Tag: motivation

Maintaining Motivation for Practicing Mindfulness

Maintaining motivation to practice mindfulness is a Catch-22 situation: to experience the benefits of mindfulness, you have to practice it; to maintain motivation for your mindfulness practice, you need to experience the benefits.  As you practise, you become more aware of the benefits and the benefits themselves increase.

However, the starting point is to believe that practising mindfulness will give you benefits that you value.  Having started your practice then, you are able to experience the benefits and to use these to motivate yourself to continue.

I found it hard to maintain my attendance at Taoist Tai Chi classes because of work commitments but I had experienced enough of the benefits of Tai Chi to find a way to maintain the practice.

As I persisted with the practice of Tai Chi, I started to experience an increasing number of benefits that now form the motivation for me to continue the practice.  These benefits that I value are:

Focus and concentration – these are essential skills for my work as a consultant and for my writing; they also help with playing tennis (my sporting passion)

Balance and coordination – this is a strong motivator for me because I have found over the years that there is a very clear link between my Tai Chi practice and how well I play during my weekly social tennis; I have written about this link elsewhere

Creativity – I noticed this benefit through my experience of greater creativity when designing workshop processes as part of my consulting practice; Google clearly values this benefit as it developed the Search Inside Yourself (SIY) mindfulness program which has been experienced by more than 4,500 members of their staff- the SIY program is now available to the public on a global basis.

Lower blood pressure – I inherited high blood pressure so anything that helps me maintain a lower blood pressure has many positive side effects

Flexibility – as I grow older, I find that my flexibility suffers. However, Tai Chi clearly improves my flexibility and I experience this on the tennis court and elsewhere; many older people throughout the world (e.g. in China) practise Tai Chi to gain this benefit, among others.

Calmness and clarity – mindfulness and Tai Chi, specifically, develop calmness and clarity and help me to manage stress

Reducing the symptoms of arthritis – this is a claimed benefit of Tai Chi which I had some skepticism about until I experienced reduced pain from arthritis in one of the fingers on my right hand when playing tennis; now I can play two hours of solid tennis without the pain recurring or impeding my capacity to play well

Reflective listening – Tai Chi and mindfulness practice generally are improving my capacity to listen reflectively, an important means of improving my valued relationships.

I think the moral of this story is that if you persist in the practise of mindfulness you will experience benefits that you personally value.  Both the choice of mindfulness practice and the valued benefits will be influenced by your own lifestyle and personal preferences.

Image source: Courtesy of Pixabay.com

Grow the Habit of Mindfulness

“Practice makes perfect” – a truism but particularly relevant to developing mindfulness.

People who know about habit forming suggest three basic steps to develop a habit:

  1. focus on one small and simple behaviour
  2. build the habit into your daily routine/structure of your day
  3. frequently revisit your motivation (s) for growing the habit of mindfulness.

Start simple and develop more complex behaviours as you master an initial starting point.  If you are trying to do something complex at the outset and trying to maintain the behaviour, you can easily become discouraged.  However, if you start simply and achieve mastery, this will add to your motivation.  You will avoid discouragement and frustration this way.

If you structure the new behaviour into you daily routine, you are more likely to be able to sustain the mindfulness practice.  So if it is something you do first thing in the morning, then each time you wake up you are reminded to undertake the behaviour.  One of the participants in the Search Inside Yourself leadership program decided to do mindful breathing whenever he put the jug on for a cup of coffee. I have started the practice of using open awareness first thing in the morning when I make my first cup of tea.  Providing an inbuilt structure (timing & location) to a mindfulness practice helps to embed it into your daily life.

It is important to maintain your motivation when the going gets tough or there are things that distract you from your practice.  One way to do this is to write down the reasons why you want to engage in the mindfulness practice.  As you begin to practice, you will find that you will be able to add to your motivation list because you have experienced some positive benefits that you had not alluded to earlier in the practice cycle. Some people even develop a personal mantra to help their motivation, e.g. “be mindful, be my best”.

Mindfulness is within everyone’s reach but each person is different. So a particular mindfulness practice may appeal to one person and not another.  You need to find somewhere to start (or extend) that suits your personal preference and lifestyle.

There are many pathways to mindfulness – mindful breathing, mindful eating, meditation, open awareness, reflective listening, yoga, and Tai Chi – to name a few.  Start somewhere and grow mindfulness from that point.

Image Source: Courtesy of Pixabay.com