The Mental Pushup

Have you ever been put on the spot in a meeting and had a hard time gathering your thoughts, or maybe you felt your heart race, got butterflies in your stomach? At the same time, your mind raced with thoughts of being nervous or unprepared? What if you could focus your attention and rise to the occasion instead? Our attention system can assist our brain by detecting and selecting one particular thing to focus on at a time. It's like a flashlight, and that flashlight can be laser focused on what's going on right in front of us, but it can also point inward at our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Many times when we're engaged in an activity and our attention system turns inward, it can become detrimental to our performance in that moment. One of the most effective practices we can use to train our mind is mindfulness, a core skillset we focus on developing here at Headspace. I want you to think about mindfulness as a practice and something you can actually train every day. It's like mental pushups, a way to strengthen your attention system to stay more present and focused. We all understand the importance of doing physical pushups to build our physical strength. Well, our minds are no different, and so we need to do our mental pushups, practice our mindfulness to build mental strength and awareness. In the following audio recording, we will practice mental pushups together. It might seem tedious or overly simple, but by putting this into practice, you're building mental flexibility, mental agility, and increased awareness by strengthening your attention system. If you train your mind like you train your body, I am confident you can train your monkey mind to settle down, so you can cultivate a sense of calm, focus, and control in any high stress environment. Let's start our training now by doing the accompanying audio exercise....