Exposure to novelty (new people, different books, diverse cultures) stirs your creativity, your vision and your habits. Question everything. Observe. Meditate.
Nurturing your mind like a garden will make it blossom. Cultivate diversity and wisdom. Miles Davis and Django Reinhardt were known to rejoice with kinds of music, which were different from the aesthetic paths that made them popular. Jim Hall explicitly referenced his search for inspiration, not in music, but in paintings, books and nature.
Avoid growing weeds. Your mind is your treasure. Protect it like a gardener protects his garden. Even more so, protect your mind like a guard protects his king!
Avoid throwing toxic waste into your precious garden: worries, anxieties, fears, lament, stress, confusion, fights, arguments, mockery, jealousy… they all drain your minds’ energy and vitality, injuring your soul.
Work on your information diet. Never settle or afford the luxury of a negative thought as it may injure you in subtle unconscious ways. Adopt a positive paradigm about the world. Start by describing three daily positive things you are grateful for.
The way you think stems from habit. Make positive thinking your habit. Through mental conditioning comes Mastery. If you come to think about it, there is only one thing you have absolute dominion over: YOUR MIND.
You can’t control the weather, the markets or the news of the world. You can’t control what happen around you, what others say or think about you. You can’t even control if your plans, projects or business ideas will work out in the end.
You can only control your attitude toward these events and your mind about circumstances: the way you look at, interpret and think about what happens around you. Put on green glasses and you’ll see the world as green. Switch them to red and suddenly the world seems red.
Your outer world reflects the state of your inner world. You take the driver’s seat of your life once you master controlling your thoughts and the way you respond to circumstances and events.
There are no absolutes. The same event or the same person might be interpreted in completely opposite directions. It’s up to you to decide which way to go. How will you interpret and process the circumstances of life? You choose your response.
Through this new light, events are no longer positive or negative. Those are just different labels you put into things when judging what surrounds you. Instead, one should experience and celebrate what may come. Every event offers you lessons that inspire or fuel your inner growth.
Life itself, then, becomes the major plateau for you to sharpen your own exercises and techniques on building mental toughness. Persistence is the mother of personal change. But the goal is not to reach the finish line. The goal is the process towards the line. Let go of the outcome and focus on the process of personal expansion and growth. You’ll never see the finish line in the horizon again, because it ceases to exist. Instead, there’s only what truly matters: The path.
Concentration is at the root of mental mastery, and also favors the secret to eternal happiness: find out what you truly love to do and then direct all of your energy towards doing it. Once you are concentrating your mind power and energy on a worthy pursuit that you love, abundance flows into your life, and all your desires are fulfilled with ease and grace.
To be worthy, your passion must, in some way, improve or serve the lives of others. Once you find out what your life’s work is, your world will come alive. You’ll be driven by your priorities in an effortless and gentle way. And given your enthusiasm and love for what you are doing in your life, you start living in the moment. Your attention is fully and completely on the task at hand. Therefore, there are no energy leaks. Discover your real reason for being here and then have the courage to act on it.
Take some daily time to silently contemplate not only where you are, but also where you are going. Take the time to reflect on your purpose and how you are living your life, every day. Most importantly, think deeply and genuinely about how you would improve the next day. Daily incremental improvements produce lasting results, which, in turn, lead to positive change.
In short, caring for your mind starts on meditation, the process where you improve concentration over your thoughts and actions. Stronger ability to concentrate leads you in finding meaning (a.k.a.: your life’s purpose) which resumes in a happy fulfilling life.
Techniques:
- The Heart Of The Rose – Meditation with a flower.
- Opposition Thinking – when an undesirable thought occupies the focal point of your mind, immediately replace it with an uplifting one.
- The Secret Of The Lake – Visualization (the mind works through pictures. Pictures affect your self-image and your self-image affects the way you feel, act and achieve). See yourself as you want to be. Visualize mental pictures of all that you want to be, to have and to attain in your life.
For more on the subject Check Robin Sharma’s “The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari”
