The 4 benefits that Mindfulness brings to achieving your goals.
These are the main benefits that Mindfulness brings to the achievement of goals.
One of the most recurrent traps we tend to fall into when we set goals (for example, at the beginning of a new year) is to assume that whether or not we achieve them will depend on the amount of time and effort we put into carrying out those tasks.
The reality is that if we do not learn to properly manage our emotions and our attentional focus, we will end up throwing in the towel no matter how much desire we invest in a project. In many ways, less is more, for better and for worse.
Fortunately, nowadays there are therapeutic resources such as Mindfulness that help us to improve our chances of achieving our goals. through an efficient use of our attention, focusing on the present moment and adopting a constructive perspective about the problem we want to solve or the need we want to satisfy. In this article we will see how it does it.
What is Mindfulness?
Let's start with the most important: what exactly is Mindfulness? This term can be used both to describe a certain type of state of consciousness and the set of techniques and exercises used to reach it.
If we stick to the first meaning, Mindfulness can be summed up as a psychological state in which attention is directed exclusively to recognizing and observing the mental contents linked to the here and now, without involving ourselves in the value of the here and now.without getting involved in morally valuing them.
And if we stick to the second meaning, Mindfulness is a type of practice inspired by the ancient Vipassana meditation (with a great tradition among the followers of Buddhism and Hinduism), but unlike the latter, it has not been developed as a religious element but as a scientifically validated tool with which objective therapeutic effects can be achieved (regardless of whether the person adheres to a religion or not).
Mindfulness exercises were created in the United States in the second half of the 20th century, especially by the researcher Jon Kabat-Zinn, who designed the Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program at the University of Massachusetts. At the beginning, the objective of Mindfulness was fundamentally to help people with stress and anxiety problems. through a training plan of several weeks, but over time variants adapted to other types of needs not necessarily limited to the field of mental health began to emerge.
Today, although the MBSR program continues to be a powerful ally of psychotherapists, a wide variety of Mindfulness techniques are available that can be used in contexts as diverse as companies, primary education centers, training of athletes, etc. All these variants have characteristics and stages adapted to their objective, but they all preserve the essence of Mindfulness, which is to teach the person to focus on the present moment to get out of dysfunctional psychological inertias (obsessive thoughts, tendency to self-sabotage, stress blocks, lack of skills to manage physical or emotional pain...).
How can Mindfulness help you in achieving goals?
What does Mindfulness have to do with, for example, New Year's resolutions, the start of a new career path or the desire to leave behind an addiction and start a healthy lifestyle from a certain date? Here is a summary of the different ways through which Mindfulness helps to address these types of personal or professional projects.
1. Helps to curb avoidant tendencies
Often, the fact of being subjected to the pressure of having to achieve very ambitious goals makes us fall into a dynamic of procrastination: as we feel a lot of stress before a complex or new task for us, we avoid starting it or thinking about it, so we let time pass and the problem becomes bigger and bigger. Mindfulness helps us to face this pressure in a much more functional and adaptive way, without letting it intimidate us to the point of paralysis.without letting it intimidate us to the point of paralyzing us.
2. It makes the breaks more profitable
Although technically Mindfulness or is a relaxation exercise, one of its consequences is that it tends to lead people to a state of calmness. This allows Mindfulness to be easily incorporated into rest routines between work or study sessions.
3. It allows us to do a "mental reset" when faced with blocks.
It is very common that when we try to do something that is new to us, we reach a point where we can not think how to continue to achieve our goal. In these situations we can become so stressed that we give rise to what is known as a "self-fulfilling prophecy": we suggest ourselves until we assume that we will not come up with a solution and that we will be unable to move forward, so that this imagined reality ends up being fulfilled because we become obsessed by the fact that we are in an apparent dead end.
In the face of these experiences, Mindfulness allows us to regain an objective perspective to what happens to us, so that we are able to see everything from a more distant point of view and it is easy for us to take a few steps back to face the problem in a different way.
4. Improves our self-esteem
Faced with a new project, we usually go through many situations in which our imperfections become very evident: in certain points we lack experience, in others we lack technique, and so on. These constant frictions between what we want to achieve and what we have learned to do so far is part of the process of personal and professional development, but if we do not manage it well, it will discourage us.
That is why Mindfulness is a valuable tool to achieve self-motivation, as it will prevent us from falling into overly pessimistic or "tragic" interpretations of reality, in which all our attention is directed to our own personal and professional development. in which all our attention is directed to our shortcomings. It is important to be aware of what we are not perfect at, but we should not let it obsess us.
- You may be interested in, "Do you really know what self-esteem is?"
Do you want to have psychological assistance and Mindfulness training?
If you are interested in incorporating Mindfulness into your daily life, please contact me.
I am a psychologist and MBSR Mindfulness instructor certified by the University of Massachusetts and I offer courses and MBSR Mindfulness training programs in Mindfulness, in classroom and online format.
(Updated at Apr 13 / 2024)