195 Are You Too Important to Slow Down?

Hey, this is Anne with your Coaching on the Go, continuing our talk about time and how to maximize your time.

I talked already about prioritizing and scheduling, prioritizing reflection time as well as meditation time, as well as work time, time on task. 

Today I’m talking with you about mindfulness, and I talk about this regularly because it’s such an essential part of the productivity that I experience now in my life.

It’s so interesting that to speed up, you get to slow down. 

When you slow yourself down, when you get your balance and your stability and your groundedness, you can really pick up on the efficient things to do, and so much time is saved, you get more done. 

If someone would have told me that years ago, I wouldn’t have believed them.

I just felt like my schedule and the things I was doing were not able to be slowed down, and I also felt like I was proving myself. 

Have you ever been in a part of your life where you are proving yourself by being so busy that you have no time? 

That’s how important you are. 

I’m beyond that now.

So in the morning I do a 15 to 20 minute mindfulness meditation. 

I started by doing a meditation, listening to an audio, and for me to close my mind down, it was very difficult. 

So listening to an audio of somebody talking me into meditation was really helpful. 

As I went along, I began to meditate myself in the quiet, and that’s what I do now most of the time.

I also end the day with either a long stream of appreciation for what I have, because it takes me out of whatever it was that could have been troublesome that day, and then when I wake up in the morning, you have a memory for what you left behind. 

When I wake up in the morning, when I have meditated the evening before, it really serves because what I remember was being relaxed. 

This deep breathing, meditating, listening is so important in guiding you throughout the day. 

It doesn’t just support you in the morning for 15 or 20 minutes as you get ready for your day. 

By creating a momentum that’s really beautiful, when you get used to it over time, it also gives you a stability throughout the day.

It connects you with witness consciousness.

And what is witness consciousness? 

It’s your ability to see the situation as if you are outside of yourself. 

The part of you that is able to see everything gets a chance to take a look at what you’re doing and where you are.

So instead of you just being in the situation, you can also be thinking about how you’re thinking.

You can be watching what you’re doing. 

You can be curious about the response you just had or why you got triggered, or why you’re agitated, or how calm you are and what’s working for you. 

So, mindfulness is really important. 

It supports you in becoming attuned with your intuition, your spirit voice, so you can recognize which hunches or which guides or which gut instincts are really based on the direction you should go, and which are surrounded by emotion.

There’s not a lot to say about this other than it’s a respectful listening to one’s self, and then when triggers come up or things happen throughout the day that normally could knock you off of your groundedness, they don’t knock you down. 

You just say, “Huh, that’s interesting.”

It’s interesting that that got me a little upset.

What is it about that that got me upset? 

And you can deal with it there. 

Instead of reacting, you can be responding in a way that’s mindful. 

So with this mindfulness and this deep structural foundation, I’m able to, throughout the day, really be attuned to hunches that guide me and save me a lot of time. 

I’m able to recalculate or get an idea from somebody, or get an idea out of a conversation, or have people show up in my life that I can leverage to magnify what I’m doing, to get shortcuts to what I’m doing. 

I’ll find out a piece of information that will save me weeks because I’m in a place where I’m mindful, I’m calm, I’m settled, and I’m able to be open to new ideas and possibilities. 

So adding mindfulness, thinking about how it integrates with your schedule is a really powerful tool to efficiency and getting the right direction and saving time and maximizing your time.

Sending you love.