5 Mindfulness Strategies To Help You Stay Motivated

Motivation Is An Internal Fire That Can Be Stoked By Mindfulness

Throughout the school year, it’s often easy to get overwhelmed with all there is to do. It’s important to make sure that you and your kids are taking time to pause and reflect in order to stay positive. Mindfulness can simultaneously serve the dual functions of helping people be content with their current state, while also priming personal energy reserves that can increase motivation. Mindfulness practices can give the mind and body a break from everyday stressors, worries, and obligations. This can, in turn, help individuals focus better and longer on the next task at hand. So, to help you get started on embracing mindfulness for the sake of its many benefits, here are five strategies and practices to help you stay motivated throughout the school year.

Meditation for discovering yourself and your passions

At some point, most people become aware, to varying degrees, about meditation. Its popularity may ebb and flow over the years, but these days most people are familiar with the concept and some of the touted benefits. At its core, meditation practice can somewhat be summarized as the practice of watching and then releasing thoughts, without judgment. Meditation can then reveal to the practitioner not only the ability to have non-attachment towards one’s own thoughts, but also who one really is beyond thoughts. Meditation can also show what thoughts jump out as most important to the individual. It’s those thoughts that reveal themselves as most important that can be pursued outside of meditation practice, to drive meaningful personal motivation.

Visualization techniques for mood and motivation boosting

Visualization is another mindfulness technique, where the individual chooses the formation of a mental image to hold in one’s proverbial mind’s eye. Visualizing desired outcomes and positive influences and situations not only boosts mood in the moment, but it can boost motivation to strive towards making the situation visualized an actual reality.

Sentence completion can be a powerful affirmative cue for motivation

Setting aside time to focus on writing as many answers as you can, to a list of prompted and meaningful statements, can yield powerful and surprising results. The key to this mindfulness practice is not to think too much about the sentence completions, but to let them rise up from within you spontaneously. Examples of the types of sentences that might be helpful in this practice include:

 

• I am hoping for…
• I least desire…
• I am most comfortable when…
• I am most excited by…
• I feel most lost when…

 

Acceptance of the moment and all that it entails

Carving time out during the day on a regular basis to explore where you are, how you are feeling, and all of the sensory perceptions of that present moment (whatever they might be) can lead to startling personal discoveries. You might find that there are things you tend to tolerate that make you feel profoundly unhappy. You might also inversely find that when you stop for a moment, you are actually more contented than you realized and have a lot for which to be grateful. Whatever the case, getting in touch with the reality of the present moment can motivate you to take next steps.

Embracing the concept of beginner’s mind

This is a mindfulness strategy and practice that can be tough to apply day to day. But, trying to approach tasks with the view of a beginner (even if you are more experienced than that) can lead to new ways of seeing tasks that are often taken for granted. This can open up new concepts and experiences and avenues of transformation. All of that can greatly enhance personal motivation. Another off-shoot of this practice is to purposefully take on entirely new tasks, for which you are a total novice. This can grow one’s personal curiosity, and out of curiosity comes a natural sort of motivation.

The benefits of mindfulness strategies and practices are often cited in studies to include general stress reduction, fewer sick days, greater levels of creativity, increased personal resilience, and enhanced motivation. So, if there are times where you find your own personal sense of motivation lacking, then why not try a mindfulness strategy or two… and see if those strategies can stoke the internal fire that helps you keep going?

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Be sure to check out the Stride Insights article, Staying Social During Digital Times, for further reading.

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