The 4 benefits of Mindfulness when it comes to achieving your goals

One of the most recurrent traps in which we tend to fall when we set ourselves goals (for example, before the start of a new year) is to assume that whether we achieve it or not will depend on the amount of time and effort we put into carrying out those tasks.

The reality is that if we do not learn to correctly manage our emotions and our focus of attention, we will end up throwing in the towel no matter how much we want to invest in a project. In many ways, less is more, for better and for worse.

Fortunately, currently there are therapeutic resources such as Mindfulness that help us improve our chances of achieving our goals through efficient use of our attention, focusing on the present moment and adopting a constructive perspective about the problem we want to solve or the need we want satisfy. In this article we will see how it does it.

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What is Mindfulness?

Let's start with the most important: what exactly is Mindfulness or Full Attention? This term can be used both to describe a certain type of state of consciousness and the set of techniques and exercises used to reach it.

If we stick to the first meaning, Mindfulness can be summarized as a psychological state in which the attention is directed exclusively to recognize and observe the mental contents linked to the here and now, without our getting involved in assessing them morally.

And if we stick to the second meaning, Mindfulness is a type of practice inspired by the ancient Vipassana meditation (with a great tradition between the followers of Buddhism and Hinduism), but unlike the latter they have not been developed as a religious element but as scientifically validated tool with which objective therapeutic effects can be achieved (regardless of whether the person adheres to a religion or not).

Mindfulness exercises were created in the United States in the second half of the 20th century, especially by the researcher Jon Kabat-Zinn, who from the University of Massachusetts designed the Mindfulness-based stress reduction program (MBSR). Initially, the objective of Mindfulness was fundamentally to help people with stress and anxiety problems. through a training plan of several weeks, but with the passage of time they began to emerge variants adapted to other types of needs not necessarily limited to the field of mental health.

Today, while the MBSR program remains a powerful ally to psychotherapists, a wide variety of counseling techniques are available. Mindfulness that can be used in contexts as diverse as companies, primary education centers, the training of athletes etc. All these variants have characteristics and stages adapted to their objective, but in all of them the essence of Mindfulness is preserved, which is to teach the person to focus on the moment present to get out of dysfunctional psychological inertias (obsessive thoughts, tendency to self-sabotage, stress blocks, lack of skills to manage physical pain or emotional…).

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How can mindfulness help you achieve goals?

What does Mindfulness have to do with, for example, New Year's resolutions, starting a new career or the desire to leave behind an addiction and start a healthy lifestyle from a certain date? Below I summarize the different ways through which Mindfulness helps to approach this type of personal or professional projects.

1. Helps curb avoidance tendencies

Many times, the fact of seeing ourselves under the pressure of having to achieve very ambitious goals causes us to fall into a dynamic of procrastination: as we feel very stress before a complex or new task for us, we avoid starting it or thinking about it, so we let time pass and the problem becomes more and more big. Mindfulness helps us to face this pressure in a much more functional and adaptive way, without letting it intimidate us to the point of paralysis.

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2. Makes breaks more useful

Although technically Mindfulness is a relaxation exercise, one of its consequences is that it usually leads people to a state of calm. This allows Mindfulness to be easily incorporated into rest routines between work or study sessions.

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3. It allows us to do a “mental reset” in the face of blockages

It is very common that when we try to do something that is new to us, we reach a point where we can not think of how to continue to achieve our goal. In these situations we can feel so stressed that we give rise to what is known as a “self-fulfilling prophecy”: we suggest ourselves until we assume that we are not a solution will occur and that we will be unable to move forward, so that imagined reality ends up being fulfilled because we become obsessed with the fact that we are in an apparent dead end. exit.

Faced with these experiences, Mindfulness allows us to regain an objective perspective before what happens to us, so that we are able to see everything from a more distant point and it is easy for us to take a few steps back to face the problem in another way.

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4. Improves our self-esteem

Before a new project, the usual thing is that we go through many situations in which our imperfections become very evident: at certain points we will lack experience, at others we will lack technique, etc. Those constant frictions between what we want to achieve and what we have learned to do so far it is part of the process of personal and professional development, but if we do not manage it well, it will discourage us.

This is why Mindfulness is a valuable tool to achieve self-motivation, since it will prevent us from falling into interpretations of reality that are too pessimistic or "tragic" in which all our attention is directed to our defects. It is important to be aware of what we are not perfect in, but we should not let it obsess us.

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Do you want to have psychological assistance and training in Mindfulness?

If you are interested in incorporating Mindfulness into your daily life, Get in touch with me.

I am a psychologist and MBSR Mindfulness instructor certified by the University of Massachusetts and I offer courses and MBSR Mindfulness training programs in Full Attention, in face-to-face format and on-line.