Mindfulness: The practice of curating the life you want

There are a number of buzzwords on the internet: Minimalism, Essentialism and Intentionalism. Mindfulness is what they all have in common. When practicing minimalism we are being mindful with the focus on our surroundings, when practicing essentialism, we are focusing on how we spend our time. Mindfulness can make us very happy. And I would go as far as saying many people are unhappy, because they are not being mindful.

But what does being mindful really mean? A minimalist, does not have less stuff, because he or she hates stuff. An essentialist, does not carefully choose what he will work on next, because he is lazy. We practice minimalism, because we want to appreciate the things we own. And we want to only own things that add value. And we focus on the essential 20% that produce 80% of the result, because we want to be effective rather than efficient. We want to do the right thing, rather than a lot of thing. It is the difference between being productive and being busy. It really is about value.

Why are things related to mindfulness such buzzwords? Truth is: we now need it more than ever. In today’s day and age it is so incredibly easy to not be mindful. To go shopping and impulse buy all the things that we think are awesome, but we really don’t need them. It is so easy to just spend hours on the couch watching TV and being genuinely bored. We do it because it is the path of least resistance. And then when it gets real bad, we get addicted to shopping and watching TV. Our brains get stimulated by pretty colors and release feel good hormones, why would we ever do anything else? Because we are unhappy.

We often wonder why we are unhappy. But are not even mindful enough to notice why it is we are unhappy. Or perhaps, we are just not willing to admit why it is we are feeling unhappy. We may even have a vision of who we want to be and it might even literally include “I am not someone who spends all day binging TV.”, and yet we turn a blind eye to what could actually make us feel happier and more fulfilled.

But how can we become more mindful? It is all about value and realizing our own limitations. The space we have in our homes is limited. Our time, attention and emotional capacity are limited. So we must learn to spend those resources on “things” that add value to our lives. That can mean different things. Some things make life easier, those are mostly tools, but if we don’t use them, there is really no point in keeping them. Some things add value by making us smile. If we are excited to read that novel that is on our shelf, we should read it. Otherwise, we don’t need that pile of paper. And if that TV show that we are watching is making us smile or ponder deep philosophical topics, go for it!

Maybe one of the most stigmatized thing is to “get rid” of people who don’t add value to your life. Yes, I know this sound very harsh. And no, “getting rid” of those people does not mean killing them. But it means to spend significantly less or better yet no time with them.

So for being mindful about possessions I recommend reading Marie Kondo’s Life Changing Magic of Tidying up. But in essence it is about questioning whether an item “sparks joy” or is useful. And useful means we have used it in the last few months.

For being mindful how we spend our time, consider this: “Priorities are what we spend your time on.” And “We are what we do on a regular basis.” Let’s think about who we want to be. Figure out our goals and your vision. Because unless we do, we don’t know what it means to spend time on something that adds value. I am not saying to never ever do the dishes again. But quit that emotional shopping habit and get a dishwasher. And once we know who we want to be, we will know what we want to be spending our time on. No worries, it’s okay if that changes. But we have to start somewhere. Then every time we go to do something, whatever that may be, we must ask ourselves: is this who I want to be? Do I really want to spend my precious time on this? This also means that we will not be multitasking. I have mad a whole post about this, so I will not be elaborating on it.

There is one more category that we have not yet addressed. And that is our mindsets. We have to be mindful about those as well. The mindset is the sum of our thinking habits. That includes anything from how we think about ourselves to our attitude towards the world and our work. The way we think reveals a lot about who we are. Therefore curating our thoughts will impact who we are. This one might be the most difficult one because we often don’t catch what we are thinking in each given moment and often we have multiple thoughts at the same time. Once we also have our emotions mix in with our thoughts, it becomes even more complex. And yet, being aware of how we tend to think has a huge impact on our mood, our image of ourselves and therefore also our confidence. I hence recommend trying to be mindful about our thoughts and curate them.

One more thing we need to talk about: Being mindful of our emotions. Our emotions are very strong. And is alright. But we need to learn to express them. We are unable to deal with emotions, if we are not capable of explaining them at least to some degree. I am currently doing a simple exercise that helps with identifying emotions: It is a bullet point journal (no, not a bullet journal). Each bullet point refers to one thing that happened and how it made me feel. I keep it in two columns one for negative and one for positive emotions. I will write 1-3 bullets in each column each night. This is of course very customizable and allows us to learn to identify emotions, but also is a nice journal to look back at and design your life around. Of course more traditional journaling as in: writing down what happened, how it made you feel and how to proceed in more detail is also a great way to become more mindful of our emotions.

In summary we need mindfulness to allocate our limited resources in the way that will create the most value. This is why I think that making a significant difference between the buzzwords I mentioned in the beginning makes no sense. Of course minimalism has as lightly different focus than essentialism, but they come from the same place. And that really is not a mindset of scarcity. It is about being grateful and fully present in the moment. It is about choosing and curating the life we want, rather than going the unhappy path of least resistance. It is about building your happiness.

Inspiration & Ownership

When we start our lives, we are all about surviving. It is not even something we learn. It is an instinct embedded into us. The thing is: as we grow and surviving really happens passively, we are at risk of starting to drift. Since our survival is ensured, there really is no reason to improve. There is no reason to struggle hard and we simply drift through life.

There is nothing wrong with taking a break and enjoying one’s life for a bit. Everyone needs that. But if we stop having a vision, a goal to work towards, we will slowly but surely end up loosing our purpose. And when there is no purpose why would we get out of bed in the morning? Why would we leave this perfectly cuddly world that is so kind to us? It makes me feel depressed. And I end up feeling more dead than alive. When we are at this point is it high time we do something about our lethargy.

The first step is to find inspiration. It is about what we enjoy. It is about listening to podcasts, reading books and watching You Tube videos to figure out what it is we want. Or at least in what direction we want to go. We need to figure out, what makes us happy. We need to envision the life, we would love to live. The kind of life, that would have us be excited to get out of bed at 8am rather than at noon.

But inspiration is not enough. It is very nice to know what we want and then just go off and drift in the comfort of our lives some more. There are many reasons for this. Fear of failure, laziness and a sense of pointlessness to name just a few. Overcoming these is very difficult and every human being struggles. But there is no point in giving in to those obstacles. Because every day that we spend sleeping until 11am has us feeling a little bit worse about ourselves and makes it more difficult for us to actually be able to achieve our goals.

Truth is: we need to take ownership. When we get inspired, we are all motivated and want to go get whatever is the cause of our inspiration, but that only applies while we are in some sort of fantasy about our own lives. The moment we come back to reality, we fall back into our comfort. And this is where we need to be doing some work. We need to take ownership of our lives. We are the only ones living our lives. Which means we are the only one’s in charge. No one will ever do anything to improve our lives for us. No one can. There is this very powerful realization, that we are alone. No one cares. Yes, this can be incredibly devastating. If no one cares, why would I get out of bed? It doesn’t matter. Well… no one cares except us. It doesn’t matter except to ourselves. Yes, if we don’t get to achieve what we wanted to achieve, no one will care, but us. And this is powerful. It means that the relationship we have to ourselves and our lives is crucial. It means that the only person who we ever have to ask forgiveness of is ourselves.

And there is another big misunderstanding: to achieve our goals and take ownership, we need to get out of bed and off our butts. But other than that there does not need to be grand changes. Changing and adjusting our routines little by little will have a major positive impact on our lives. It is mostly the mindset that needs to be changed fundamentally. We need to adjust our mindset to be focused on owning our lives. We need to monitor our thinking. And this is important. The things we think is like talking to ourselves and if we say something often enough we will end up believing it. That can be very powerful if we control the way we talk to ourselves.

More often than not however we are blissfully unaware of what we are thinking at any given moment. There are a few things that can help. One of them is having a conversation with ourselves about what we think and how we feel. No one needs to know other than us. We need to be brutally honest with ourselves. And if we feel like a complete failure, maybe we can redirect our attention to the things that we haven’t failed, or even better find a way to improve. One more very effective way to monitor what we think is journalling. This can be in the form of regular check-ins with ourselves, or just random journalling about anything that is on our minds.

We need to ban negativity from our minds, that often comes in the form of perfectionism or realism and it causes a lot of stress which in turn costs us a lot of energy and has as drift into lethargy which is not what we want. We want to be inspired and take ownership. Never forget that we need regular boosts of inspiration, otherwise we might forget, why we are striving to build a certain life every day. Ownership of our thoughts, our mindset, our habits our daily actions. Ownership of our lives. Living and surviving are two different things. One is inspired and full of deliberation and happiness. The other is purposeless. It is up to us to choose. Only us.

The Mindset

A Mindset. What is it? Can I eat it? No. A mindset is not eatable, but it can include eatable things. Allow me to explain. Google defines Mindset to be a person’s set of attitude. Even though very accurate this does not help anyone unless one already knows what a mindset is.

A mindset does not include emotional state, attitude may. Even though emotions and mindset do affect each other. But is one important difference: The mindset can and should be a conscious choice, whereas emotions are out of our control. As a result, the mindset is more steady than emotions.

How we handle our emotions may very well be a matter of our mindset. And how we choose to form our mindset may be influenced by our emotions. But they are not the same. Mindset can include eatable things, as it determines, what exactly we think about food.

The dictionary defines Mindset as a person’s way of thinking and her opinions. I like this definition. Because we can choose the way we think. We get to have control over that. Our mindset includes every attitude and also our general approach to life, the universe and everything. It includes our attitude towards working, relationships, spirituality, money, health, politics and climate change. As well as our opinion on art and literally everything around us. It also includes our goals and our wishes. Our desires and dreams. And our attitude towards those.

The most known and hyped mindsets are probably the minimalist mindset and the mindful mindset. But I do not believe that we have to choose one of the two, to form our own mindset. Keep in mind, that the mindset is probably one of the most personal things. I believe that a mindset can be changed. I believe everyone should tailor their mindset to their own needs to find happiness. But that is a whole new blogpost, that is what I am planning to write next.

A mindset does not only define our way of thinking and our attitude, a mindset can and in my opinion should define our whole life. The reason for that is simple. We have control over our mindset, if we define it such that it will take control of our life, we control our life by transitivity.

A passive mindset, will not affect a person’s life very much, in contrast to the active one. To understand that imagine Anna being criticized by her friend. She understands and even agrees with the criticism and moves on with her life. If Anna entertains an active mindset, she will improve, it may take her days, weeks or months depending on what the criticism was about, but in due time, she will not repeat that mistake. Anna takes responsibility for her life. And she deals with things. If she had a passive mindset, Anna would nod and smile and forget about it. She agrees, but her mindset is not to take action.

Improvement comes easier if one has an active mindset. Because with an active mindset, we have realized that this world does not do anything for us. As long as we have a passive mindset, our lives will not change the slightest bit. At least not in the direction we want. Because we may have dreams… but those are not coming true by chance. And concerning the little things in life, we don’t even really know what we want. We don’t really care. A passive mindset is just the result of ones upbringing. Just the sum of one’s surroundings.

An active mindset does not only contain the dream, it contains the steps to reach it. It contains a detailed roadmap. Someone with an active mindset will check back in with that roadmap and see if his or her actions bring him or her closer to that dream. Which at that point is not a dream anymore, but a goal.

The problem with switching from a passive mindset to an active one is, that it is so much work. We don’t only have to figure out what we want and how to get there. We have to motivate ourselves. And that turns out to be way more difficult, that it sounds. Taking the action of switching mindset, is already something that would be inherent to the active mindset, that is the very thing we are trying to acquire. And so we end up in a vicious cycle.

Most people with passive mindsets do not even realize, that their mindset is passive. Because it is how they have always lived. And when they don’t feel their best about their lives, they don’t realize, that it is not just a little thing bothering them. It is not just their job, friend or partner that is problematic. It is their entire mindset. Their way of thinking. Their attitude. That makes them unhappy. And they do not realize that unless they find a way to fix that, they will never find true peace and true self-confidence.

In addition I believe that many young people don’t quite understand the concept of a mindset. They all want to grow up and be their own boss, but they cannot take control of how they think, because they are still entertaining the same mindset they entertained as teenagers and children. I think, that we cannot be truly gown-up unless we understand how to take control of our own mind. This is true freedom. True independence.

Minimalism: The art of appreciating one’s possessions

The term minimalism has been thrown around the internet a lot. But why? Why does everyone suddenly want to de-clutter and have tidy spaces. Why are Instagram and Pinterest filled with the most beautiful pictures of homes? And why do people look at these picture envying the people living in the spaces depicted?

The movement seems to come from the notion that people who have less can be perfectly happy and that therefore it is not stuff, that makes happy. I think in fact it is our relationship and our approach to things that can contribute to our happiness. And this is exactly the point that makes minimalism a top for this blog, where I constantly stress the importance of a positive mindset. A positive approach to life, to the universe and… to everything, really. So let’s explore how minimalism can help finding the right approach to our possessions.

Everyone who has jumped into minimalism will have come across Marie Kondo’s “The Life changing Magic of tidying up”. It is basically a book on how to de-clutter and finding everything you keep a new home. And this thought I found so very inspiring. She talks about possessions almost as if they were conscious beings. If she discards something she thanks the item for its services. And I find that this gratitude is very helpful. Not only in discarding things but also in our everyday approach to items. But in order to be able to be grateful for something we need to not value our possessions in the first place and this is where minimalism strikes.

What items do we need? Marie Kondo’s hero-question is: “Does this spark joy?” And sure, there are things that do not in particular spark joy, but thinking about it, those items do make our lives a lot easier. For me the first thing that would come to mind are tissues. But usually “Does it spark joy?” Will help to discard many things, that we keep because we feel obliged to and yet, we never use them and we feel guilty about that and as time goes by we feel more and more guilt and we start trying to avoid those things.

But it is not only the things that make us feel bad about ourselves, that we need to let go. The things that we do not care about as well. If we have a shirt that we love and one that we feel “Meh” about, we will always reach for the one we love. So letting go is the right choice. Why though? Why let things go that we don’t care whether or not we have them? Because the more things we love we have around us, the more we can appreciate what we own. And the more things that are Meh and surround us, the more we feel Meh.

We do not need things that make us feel Meh. Because Meh is just another word for “kinda empty” and the latter is definitely an issue when it comes to dealing with tension and self-harm. That we do not need things that make us feel bad is obvious.

But what if I do not need 9 white T-Shirts, but I love every one of the ones I own? Do I have to toss them if I want to be a minimalist? Certainly not. It is not about having only a few things. It is about having only the things we really want to have. And this will contribute to our happiness. Minimalism should never be a source of guilt. Never. If we like pens and like to have hundreds of them in pretty containers and display them somewhere. Sure. We should do that. But we should always have a designated home for anything we own. Because that is the first step to expressing gratitude and if we cannot find a home for the item, how much do we really love it? We shall never just stuff things away, because chances are that we don’t need those things.

This way we will be happier with less possessions. Not because we value having only a few things. But because we value the things that we own. Because eliminating the things we do not like will give us the mental space to appreciate what we own. We can have a completely positive mindset towards our possessions, because we love everything we own. Everything brings us joy. And thinking about it… even if we discard half of what we own we still will be surrounded by so many things. So many things we love. And this means, we can go through life more positive. Which is exactly what we want.

The concept of having less and valuing it more can be applied to anything. It can be applied to every action. It is about being mindful. Doing one thing and giving it purpose rather than doing a hundred things but not caring for one of them. And not only will we be happier as an individual but also as a social being. Because if we meet a friend that’s all we do. Meet a friend. If we work we are more productive, because we are not doing five things at the same time. It will take pace and stress and pressure out of our daily lives and therefore leave us happier.

And again with caring for the few things we do more than for the hundreds of things we can be more grateful. With the few things we own we can be grateful for every single one of them. And eventually this fills us with peace. Having a few meaningful things in our lives, rather than just having stuff around us, that we don’t know what to think about.