Mindset
I know not how much time I have left, but that time will be spent with those I love for those that matter, including me.
Recently, I took the afternoon with my wife to go to a local spa and just give ourselves two hours of recovery time and connection. Time for me to be still.
We work hard just like everyone else. We needed that time.
We didn’t need to talk, we just took time together, held hands and hugged, and let our minds wander in our stillness.
You see, it’s in the stillness that we find our truth, when we let our mind wander and observe and listen.
Scary you say?
Yes, it can be, your mind loves to live in the negative, but at the same time, if you just give your mind the time to unwind the ball of yarn, quite often you’ll see and hear the solutions you need, or the truth you need to recognize.
We clutter our lives with things to do, projects to complete, useless conversations, media of every sort.
When do you allow your mind to just run free?
I liken it to having more and more tabs open and programs running on your computer, eventually you begin to notice how slow it’s running, it glitches, or downright crashes!
Stillness, internal conversation, and even boredom are necessary “reboots” for your brain, just like quality sleep.
But if you always ignore or avoid this stillness, you avoid the freedom it can ignite to really explore yourself and what is truly possible within you.
These last few years, I’ve been running a program, on my own, and Jaime and I run one together, to help people do better for themselves.
I’ve been struck by just how hard it is to get people, especially those in human performance, to actually take the time to take care of themselves. Even an hour a week seems an inordinate amount of time to simply dedicate to you.
It’s not a judgment, but an observation, a conundrum of sorts.
Here we rest in a field dedicated to supporting the high performance of others, and yet we struggle with doing right by ourselves.
Even if you aren’t in the field of human performance, it’s not unusual for most people to just not do right by themselves.
We won’t give ourselves permission, and by covert inference, we eliminate it from all those who matter most around us.
Our health suffers, our families suffer, and we suffer silently.
Seems like mental health is a daily conversation these days. But the secret doesn’t reside in mico-manging the outcomes of our lives, but in the day-to-day dedication to doing right by us and by those who matter.
Despite all the strategies, books, and programs that exist, sometimes it’s just the simple gift to yourself that will make the real difference.
A daily dose of stillness, a weekly moment alone, a monthly spa day, these are all just opportunities to let your mind go free, and in turn give it the rest and reboot it needs to succeed.
You deserve it.
