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https://www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/mindfulness-based-interventions

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6 Mindfulness Exercises You Can Try Today

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6 Mindfulness Exercises You Can Try Today

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https://www.pocketmindfulness.com/6-mindfulness-exercises-you-can-try-today/

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22 Mindfulness Exercises, Techniques & Activities For Adults (+ PDF’s)

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22 Mindfulness Exercises, Techniques & Activities For Adults (+ PDF’s)

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https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/mindfulness-exercises-techniques-activities/

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How to Bring Mindfulness Into Meetings--10 Tips

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How to Bring Mindfulness Into Meetings--10 Tips

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https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201510/how-bring-mindfulness-meetings-10-tips

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A 3-Minute Body Scan Meditation to Cultivate Mindfulness

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A 3-Minute Body Scan Meditation to Cultivate Mindfulness

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https://www.mindful.org/a-3-minute-body-scan-meditation-to-cultivate-mindfulness/

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Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World (audio here)

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Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World (audio here)

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http://cdn.franticworld.com/

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http://cdn.franticworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Mindfulness-Of-Body-And-Breath-from-book-Mindfulness-Finding-Peace-in-a-Frantic-World-128k.mp3

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http://www.mindfulschools.org/personal-practice/back-to-school-2/

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What Changes When A School Embraces Mindfulness

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What Changes When A School Embraces Mindfulness

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https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/03/30/what-changes-when-a-school-embraces-mindfulness/

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How the Brain Changes When You Meditate - Mindful

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How the Brain Changes When You Meditate - Mindful

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http://www.mindful.org/how-the-brain-changes-when-you-meditate/

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Help your mindfulness students work through difficult emotions by reflecting on these four questions:

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Students at the Project Wayfinder retreat use the kit to think through the qualities they embody. ( Patrick Beaudouin/Project Wayfinder)

This post has been edited*
Classroom educators know better than anyone else how much of learning is built on the strength of relationships in the room. When students like and trust their teacher, they learn better. That's why large class sizes and a focus on standardized test scores - to the exclusion of other things - frustrate many veteran teachers. They know those factors often hinder teachers' ability to form relationships. But a slow shift may be coming as some school leaders are starting to recognize that the health and happiness of teachers, students and staff depend on making space in school for relationship-building.

Advisory programs are a popular way school leaders are trying to shift school culture toward relationships. Advisory programs set aside time in the week for a smaller group of students to meet with an adult mentor in a casual setting and with the intent of building relationships. While that sounds like a good idea, too often advisories are glorified study halls; that time isn't used well because content teachers aren't always comfortable in the role of adviser. Leading a productive advisory takes thought and training, just like teaching, and strong relationships don't magically form without work.

'It was born out of a question about how you get students to develop a sense of purpose in their lives, which for the most part high school doesn't really do.' Patrick Cook-Deegan, co-director Project Wayfinder

"There's not a lot of resources for advisers that work well," said Patrick Cook-Deegan, co-director and lead program designer of Project Wayfinder. Advisers are usually teachers with many other demands on their time, so some advisory support goes a long way to gain their buy-in. On the flip side, prepackaged curricula can feel canned and inauthentic, the worst possible combination when asking students to be vulnerable about their life, worries and dreams. Cook-Deegan and his co-director, Kelly Schmutte, think about their Project Wayfinder tools as a supportive structure for open-ended conversations. The focus is on helping adolescents find purpose.

"Project Wayfinder was born out of trying to make advisory more meaningful," Cook-Deegan said. "And it was born out of a question about how you get students to develop a sense of purpose in their lives, which for the most part high school doesn't really do." Cook-Deegan believes purpose is a critical component of adolescent development that is utterly lacking from traditional high schools. His theory is based largely on the work of Stanford psychologist William Damon, who says a sense of purpose is "the long-term, number one motivator in life."

"For you to have a sense of purpose you need two things: One, you need to know what's important to you and what you care about," Cook-Deegan said. "And two, you need to know how your work is going to have consequence in the world." Many high school students go through four years of school doing exactly what they are told to do. The work often feels divorced from the real world - a prescriptive set of "shoulds" that adults say will lead to a happy life. But for many students, the end goal of all that work - college or a career - is a hazy future, not a tangible one.

At a Project Wayfinder summer program, students expressed similar sentiments. Many of them had joined the one-week camp at Stanford because their parents encouraged them to, and most thought it was a camp about design thinking, but they were glad it turned out to be more than that.

"I want to do something meaningful in life, that's going to have an impact on everyone," said DeShun Smith, a senior at San Lorenzo High School. "It's just going deeper in myself and finding out what my life is about." Smith said he's been thinking about what he wants to do with his life for the past five years, but the way has never seemed clear. He was excited about a Wayfinder activity he'd just completed in which he listed his skills and passions, as well as needs he saw in the world. Then he thought about all the ways he could combine those things. He's thinking about writing a book about his life.

"I think it's kind of cool to slow down and think and reflect about what you do," said Maya Holton, a senior at Los Gatos High School who said many of the experiences connected to Wayfinding were new to her. As a senior she feels a lot of pressure to pick a college and a career - and it feels like whatever she decides will determine the rest of her life. But through conversations with mentors over the week she's realized her path might be more of a zigzag than a straight line, and that's helped relieve some of the pressure.

"My school is very traditional," Holton said. "We just go to math and then English and they don't teach us these new broader ideas about social awareness within the classes, which I think is very important." During the camp she thought a lot about her passion for helping people with special needs, something she's dabbled in, but never put a lot of time into. "You never really think about what you're good at, or what you love to do," she said. She's trying to design a project to help kids with special needs learn life skills in silly and fun ways.

Cook-Deegan, who's helping to run the weeklong retreat, is encouraging students to broadly outline a project they might pursue with their insights after they leave the retreat. He thinks project-based learning could be powerful avenue for educators to help students discover purpose, if they allow enough time and structure for students to think through what holds meaning for them.
CONNECTING STUDENTS TO WORLD BEYOND SCHOOL
The Blue Valley Schools in Kansas are high-performing and generally serve a fairly affluent community. The graduation rate is 97 percent and most of those students go to four-year colleges. But administrators there know these impressive numbers aren't enough. They were concerned that while the district was winning the traditional accountability game, it wasn't helping students to think about who they are, where they want to go, and how they'll successfully meet their goals. So in 2009 they started the Center for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS) to help connect students to real-world experiences in careers they might be interested in pursuing.

"If we're really going to make a huge difference in terms of preparing students not just for college or career, but for life, we need to tap into something that feels like a calling for them and not just a job," said Cory Mohn, executive director of CAPS.

The CAPS program partners with local industry to identify strands like bioscience, human services, engineering and health care, where there are rich community resources. Mentors work with students to identify their personal interests and connect them to real-world challenges that local businesses put forward. About 30 percent of Blue Valley graduates end up doing a semester with CAPS, where they spend half the school day immersed in a passion-driven project with mentors at the center or with community partners. When students aren't at CAPS, they return to their home high school where they take more traditional classes.

Despite being a well-resourced, innovative program, CAPS mentors still struggle to help students identify their passions. Often the question "what do you want to be when you grow up?" is too broad and open-ended for students. Students end up gravitating toward fields where they've received external validation. But the CAPS mentors want students to find their own purpose, and they've partnered with Project Wayfinder to help students think through their goals.

'I think there's also a fear with students that they think if they miss one of those hoops then they're done, they've crashed and burned.' Erin Hayes, CAPS teacher

"The teachers appreciate the ability to have those guiding conversations with students," said Scott Kreshel, director of program development for CAPS. "We want this to be an exciting path," not just another hoop to jump through. The Wayfinder toolkit has helped students think not just about the most lucrative careers or even about their own strengths, but to look at the intersection of need, passion and strengths to find something that might be more fulfilling.

"A lot of times they don't know where to begin," said Erin Hayes, a foundations of medicine instructor for CAPS. "Sometimes it's hard for those high-achieving students to do that piece because they're looking for the check boxes." She tries to weave Wayfinding activities throughout her curriculum when she thinks students need a moment to reflect or a tool to help them gain clarity.

Hayes also uses the tools to help individual students. One student came to Hayes with a dilemma: She thought she'd found her passion and was excited to pursue it, but knew her parents thought she should become a doctor. She felt weighed down by their expectations, as well as anxious that they might be right. Hayes gave her the "Islands and Buoys" exercise.

The activity asks the student to think about all buoys in life - the "should dos." Then the student brainstorms the islands, the things she would love to do. Sometimes the buoys can help a person reach their island, so the activity leads the student through a reflection process about which buoys might help them reach their goal and which ones may be in contention with the goal.

"For her I think it was so helpful to lay it all out on the table," Hayes said. Her ultimate goal was to affect change on a global scale and she felt tension with the "should" of becoming a doctor. But the activity helped her see the idea of becoming a doctor differently, as a potential route to global change.

"What I liked about it was, even as the instructor, I was looking at what's the end goal here," Hayes said. It wasn't prescriptive. There are lots of potential solutions to the student's problem, but it offered a structured way to deal with the tensions she was feeling. "It was a tool you might reflect on and then you might come back to it," she said.

Hayes has found the activities personally helpful as well. There are 10 Wayfinding traits, many of which are in direct tension with others. Students think about "packing their backpack" with the traits that they find valuable, as well as ones that are valued externally by the world. It's really asking students who they want to be, a question Hayes has also asked herself. She used to be a biomedical cancer researcher at Kansas University before realizing that benchwork wasn't her passion. That's when she switched to teaching. Her roundabout life path has helped her empathize with the stress students feel.

"I think there's also a fear with students that they think if they miss one of those hoops then they're done, they've crashed and burned." Hayes said. "I don't think that's true at all. You just have to twist and turn a little." Life is rarely exactly as one expects, even if the goal remains the same. Helping students to see the twists and turns as normal also helps them be more resilient when they hit bumps.
*Correction: September 29, 2017
An earlier version of this story included information that overstated Henry M. Gunn High School's involvement with Project Wayfinder. While some teachers helped test some activities in the past, Gunn is not currently affiliated with Project Wayfinder. We regret this error.
Helping Teens Find Purpose: A Tool For Educators To Support Students' Discovery

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Helping Teens Find Purpose: A Tool For Educators To Support Students' Discovery

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This post has been edited* Classroom educators know better than anyone else how much of learning is built on the strength of relationships in the room. When students like and trust their teacher, they learn better. That's why large class sizes and a focus on standardized test scores - to the exclusion of other things - frustrate many veteran teachers.

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http://trauma-recovery.ca/recovery/self-compassion/

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Why do we loose control of our emotions?

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Why do we loose control of our emotions?

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Youtube video

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Simple, easy-to-understand whiteboard animation to help early Elementary-aged children gain an understanding of the way their brains work to recognize and manage their emotions. This is intended as a beginning resource to help children, parents, educators, and those who work with children to encourage mindfulness, empathy, and emotional regulation.

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Mindfulness is the practice of observing your own experience in the present moment with an attitude of non-reactivity and/or non-judgement. That's it. It's not necessarily about being calm, going to a "happy place" or even controlling your breathing. Mindfulness is about being with "what is" in regard to your experience. Check out this infographic on 5 mindfulness myths below.

Learn more about mindfulness in our free course.

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[Infographic] 5 Mindfulness Myths - Center for Adolescent Studies

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Mindfulness is the practice of observing your own experience in the present moment with an attitude of non-reactivity and/or non-judgement. That's it. It's not necessarily about being calm, going to a "happy place" or even controlling your breathing. Mindfulness is about being with "what is" in regard to your experience.

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Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World

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Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World

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The secret to living mindfully. Just don't breathe a word of it...
You breathe 22,000 times every day. How many are you really aware of?
International bestselling and award-winning author Dr Danny Penman provides a concise guide to letting go and finding peace in a messy world, simply by taking the time to breathe.
Known side effects: You will start to smile more. You will worry less. Life won't bother you so much.
Dissolve anxiety, stress and unhappiness, enhance your mind and unleash your creativity with these simple exercises. And with each little moment of mindfulness, discover a happier, calmer you.
It really is as easy as breathing...
'A marvellously beautiful and sensitive book.' Jon Kabat-Zinn.

'This book is inspiring. Against a backdrop of beautiful art, Danny Penman's gentle words explain clearly how breathing, known since ancient times as the foundation for living mindfully, can become, for any of us, a way to reclaim our lives.' Mark Williams, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Oxford.

Follow Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World using our new app.

Originally developed for a research programme at Oxford University, the app is available for both and iPhone. It contains all of the meditations from our bestselling book plus other useful features that make following the 8-week programme even easier and more convenient. It will help you to meditate absolutely anywhere, allow you to 'daisy-chain' meditations and help you to monitor your progress as you move through the programme. It's free for the first ten days. If you like it, you can then pay a small fee (just the once). There are no subscriptions, 'hidden' on-going charges, or adverts.

Download from the app store for iPhone.

Or from Google Play for Android.
The relentless pace of modern life can stifle creativity and undermine happiness and wellbeing - but it doesn't have to be this way.
The simple mindfulness techniques at the heart of Mindfulness for Creativity dissolve anxiety and stress and have been proven to enhance creativity, problem solving and decision making - skills that are needed not only by 'creatives' but by anyone who wants to optimise their work, life and overall wellbeing. This easy-to-follow, four-week programme takes just 10-20 minutes a day and works by soothing and clarifying the mind, allowing innovative ideas to take form and flourish. It reveals just how much of life is controlled by habitual ways of thinking and approaching the world - and shows you how to pursue a more creative and productive path.
'If you want to discover your creativity, and make more insightful decisions, then read this book.' Mark Williams, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Oxford WINNER OF BEST BOOK (POPULAR MEDICINE) AT THE BRITISH MEDICAL ASSOCIATION'S BOOK AWARDS 2014 Pain, suffering and stress can be intolerable - but it doesn't have to be this way.
Life is chaotic, but if you follow the mindfulness meditations in this programme you will become more resilient and less anxious, and develop the courage necessary to make difficult decisions, create new ideas and to follow them wherever they should lead.

Mindfulness for Health reveals a series of simple practices that you can incorporate into your daily life to relieve chronic pain and the suffering and stress of illness. Clinical trials show that mindfulness meditation can be as effective as prescription painkillers and also enhances the body's natural healing systems. Mindfulness can also reduce the anxiety, depression, irritability, exhaustion and insomnia that can arise from chronic pain and illness.
Mindfulness for Health is based on a unique meditation programme developed by Vidyamala Burch to help her cope with the severe pain of spinal injury. Taught at Breathworks - and its affiliates around the world - this programme has helped tens of thousands of people cope with pain, illness and stress.

The eight-week programme at the heart of this book takes just 10-20 minutes per day. You'll be surprised by how quickly your suffering melts away, leaving behind a deep- seated love of life.

'A beautiful and compassionate book, Mindfulness for Health will put you back in touch with the extraordinary person you already are' Professor Mark Williams, University of Oxford

'This book provides an extremely effective and elegant mind-body approach to healing . . . Highly recommended' Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, author of Full Catastrophe Living and Coming to Our Senses

'In a world of much suffering this book is a gift of wisdom and practical help' Professor Paul Gilbert, PhD, OBE, author of The Compassionate Mind

Life can be relentless, frantic and exhausting - but it doesn't have to be this way...

MINDFULNESS reveals a set of simple yet powerful practices that you can incorporate into daily life to help you break the cycle of anxiety, stress, unhappiness and exhaustion. It promotes genuine joie de vivre; the kind of happiness that gets into your bones and seeps into everything you do. The book is based on Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). MBCT revolves around a straightforward form of mindfulness meditation which takes just a few minutes a day for the full benefits to be revealed. MBCT has been clinically proven to be at least as effective as drugs for depression and it is recommended by the UK's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence - in other words, it works. But more importantly, it also works for the rest of us who aren't depressed but who are struggling to keep up with the relentless demands of the modern world. In short, Mindfulness helps you meet the worst that life throws at you with renewed courage.

Mindfulness is co-authored by Professor Mark Williams of Oxford University, co-developer of MBCT and inspiring meditation teacher.

Mindfulness Apps

You can now follow Mindfulness using our new app. It contains all of the meditations plus other useful features that make following the 8-week programme even easier and more convenient. Originally developed for a research programme at Oxford University, the app is available for iPhone and Android.

What can mindfulness do for you? What exactly is mindfulness? Buy the book from Amazon.com Buy the book from Amazon UK Follow us on Twitter @DrDannyPenman
BBC Culture Correspondent David Sillito tries a mindfulness course and finds it transformative. Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World featured after 7 minutes.

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Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World

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You breathe 22,000 times every day. How many are you really aware of? International bestselling and award-winning author Dr Danny Penman provides a concise guide to letting go and finding peace in a messy world, simply by taking the time to breathe. Known side effects: You will start to smile more.

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How to Use Mindfulness to Work with Negative Emotions

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How to Use Mindfulness to Work with Negative Emotions

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There are moments in life that are hard, painful, scary and difficult to endure. There are times when we feel anger, anxiety , grief, embarrassment, stress , remorse or other negative emotions.

In these trying times we often want to escape the pain, drown it out or push it away somehow. We may begin a mental struggle with the pain trying to mentally talk our way out of it, or we distract ourselves with activities or drown it out with food or drink or something stronger.

All these ways of avoiding pain only perpetuate it in the long run. Avoidance creates suffering and keeps us from living fully this miraculous and precious life that we have.

Through mindfulness you can learn to turn your into your greatest teachers and sources of strength.

How?

Instead of 'turning away' from pain in avoidance we can learn to gently 'turn towards' what we're experiencing. We can bring a caring open attention towards the wounded parts of ourselves and make wise choices about how to respond to ourselves and to life.

It's a paradox that we all must understand: It is by turning towards negative emotions that we find relief from them - not by turning away.

Whatever You Fight, You Strengthen, and What You Resist, Persists - Eckhart Tolle

Here is a six step process for mindfully dealing with difficult emotions...

1. Stop, Turn Towards

Once you have become aware of the feeling, stop for a moment. Take a deep breath and then 'sit with' the anger, shame, guilt, anxiety, frustration or fear. Don't inhibit it, suppress it, ignore it or try to conquer it. Just be with it with an attitude of open curiosity and acceptance.

2. Identify The Emotion

Acknowledge that the emotion is there. If you are embarrassed, you can specifically recognise that feeling. You can mentally say to yourself, for example, "I know there is embarrassment in me."

3. Acceptance Of What Is

When you are embarrassed, or feeling another negative emotion, you don't need to deny it. You can accept what is present. In his book 'Peace is Every Step', Thich Nhat Hahn suggests we can actually mentally acknowledge to ourselves... "I can accept that I am experiencing intense embarrassment right now."

Through your mindful acceptance, you can embrace or hold the feeling in your awareness- this alone can calm and soothe you. This is an act of self-compassion and responsiveness to your own distress, and it is so much more effective than punishing yourself for having this feeling.

See if you can be open to feeling what you feel. Opening to it means to see what is there fully without suppressing, rejecting, ignoring or trying to be 'stronger' than the emotion.

By opening and embracing the emotion, you create a mental space around it and witness it instead of being enmeshed in it. By creating this space you'll discover that you are not your anger, your fear or your pain. You are much larger than that.

Think of embracing your difficult emotion in your arms just like a mother holding her upset child.

4. Realize The Impermanence Of All Emotions

Acknowledge that all emotions are impermanent. They arise, stay for a while and then disappear. They come and go in you, like waves in the sea, cresting and receding.

Your task is simply to allow this current wave to be and to witness, with patience, as it continuously changes form and eventually disappears.

We often take emotions (especially negative ones) very personally. But mindfulness invites us to view them as simply mental events passing through- temporary waves in our ocean of awareness.

Psychologist and mindfulness teacher suggests, it can be helpful to say to ourselves, "While this is a temporary feeling, it is here right now, how can I care for it? What do I need?"

5. Investigation and Response

When you are calm enough, you can look deeply into your emotion to understand what has brought it about and what is causing your discomfort.

It may be that particular kinds of were the cause. You may have been worrying unnecessarily about something or someone and that generated feelings of . Perhaps you were ruminating on a random comment a colleague said last week and it created anger or embarrassment.

You may also find that you have particular values, beliefs, expectations and judgments about how you should behave or be seen by others that contributed to the emotion.

Perhaps an event has happened and your response is perfectly natural or perhaps an old habitual reaction. Allow the light of your mindful awareness to help you gain insights into the emotion.

You may then reflect on how you want to respond to what is happening. This may take the form of simply realizing that your thoughts are not reality and therefore not taking them seriously.

It could be that the simple embracing of the emotion is all you need to do for now, or it could be that a response is needed to a situation that has arisen in your daily life.

6. Trust Yourself To Choose The Appropriate Response

Wishing you well,

Melli

P.S Are you suffering under the weight of negative thinking? If so, read this related post about how I overcame this in my own life and my 'Four Keys to Overcoming Negative Thinking....For Good'

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How To Overcome Negative Emotions With The Power Of Mindfulness

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There are moments in life that are hard, painful, scary and difficult to endure. There are times when we feel anger, anxiety, grief, embarrassment, stress, remorse or other negative emotions. In these trying times we often want to escape the pain, drown it out or push it away somehow.

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How mindfulness changes the emotional life of our brains | Richard J. Davidson | TEDxSanFrancisco

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How mindfulness changes the emotional life of our brains | Richard J. Davidson | TEDxSanFrancisco

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How mindfulness changes the emotional life of our brains | Richard J. Davidson | TEDxSanFrancisco

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10 Minutes of Mindfulness Changes Your Reactions

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10 Minutes of Mindfulness Changes Your Reactions

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Leaders across the globe feel that the unprecedented busyness of modern-day leadership makes them more reactive and less proactive. There is a solution to this hardwired, reactionary leadership approach: mindfulness.

Having trained thousands of leaders in the techniques of this ancient practice, we've seen over and over again that a diligent approach to mindfulness can help people create a one-second mental space between an event or stimulus and their response to it. One second may not sound like a lot, but it can be the difference between making a rushed decision that leads to failure and reaching a thoughtful conclusion that leads to increased performance. It's the difference between acting out of anger and applying due patience. It's a one-second lead over your mind, your emotions, your world.

Research has found that mindfulness training alters our brains and how we engage with ourselves, others, and our work. When practiced and applied, mindfulness fundamentally alters the operating system of the mind. Through repeated mindfulness practice, brain activity is redirected from ancient, reactionary parts of the brain, including the limbic system, to the newest, rational part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex.

In this way mindfulness practice decreases activity in the parts of the brain responsible for fight-or-flight and knee-jerk reactions while increasing activity in the part of the brain responsible for what's termed our executive functioning. This part of the brain, and the executive functioning skills it supports, is the control center for our thoughts, words, and actions. It's the center of logical thought and impulse control. Simply put, relying more on our executive functioning puts us firmly in the driver's seat of our minds, and by extension our lives.

One second can be the difference between achieving desired results or not. One second is all it takes to become less reactive and more in tune with the moment. In that one second lies the opportunity to improve the way you decide and direct, the way you engage and lead. That's an enormous advantage for leaders in fast-paced, high-pressure jobs.

Here are five easily implemented tips to help you become more mindful:

Practice 10 minutes of mindfulness training each day. Most people find mornings the best time to practice mindfulness, but you can do it any time of day. You can find a 10-minute guided mindfulness training program, a short mindfulness training manual, and a link to a free downloadable mindfulness app here. Try it for four weeks.

Avoid reading email first thing in the morning. Our minds are generally most focused, creative, and expansive in the morning. This is the time to do focused, strategic work and have important conversations. If you read your email as you get up, your mind will get sidetracked and you'll begin the slide toward reactive leadership. Making email your first task of the day wastes the opportunity to use your mind at its highest potential. Try waiting at least 30 minutes, or even an hour, after you get to work before checking your inbox.

Turn off all notifications. The notification alarms on your phone, tablet, and laptop are significant contributors to reactive leadership. They keep you mentally busy and put you under pressure, thereby triggering reactionary responses. They cause damage far more than they add value. Try this: For one week turn off all email notifications on all devices. Only check your email once every hour (or as often as responsibly needed for your job), but don't compulsively check messages as they roll into your inbox.

Stop multitasking. It keeps your mind full, busy, and under pressure. It makes you reactive. Try to maintain focus on a single task, and then notice when you find your mind drifting off to another task - a sign that your brain wishes to multitask. When this happens, mentally shut down all the superfluous tasks entering your thoughts while maintaining focus on the task at hand.

Put it on your calendar. Schedule a check-in with yourself every two weeks to assess how well you're doing with the previous four tips, or as a reminder to revisit this article to refresh your memory. Consider engaging one of your peers to do the same thing. This gives you a chance to assess each other, which can be both helpful and motivating.

We encourage you to give these tips a try. Although mindfulness isn't a magic pill, it will help you more actively select your responses and make calculated choices instead of succumbing to reactionary decisions.

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10 Minutes of Mindfulness Changes Your Reactions

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Leaders across the globe feel that the unprecedented busyness of modern-day leadership makes them more reactive and less proactive. There is a solution to this hardwired, reactionary leadership approach: mindfulness.