An Intentional Life
Page 18
• Of your core values, which ones would be the same no matter what you were doing in your life?
• Think about how you manifest your core values in all areas of your life, especially in areas of most importance to you.
• Reflect on where you have difficulty bringing your core values into your life. What might get in the way?
Choose:
• Make decisions that reflect your core values.
• Choose to define your core values concretely so that they can help shape your decisions.
• Choose not to invest time or energy in situations that are in misalignment with your core values.
Act:
• Create a plan with clear steps to manifest your core values. Take an action to implement them daily.
• Cultivate relationships with people who live in alignment with their own personal core values.
Chapter 2 Practices:
How to Actively
Cultivate Well-Being
Awareness:
• Place attention on how you experience well-being. How do you know when you feel it?
• Place greater attention on what you feel gratitude for and what is right about your life.
• Notice what brings positive emotions and what helps you let go of negative emotions.
Reflect:
• Reflect upon activities that promote a sense of well-being and make time for them.
• Reflect on the kinds of thoughts that lead to the experience of positive feelings.
• Think about how to bring greater appreciation to the things you value most.
Choose:
• Choose to take breaks from negative news and electronics.
• Choose to focus on yours and others’ efforts for positive change in the world.
• Make choices with your time in ways that produce a sense of well-being—including time alone and with others.
• Choose to give more time to relationships that are mutually supportive.
Act:
• Take care of your body by movement, exercise, and eating healthy food.
• Make social plans more often with people that value you for who you are and aspire to be.
• Practice types of self-care that are soothing and nurturing.
• Communicate appreciation for the people in your life right now.
Chapter 3 Practices:
How to Have a Healthy
Relationship to Your Desires
Awareness:
• Notice which desires get a lot of head space and energy.
• Be aware of self-judgment around your desires.
• Notice moments of contentment; when there is nothing that you desire.
Reflect:
• Reflect on ways that you can practice a healthy relationship to your desires.
• Think about when stepping back from a desire feels like a deprivation.
• Think about ways to enjoy desires that are in alignment with your core values.
Choose:
• Make healthy choices around desires.
• Choose to spend less time in thoughts about desires. Instead, make room for enjoying them.
• Choose to make desire for more money and material things less central to your day to day life.
Act:
• Have fun, be sexual, enjoy good drink and food, treat yourself.
• Step back from desires that have become habits or cravings (e.g., excessive shopping, drinking, working, etc.)
• Be creative. Find new ways to fulfill desires.
Chapter 4 Practices:
The Importance of Pausing More
Awareness:
• Notice and appreciate the precious still moments when you are not lost in thought.
• Notice when your awareness leaves what you are doing in the present moment.
• Notice that moment you bring yourself back to the present moment.
Reflect:
• Begin each morning imagining how to create pauses throughout the course of your day.
• Think about what breaks from your routine enrich you most. How can you create more time for these?
• Reflect on circumstances that make it challenging to pause. How can you encourage stillness in these moments?
Choose:
• Choose to incorporate pauses throughout your day that help you feel centered.
• Choose to shut off your phone and step away from the internet for periods during the day, every day.
• Make lifestyle choices that allow you to take breaks from routine. These breaks are fertile ground for creativity.
Act:
• Take a moment to pause between one task and moving on to the next.
• Practice daily mindful awareness of your breath (see the practice in this chapter).
• Take vacations, use your personal days, take time off when you are sick, and make plans with people who enrich your life. Meditate, practice yoga, write in a journal.
Chapter 5 Practices:
How to Shape
What Makes You Tick
Awareness:
• Notice the physical experience of different emotional states: anticipation, anger, ease, excitement, sadness, fear, anger, happiness, annoyance, joy.
• Notice which physical sensations you welcome, which ones you dislike.
• Notice the thoughts that come up around the physical experience of constriction, of openness.
Reflect:
• Reflect upon ways you can encourage the quality of openness when you feel stress.
• Think about ways that you perpetuate constriction unnecessarily. For example, do you get easily annoyed under certain circumstances?
• Reflect upon ways you are a more skillful communicator when you feel open rather than defensive (constricted).
Choose:
• Choose to pause and be curious about the state of constriction, rather than reacting to it.
• Choose to cultivate states which bring openness—like generosity, kindness, and compassion.
Act:
• When you feel constriction in your body, breathe deeply into it. How does the breath change the experience?
• When you have a difference of opinion with someone, approach the other person as someone to understand (openness) rather than diminish or confront (constriction).
• When you feel uncomfortable, get up and move—dance, sing, swirl around—and see if this changes your experience of discomfort.
Chapter 6 Practices:
Improve the Quality
of Your Thinking
Awareness:
• Bring greater awareness to the quality and content of your thoughts.
• Notice when you are having a flurry of thoughts. Notice when your thoughts are quiet.
• Bring awareness to the difference in thought as background activity in your mind and thought as direct reflection.
Reflect:
• Think about the ways the content of your thoughts influences your decisions and actions.
• Reflect on times when you “think” in a way that clutters your mind. When might you confuse overthinking for skillful reflection?
• Reflect upon the kind of biases you have that impact your ability to think flexibly and creatively.
Choose:
• Choose to engage daily in practices which quiet your mind.
• Choose to limit your attention being pulled by digital technology. For example, put the phone away when taking in information or experience (e.g., conversations, reading, walking).
• Choose to be skeptical of the usefulness of certain thoughts.
Act:
• Place yourself in environments that lend themselves to skillful reflection.
• Record the results of conscious r
eflection in different ways (e.g., writing, recording, sharing with others.) This helps you integrate them more.
• Participate in activities that cultivate the kind of thinking that adds to your well-being (e.g., books, film, music, seminars).
Chapter 7 Practices:
Ask Questions
That Help You Think Better
Awareness:
• Become aware of how often your mind tries to make sense of things by thinking about rather than direct reflection.
• Notice your experience of asking yourself direct questions and regarding your answers with openness. How does this differ from thinking about what happened?
• Notice what you pay attention to when asking yourself the question, “What’s happening now?” Do you tend to notice things within you? external events?
Reflect:
• Ask yourself “What is happening now?” throughout your day, every day.
• When you notice yourself playing something over and over in your head, ask yourself, out loud, “What is my question?” and “Do I have a question?”
• And ask yourself another question, out loud, “What, if anything, can I do to help me deepen my understanding?”
Choose:
• Choose to practice direct reflection by using simple helpful questions like, “What is happening now?”, “How is this for me?”, and “Is this true for me?”
• Choose to ask yourself questions in a state of openness and curiosity.
• Choose to approach the questions you ask with sincerity. Ask in a way that invites skillful reflection, and listen to your responses.
Act:
• Pay attention when your answers to your inquiries compel you to take action.
• When you take action, bring skillful reflection to the outcome of your action. What can be learned is often more important than the outcome.
Chapter 8 Practices:
Take More Interest
in What Can Be Known
Awareness:
• Be aware of when you are making causal links that are not based on what you know.
• Notice how difficult it is to let go of the stories about what can’t be known when you are uncomfortable or upset.
• Notice whether you make causal links when something good happens. Is this different from when something happens that you don’t like?
Reflect:
• Reflect on how much time you spend lost in thought about what cannot be known.
• Think about how, in times of uncertainty, you can practice reflecting only upon what you can know, rather than conjecture.
• Reflect on ways to skillfully explore what can be known.
Choose:
• Choose to take responsibility over what you have control over, which is your response to external events.
• Choose to not personalize outcomes that you can’t control.
• Choose to shift your thoughts from what cannot be known to what can be known.
Act:
• As above, ask yourself, out loud, “What can be known right now?”
• When something makes you uncomfortable, write down on a piece of paper what is happening within you. Write down what is most painful or uncomfortable. Write down what, if anything, you could do to release the discomfort.
• When something is going how you would like it to go, write down on a piece of paper what, if anything, you can know about what you have done to bring it about.
Chapter 9 Practices:
How to Make
Deliberate Decisions
Awareness:
• Bring awareness to the number and variety of decisions you make in a typical day.
• Bring awareness to decisions that are most urgent or relevant to your core values.
Reflect:
• Reflect on decisions that take time and thought but do not add to your life. How might you reduce time spent on these decisions?
• Reflect on which decisions are easier for you to make. Which ones are harder?
• Reflect upon areas where you are a skillful decision-maker, as well as upon areas where you might practice becoming more skillful.
Choose:
• Choose an area where it is difficult to make a decision and explore what, if anything, could help you feel better able to choose.
• Prioritize carving time out for reflection on decisions that are related to important goals.
• Choose to routinize decisions that take time and don’t add to your life (e.g., have healthy meals at the ready; simplify your wardrobe).
Act:
• Spend less time in distracting activities (e.g., internet surfing) that interfere with your more actively choosing how to best engage with your free time.
• Read a book on decision-making bias (e.g., Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely or The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons).
• When making important decisions, ask for input from informed people with different perspectives.
Chapter 10 Practices:
How to Choose
Now and Stay Open to Unknowns
Awareness:
• Notice what you do with options that don’t seem readily available. Do you move on? Do you explore them further?
• Notice when you feel fear around making a decision. Notice how fear impacts your ability to choose well.
Reflect:
• Think about a decision that is complex. Create options around this decision that you have not yet thought of. Reflect on them as if they were a real possibility.
• Think about a decision you made in which the end result was something you had not foreseen, both positive and negative. Reflect on how the outcome impacted your future decision-making.
• Think about a decision you would make if you didn’t fear a negative outcome.
Choose:
• If you choose not to pursue a goal, make it conscious. Choose to choose. Consciously let go of an option rather than avoid making a decision about it.
• Choose to test out possibilities that extend beyond your current experience.
• When making decisions, choose options that reflect a belief that good things can happen for you. Then consider what conditions you can try to create to manifest these things.
Act:
• Take one small step toward a long-range goal. Then evaluate the impact of that step.
• If you feel resistance to making a difficult decision, write down different possible choices. Write down what gets in the way of you making a decision. Write down what could help you decide (e.g., information? courage? time?).
• Talk to one or two people you trust about a decision that you want to make but are unclear how to move forward.
Chapter 11 Practices:
How to Be an Effective Actor
Awareness:
• Bring greater awareness to the way you approach and take action.
• Notice the difference in your experience of intentional inaction and avoiding taking action.
• Notice the experience in your body when you feel reactive. Watch the sense of urgency. Notice if it passes. Notice what keeps it alive.
Reflect:
• Think about your style of acting in different areas of our life. Think of times your style has served your aspirations and when it hasn’t.
• Think about your core values and how you can bring them more front and center through meaningful action.
• Reflect upon action that can be automated as well as actions which would benefit from greater intention.
Choose:
• Choose to be more conscious of when action, and inaction, is the best option.
• Choose to create time for non-doing, for activities that have no stated goal, ones that create a sense of openness and i
n which you are relaxed and have a heightened awareness of what is around you.
• Choose to spend less time in actions that are neither intentional action or mindful inaction. Choose to spend less time in distracting defaults.
Act:
• Think of something that you want to have happen in your life but have not yet taken action. In the coming week, take one small action in that direction.
• When your core values require action, take it.
• When you find yourself jumping into action before pausing, refrain from action and allow more room for the experience of receptivity.
Chapter 12 Practices:
How to Value
Effort Over Outcome
Awareness:
• When taking action, place your attention on the quality of your effort.
• Notice if you have expectations for a particular outcome. If you do, can you create some distance from it? Expectations limit flexibility of your future actions.