Imagine a day like this:
You’re hating your job because you feel like you should be further in life than this. Every task is ‘boring’ or ‘pointless’. It all feels like groundhog day. You’re angry that you have to stay in this crap job because you have a mortgage to pay or a family to support. You just can’t get how much you hate it and how unfair it is out of your mind.
Maybe you’ve been here. Maybe with work. Maybe with a relationship. Maybe with housework. Maybe with your life in general.
Imagine if all the suffering that went into feeling like that was a construct of your mind and could be changed with an attitude adjustment. A mindful attitude adjustment.
Let’s just take a couple of the attitudes.
Acceptance. We cause ourselves an amazing amount of suffering through wanting things to be other than they are. We fight against what is. We say things like “I don’t want it to be this way”, “It’s not fair”, “I hate this”. And all that ends up happening is we become miserable and feel powerless to change anything.
Imagine how much easier a boring job would be if you didn’t think it should be different or that you should be doing something better. You could be using that ‘hating it’ energy to improve your situation through other means. It can be an interesting exercise to see how many things you fight against. Do you grumble about doing the groceries, or washing up, or the cold?
Non-Judging. We spend our lives judging things as good, bad or indifferent. We judge ourselves, what we say, how we interact, how we look. We judge others in the same way. And we judge all our experiences as negative or positive, good or bad.
What if things just were. That they weren’t good or bad. That they were just happening. Then your job wouldn’t be crap. It would just be happening. And you wouldn’t be feeling bad about it. It can be an interesting exercise to notice just how often you judge things as good or bad throughout one day.
Beginner’s Mind. Have you ever watched the excitement and curiosity that kids approach the world with? Things are being experienced for the first time and they are endlessly interesting and fun. Adopting an attitude like that can make mundane things seem super interesting. We become jaded when we have a ‘been there, done that’ attitude. No matter if we’ve done something 100 times before, there will always be something new in it.
If you were to take this attitude to your groundhog day job, you might find things that give your attitude to it a whole new lease on life. It can be an interesting exercise to take a walk somewhere you walk all the time and try to notice things you haven’t seen before. You’ll be surprised at how much there is.
So, if you’re interested I can let you know more of the attitudes of mindfulness and how you might use them to make your own life more pleasant. Just reply Y to this email if you want more.
Related Tag: Life Coach Gold Coast
