you heard them say, to make sure you understood them. You can either parrot or paraphrase. There’s more to it, so start with that and let me know how your conversations go this week.

If you’d like to talk more about cooperative communication, just reach out.

www.thementalhealthplan.com

https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=18248924&appointmentType=11286512

Matt’s Mindset Course Experience

Matt got in touch with me to run a 12-Week Mindset Course for his gym. In this short video he shares why he reached out, his experience, the benefits and advice to anyone considering the same.

If you’d like to set this up for your team reach out to me - [email protected]

www.thementalhealthplan.com

https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=18248924&appointmentType=11286512

Tough Love Thursday - Avoidance and Distractions Are Not Mental Health

Lately there’s been a lot of arguments made for services to be classified as vital for mental health.

One problem is mental health is synonymous with mental illness. If you are severely depressed, or anxious, you absolutely need a professional to help you. Either through talk therapy, medication, or some combination of the above.

Building mental health is further along the continuum. It’s all the repeated acts of positive self care that add up to mental well-being, peace of mind, and happiness.

Any activity with the right intention and execution can build mental health. But any activity that’s used as a means of avoidance for a distraction isn’t contributing to your peace of mind. If you run to enjoy the endorphins and fresh air it can be a positive. If you only feel good about yourself after you’ve had your run, or run excessively while avoiding your obligations and difficulty conversations/self reflection, then it is no longer a method of building and preserving your mental health.

Mental health cannot be built only on what feels good. You need to address your self limiting beliefs, bad habits, unresolved memories, and embrace the “dark” side of development. This can be done through ‘making yourself’ study in order to improve your career, having raw and honest conversations with loved ones or professionals, and sitting with yourself to clear your jumbled up thoughts and feelings.

When you commit to the difficult, uncomfortable, or downright scary tasks of true self care, that’s where the real pay off of peace of mind and true mental health resides.

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Mindset Monday - What Can You Remove?

So often in life we feel the need to add something to our lives to make them better.

That can be adding physical things like a bigger home, new shiny phone, more clothes, etc.

Or it can be adding in practices like extra workouts, more experiences, more time reading or learning how to cook.

All of these things can be great, or they add to our stress if it creates a sense of angst because we’ve too much to do and not enough time or energy to do it.

That’s why this week I’d like you to investigate what you can reduce and remove? A simple practice I do is look for one item to throw away each day. Just one. This promotes calm through gradually decluttering the physical environment.

But we can also look at activities we can remove, like spending 20 minutes getting your daily coffee or watching Netflix past 10pm.

Finally, we can look at thoughts that are no longer serving and look to remove those as well.

Try a week of subtraction and see how it adds to your mental well-being.

www.thementalhealthplan.com

https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=18248924&appointmentType=11286512

Tough Love Thursday - Nobody “Makes You” Feel Anything

The words we use to describe ourselves and how we feel are incredibly powerful. This is why I invite you to be reflective of the words you habitually use.

When we say someone or something “made me feel” a certain way we’re putting ourselves in the victim role. When we say something outside of us makes us feel something we’re putting the solution outside of our control as well.

Let me be clear, external events and people’s actions can absolutely trigger our emotional response. The trigger is external, the cause is internal. It’s our thinking about the situation, our history, our choice - even if it seems like it’s a split second choice - that leads to the emotion we’re feeling.

It’s a subtle shift in language, changing from “you made me” to “when you did this, I felt X” yet repeated enough it changes our worldview, our sense of self and our agency over time. When we take responsibility for the feelings we have, we’re empowering ourselves. When we put this on someone or something else, we’re making life unnecessarily harder on ourselves.

www.thementalhealthplan.com

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Tough Love Thursday - Stop Shoulding

This week’s Tough Love Thursday is to stop “Shoulding” - saying and thinking that things and people should or shouldn’t be a certain way!

When we waste energy on shoulds we’re taking away from our happiness in the moment and our ability to improve our life. “Should” is just us fighting what actually is. Our thinking is creating a narrative about what’s going on, and usually how unfair or wrong it is that it’s happening.

To help us overcome this tendency to should ourselves into negative headspace, we can use replacement words.

When we say we should do something - eat better, save more, invest in our mind’s health - we can replace that with “I will”. Now we’re creating a positive intention instead of either berating ourselves for not living up to a standard or wishing for magical improvement some point in the future.

If we’re talking about other events or people, we can replace should with what we’d like to see. Instead of “they shouldn’t be so disrespectful” we can state our boundaries with “I’d like it if…” and be specific, kind and clear about what we want.

Any time we should we’re in judgment mode about something outside of our control. When we replace should we’re brining back our acceptance of the present and our agency to improve our lives.

www.thementalhealthplan.com

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Mindset Is The Missing Piece To Happiness

Like most of us I spent most of my life chasing tangible goals, and trying to “fix” my external world. I genuinely believed that once I got the money, the body fat levels, the right people, lived in the right area, I’d be happy and at peace inside.

Looking at people who had what I thought would make me happy and seeing they weren’t as content as I thought they should helped me realise that chasing the outward markers of success wasn’t a guarantee of fulfilment.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s super important to make progress. Making strides towards meaningful outcomes is a critical part of our well-being, we’d never be fully happy just sitting around all day doing nothing. Striving is important. Chasing these goals and placing our happiness on the far side of “success” is a surefire way to ensure you remain miserable.

We’re always going to have problems to deal with, and issues to overcome. That’s a given in life. When I started commitment to a daily mindset practice (which doesn’t take as much time out of your day as you’d think!) that’s when not only did I feel more at ease internally but I made more progress in my personal and business goals.

It’s important to invest some effort daily in our health, relationships and wealth. Most of us shy away from the mental health side because we’re not familiar with what’s involved and unsure if it’s working. So we continuously go back to our jobs or exercise - habits we’re familiar with. Because of this I’ve refined my mindset training to give you easy to understand, actionable steps, and regular check in and accountability so we can know if it’s working or not.

If you haven’t taken the time to invest in your mind, reach out and let’s talk about how we can improve this vital area of your life. - https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=18248924&appointmentType=11286512

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Where Are You Hoping For The Lotto Ticket?

This week’s Tough Love Thursday let’s ask ourselves “where am I looking for the lotto ticket?”

What I mean by this is what area of your life are you hoping it will just solve itself, or someone will just take care of it 100%?

It could be you're hoping one activity will give you perfect clarity of mind. Or that one person can solve your loneliness, one conversation repairs your relationships, one change fixes your nutrition and health, or maybe you're hoping for the lotto ticket to solve all your financial woes!

We do this when we feel powerless, or when it seems the energy expended isn't worth the pay off. The thing is the energy and time we waste wanting things to be fixed ends up costing us more in the long run.

For the longest time I was like this with my mindset and mental health - I wanted someone else to fix it, and very often fantasised that the next person or next event would give me the peace I was looking for. But it was never going to be one thing. It was a few key actions, applied in the correct order and given enough time to work. When I committed to small actions consistently applied that’s when I got the results I needed.

Once we've become aware of where we're wishing for the magical fix, we can then start accepting where we are, and reassuring ourselves that small fixes added up will ultimately have an impact. It can also help to think of other areas where you consistently put in the work and eventually saw the reward.

If you need help with this - which is a perfectly okay strategy - just reach out and let's talk.

www.thementalhealthplan.com

https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=18248924&appointmentType=11286512