Mental Chic

Calm and Poise are two words I would use to describe a “chic, elegant” person. And those two enviable attributes start in our minds…

  Joy on Demand by Chade-Meng Tan. So how do we spend our time when caught in traffic or trapped in the slowest line ever experienced in the history of mankind? Tan gives us some ideas on how to creatively use these brief (or not so) interludes in our busy days. Humorous and thoughtful, Tan offers unusual wisedom and good advice presented in gentle, bite-sized nuggets. I’ve tried his approach to line-survival (the 20-second meditation on loving-kindness) and can honestly report that it works! I could feel my tension seep away as I breathed slowly and focused on the positive intention of sending the (very) slow clerk thoughts of loving-kindness.  It didn’t make the line move any faster but the exercise di

d, amazingly, lower my stress-level! For that one moment alone, I send Tan my heart-felt thanks. I have continued the practice of the 20-second (or 2-minute) meditation when stuck in some frustrating/mind-numbing interlude that is out of my control. The gift of calm is wonderful!

 The Miracle Morning: The Not So Obvious Secret Guarenteed to Transform Your Life by Hal Elrod. Here is Elrod’s basic message: how we START our day basically sets the course for how our day goes. Start our day by scrambling out of bed late and panic-stricken (because we hit the snooze button too many times) and we tend to continue on a scrambling, chaotic-feeling course for the whole day. Start our day with a short series of activities that brings us to a calm, focused, grateful mental state and we move through the rest of our day feeling and acting in a calm, focused and emotionally stable manner. And our lives are the sum of all of our days. Hence, how we start our day has a significant impact on the course of our lives. This is a pretty loft claim (not unlike the title.) But, Elrod’s idea is not without a kernel of truth. The author encourages us to set our alarm clock one hour earlier. (Yes, you read that correctly, one hour – 60 full minutes – earlier than usual) and to start our day with calm, quiet intention. The plan is that we do each of the following six things – each day – for 10 minutes each (in whatever order makes sense for your specific needs.) He calls this collection of activities “Life S.A.V.E.R.S.”

S – Silence – sit quietly and meditate or pray – the point is to quiet our minds.

A – Affir

mations – repeat our positive, uplifting affirmations to ourselves. These can be focused on large, life mission statements (“I am grateful for the love of my children”) or on smaller, day-to-day things (like practicing in my mind the presentation that I will give at the 8:00 am meeting.)

V – Visualization – visualize in our minds us doing our daily activities (or whatever we are concerned about) in a way that brings out the best version of ourselves. (A good example would be to visualize handling that difficult co-worker or family member in a calm, detached manner.)

E – Exercise – ten minutes of exercise, whatever we choose (pushups, sit-ups, walk around the block).

R – Read – read something related to self-improvement. (Popular Culture magazines and internet surfing are specifically excluded.)

S – scribe (write) – keep a journal – use ten minutes to jot down a journal entry. (It shouldn’t be War & Peace, just put a few words down on paper.)

Elrod eloquently describes the individual benefits to each activity as well as how the combination of the actions make a giant, positive difference on the course of our day. I describe what I experienced and my conclusions here when I attempted his 30-day challenge.