Hey Team,
Today, I’m inviting you to do another type of check-in.
Let’s see how we can make your life expansion and enhancement practices just a teeny bit more fun, more interesting, or more you-friendly.
In short, let’s do a little bit of self-kindness finetuning.
Start by spending a few minutes thinking about your practices, whether they are already underway or under development. You can make some notes, keep the info in your head, or say them aloud to a friend or into a voice memo.
Then, dig a little into what is going well so far.
Here are a few questions I came up with but please feel free to develop your own:
What have you enjoyed about your practices so far? Or what ideas have you enjoyed considering so far?
What do you look forward to?
What feels good about the processes you are following or working towards? Or what feels good about your plans?
Now, consider how you can make your practices easier to start or to complete, how you could add more fun, or what could help you make the practice even more your own.
These changes can be very subtle and don’t have to involve a lot of rigamarole.
Maybe you can make things easier to start by using a practice-specific alarm or by arranging your gear in an obvious place. And it might be easier to complete something if you use specific music or work with a friend or if you have a reward at the end.
Making things more fun might involve gamifying your practices, adding points of interest to a walk or listening to a podcast while training.
As for making your practice more your own, here’s a personal example: When a practice of mine involves repetitions I have three techniques to make the process more Christine-friendly. I either use a timer instead of counting or I use letters instead of numbers or I count down instead of up (because up feels like I might have to do the repetitions forever.) Making these changes doesn’t affect the practice itself but it affects how I feel about it and that makes a big difference.
Then, do a quick review of things that are getting on your nerves.
Ok, so we all understand and acknowledge that change, new practices, and building new habit building can be difficult, tricky, and frustrating. Accepting that those kinds of feelings arise for everyone can play an important role in helping you persevere.
BUT
Just because new practices can cause those feelings doesn’t mean that you can’t examine your processes for ways to reduce your annoyance or frustration.
For me, this kind of finetuning often involves checking to see what conditions I have accidentally put on my practice. For example, I was once finding a yoga challenge really frustrating and resisted getting started each day.
When I stopped at looked at my process, I realized that I had inadvertently connected my yoga practice with a specific space in my house. There wasn’t actually enough room to do many of the sequences in the challenge so I was constantly having to shift myself over or adjust the movements which was annoying and took me out of the lovely mental space that yoga practices can create.
So, while getting started/continuing the practice involved some frustration, I could finetune my approach by practicing in a difference space and, hence, remove a whole set of unnecessary annoyances.
You may have fixable annoyances going on in your practice as well.
Maybe your chosen meditation space is chilly and you need a blanket or maybe there’s a distracting noise that you could cover with white noise – or maybe you could choose a different location.
Perhaps your socks aren’t quite warm enough for your walks so you dread lacing up your boots each day. Perhaps you could wear two pairs of socks or get some warm inserts or wear different footwear. (I once had an opposite kind of problem. The socks I wear at home in the winter are too bulky to be comfortable in my boots. I started keeping less bulky socks in the drawer with my mitts and that made a huge difference.)
Maybe the pen you have been keeping with your paper journal makes a scratchy sound when you write or maybe the ink is blotchy. Trying a different pen might make a world of difference.
Being kind to yourself can involve tangible changes, too.
Most of the time, my advice about self-kindness has to do with how you view yourself or how you think about your efforts, any kind of mental reframing of the situation.
However, being kind to yourself can be very tangible as well.
You can move the table you bump into instead of just being annoyed at yourself for bumping into it.
You can wear gloves when you write so your hands stay warm instead of telling yourself that your chilly hands are no big deal.
You can have two separate water bottles for different areas of your house instead of being frustrated that you keep forgetting to bring your water bottle with you when you go upstairs.
Sure, these small changes may not make a dramatic difference in the effectiveness of your practice but finetuning your self-kindness in both tangible and intangible ways will make it much easier for you to keep moving yourself in the direction you want to go.
So, Team, I hope you will consider how you can finetune your practice and processes and reduce unnecessary frustrations.
And, I’m offering you this gold star in honour of your efforts, no matter what they are.
Go Team Us!
