EP33 Mindset Monday - Calming and Relaxing Your Mind

This is the empowered athlete podcast Mindset Monday. 10 minutes with Kari Schneider to learn new mindset tactics and tricks to optimize your performance in sport, business and life. Let me take you back to the summer of 2008. It was my first summer not playing for the national team. I had it off and I got to train the entire summer with Kari on a specifically made program that was tailored to me, my injuries, my body, and my goals for that next upcoming season. And I was 34 years old. Well, the result went back over to Turkey and won a European cup in incredible physical condition. Thank you to that program setting me up for the perfect season. Well, now you have access to the exact same thing. Hit email ksempowerconditioning.com that's KS for Kari Schneider and get started on one of Kari's incredible online training programs. The program is tailored to you. It has video of each exercise you're doing so you know what you're doing. Your reps are laid out, the sets are laid out. You can't go wrong. Reach out now to reach your best.

And welcome. Welcome to Mindset Monday. So the prompt for today, the topic for today is how to calm and relax your mind. And I chose this because we are in Mindful March and our challenge for March is meditation, acts of kindness, weekly yoga, and daily gratitude as well. So this is something that I wanted to talk about today because I know that for myself and for many of my clients being type as and taskmasters and people who want to get things done and who are always looking forward to the next thing is it can be a real problem, a real challenge to calm the mind. So I wanted to take a look at ways that you can and ways that have been successful for me. So if I think back of when I first started to try and meditate, number one, I wasn't very open to it because I didn't understand what meditating was. I just thought of somebody sitting quietly, and sitting quietly seemed like a massive waste of time to me. So I explored meditation further simply because as I learned all of the research that surrounds meditation and the performance of the mind and the recovery of the mind and the body, it is a easy answer that meditation is something that would be a massive help for everyone. So as soon as I understood that, that was my incentive to get better at it or actually succeed at something with it. But again, I still had that mindset of trying to succeed and. And anytime I tried to meditate, I would easily just have my mind wander into all the things I needed to get done or whatever was on the plate that day or whatever I was bugged by at that time, so it just wasn't going to happen. Over time, I learned that meditation is a practice, and it's something that isn't. You're not looking for a specific outcome all the time. It's the practice of what you're doing. So here are three things that have helped me really calm and relax the mind. And remember, before we go into these ones, remember that there are ways that you can energize and focus and uplift the mind as well with meditation. But I'm looking at ways that have been very useful for me to calm and relax the mind. So, number one, one thing that helps me a lot is distraction. And what I mean by that is it might be a task, it might be a little. It might be a book, something that distracts my mind before I start to meditate. So the example I'm going to give is I typically meditate after I eat lunch or I meditate before bed. Those are the times I meditate the most. But when I go to meditate right after lunch, what I will find is that inevitably my mind is onto the list of 20 things that need to be done that day or what I was dealing with in that morning, whatever it is. So I just came from the gym, and shortly I'll be eating lunch, and I might be stuck in my brain on the things from the gym in the morning or the things that I'm about to do for later that day. So at lunchtime, what has helped me a lot before I meditate, I do something that takes my mind to a completely different place. I actually, I use a Spanish app, So I use duolingo to learn Spanish, and I do Spanish for about five minutes. So I practice my Spanish anywhere between five minutes to 15 minutes. I work on my Spanish, and making my brain work on something else takes my brain away from the things I was at. And that distraction helps me massively to get into my meditation so much faster. If I look at any of the times that I try to meditate and it just takes me longer, I would need more time. So I would have needed that five to 15 minutes to get into my meditation. And instead I use that five to 15 minutes on my Spanish practice. So that could be anything for you. It might be a phone conversation with someone, it might be doing Sudoku, it might be something. But distraction has been a key tool for me and to be able to shift my mind to get to the space that I want to Prior to my meditation, the second thing is focus. So when I say focus, I mean something that causes you to focus in on maybe a smaller thing or a larger thing. There's two major techniques with this. So often it might be something like your breathing, it might be a word. Yesterday, a meditation that my husband and I did together, it was a partner meditation. And you are being still, but you say the feeling or the body part or whatever it is that you're feeling in that still moment. So, you know, you might feel an itch in your foot. So you would say foot or itch or that kind of thing. So you're causing awareness to the focus on your body. You're just thinking about your body, getting present with your body. And then whatever speaks to you, whatever you're feeling at that time, that is what's drawing your focus. And that can be a very focused thing. And you can really whittle that down into. If you felt your foot, then you might visualize the internal parts of your foot or your skin or any little minutia. But the opposite way of using that focus is, say if you were looking at a view out a window or a view from a car drive, you do the exact opposite, and you broaden your spectrum of view as wide as it can possibly be. Looking at everything you possibly can look at, Looking from every peripheral view all the way across, without singular focus on one thing, trying to take in as much as you can. So these techniques are way to guide the brain into specific focus, either broad, broad focus, or very, very fine minutia, very specific focus. So focus is one way of looking at things in whether it's a word, a breath pattern, a body part. Sometimes it's the act of breathing and how the breath is going. So focusing in on how something is done or what you are feeling in a certain space. And there is a wide range of things and ways that you can focus. So focus is the second thing. But you'll find that once you've gone through these two steps, a little bit of distraction and getting into some specific focus, that all of a sudden your brain has lost a lot of the things that it was really wound up on. So those two steps alone cause a lot of relaxation, a lot of calm, a lot of grounding for your thoughts and your mind. So the third step in really allowing your mind to calm and relax is allowing. So this third step in allowing is the act of recognizing when a thought pops in and allowing it to be there without making the thought wrong or yourself wrong. So allowing things to come through in a way that an observer would by watching a car go by. If a car went by my street right now, I'm not looking at that car like oh why are you there? I can't believe that car came on my street or anything like that. And that's the way you're going to view a thought coming in. And as soon as you recognize the thought, oh, that thought came in, not making it wrong, not making yourself wrong. The focus in this allowing is going to be just see it, be curious and get back to whatever your task in focus was. So if your focus task was thinking about different body parts, if your focus task was broadening your spectrum of view, whatever it was or your breath alone, you get back to that. So just a quick recap those three steps. Distraction works very well for me proceeding going into a meditation, especially if I'm really wired. If it's before bed, my distraction might be reading first, especially something without screen time helps me a lot before bed and especially that's the time that I'm looking to calm or relax my mind. This is my sleep routine. I want deep, purposeful sleep so that distraction helps me a lot pre bed. But it has to be without a screen. If I've watched TV, I still have at least a 30 minute window with no screen time before I sleep and that will have reading. So distraction is one, the next one is the focus with the breath, the body parts, the specific visualization, the broadening visualization and then the last one is the allowing. When the thoughts pop in, when the mind starts to run, just take a look like an observer. No wrong making of yourself or what's going on there. Okay guys, I know some of you hopped on towards the end and please feel free to comment whether it's on the podcast, whether it's in our Facebook group, comment, ask questions, whatever you'd like there and pop this back for a listen again so that you can go through how you can use these three techniques to up level any steps you're taking in meditation and really calm and relax your mind. I think next Monday I have set to focus on energizing and focusing your mind. So have a great day guys, Happy Monday, have a fantastic week. I'll see you on Truth Bomb tomorrow.