Mindfulness Coach Explains It’s Not Just About Following Your Breath – PS79
Episode Introduction
With the current pace of disruptive change, soaring personal stress and widespread mental health issues, how do we find a positive road to human flourishing?
In this episode, I chat with executive and mindfulness coach, Meg Salter, author of Mind Your Life: How Mindfulness Can Build Resilience and Reveal Your Extraordinary. She talks to us about building the muscles of resilience, incorporating attentional skills into your daily life and build a truly sustainable practice.
Many people intuit that mindfulness will help them maintain a positive personal attitude, or provide better balance in their hectic lives. But mindfulness is more than occasional oases of calm. Mindfulness is a skill, not a pill.
Episode Background
As an executive and mindfulness coach, Meg is working increasingly with those who want to create positive change in their worlds. Meg offers both an extensive business background and deep experience in meditation. She first started meditating over 20 years ago gaining profound experience while pursuing a career, living in a number of cities, and raising children.
In 2002, she started teaching meditation, and now, as a mindfulness coach, she has witnessed the enhanced resilience and personal flourishing in those who develop mindfulness skills.
Coupled with her busy professional background, on a personal level, Meg suffered trauma in her family with her young brother’s suicide. As Meg states, things don’t always work out. Bad things happen to good people. She developed an appreciation for compassion about the depths of suffering people experience and that cracked her open.
Mindfulness Explained
Mindfulness means learning to pay attention to what’s happening in the present moment in the mind, body and external environment, with an attitude of curiosity and kindness.
Mindfulness requires deep learning and developing attentional skills. Meg offers three essential skills:
- concentration
- sensory clarity
- equanimity, and
- a host of practices to suit your own preference and life style.
It's key that it takes practice to develop the skills that'll affect personal effectiveness and impact. Increasingly, many people report they are pulled in many directions and the demands on their attentional faculties are at breaking point. Through the practice of mindfulness, they report they become more focussed, productive and equanimous.
Mindfulness in Creating Positive Change
It's our experience as coaches and human development professionals, that people are well intentioned. They want to do the best for themselves and those around them. And, because of the complexities and the pace of life referred to above, many of us need help to develop the capacities and skills to deliver on our positive intentions.
Growing capacities in mindfulness and positivity is a big part of that to strengthen resilience. As Meg explains in this episode, by building self awareness, you get to know more about your DAN (default attentional network). This means you become aware of the little voices in your head, the emotions in your body, and with that kind of awareness you have the capacity to recognize them for what they are. You recognize you can make new choices. You no longer need to be yanked around by old fears and stories. You experience a new found freedom.
You learn to recognize those unconscious patterns that don't serve your best intentions. When you see them, you take them for what they are, and with practice you're increasingly liberated from self-defeating assumptions, emotional pattens, and rigidity. That's the power of having a mindfulness practice.
Reveal Your Extraordinary
What if the capacities of mindfulness were available more often, what would your life be like then?
Through mindfulness, we cultivate capacity to embrace what we are experiencing in the moment. We develop skills and practices to turn toward what is in front of us and open up to it in a positive way.
Mindfulness helps with experiencing the wholeness of life. When you open up your attention and intention to ALL of life, life has a way of supporting you differently.
As Meg says,
You take something ordinary and apply some intentional steps, you can end up with something extraordinary. Because when you mind your life—life minds you back.
Connect with Meg
Meg's Website: Meg Salter
Meg on Twitter
Meg on LinkedIn
Meg's Book
[amazon template=iframe image&asin=0995936803]
Mind Your Life: How Mindfulness Can Build Resilience and Reveal Your Extraordinary
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