If you have ever tried to build muscle at the gym, then you know that only lifting weights once in a while simply won’t cut it if you want to get stronger. It’s through consistency and repetition that you begin to build your muscles and feel stronger over time. The same is true for building your mental muscles related to your mindset and creating the opportunity to change your own patterns.

Think of building your mindset as if it’s strengthening your mental muscles. Each time you practice strengthening your mindset you become stronger. If you take a long break from this practice, most likely you will have to start small and rebuild one repetition at a time in order to regain your strength.

Mindset is what you focus on with determination coupled with consistently following through. Mindset is the muscle you strengthen that supports the process of change through taking consistent action. Each time you practice engaging your mindset, you become far more likely to follow through on the action steps needed to create the change you desire.

When you have a strong and focused mindset you are able to work through the mental noise and take control of the mental gymnastics that can derail you. We all have an inner self-saboteur. When your mindset muscle is strong, you’re ready to deal with that saboteur part of yourself. Through strengthening your mindset, you are prepared to remain strong in the face of the internal saboteur—usually experienced as convincing excuses— that usually arise from fear or shame.

Fear and shame are two emotions that can keep you living small, keep you feeling stuck and out of alignment with your vision for your life. The trick is that you must experience and understand these emotions, allowing you to feel and recognize the fear and/or shame and get curious about why it’s there. The shame plays off of the fear by way of reminding yourself how you maybe didn’t follow through in the past. The shame will then try to convince you that you won’t follow through based on these perceived failures from the past. This inevitably makes you feel so crummy about yourself so that you feel safer feeling the fear of change rather than taking the action YOU KNOW would move you closer to your vision. The mind is so tricky to conquer. The good news is that with consistency and practice you can have a greater understanding of your patterns and where the fear and shame are just an old narrative that you DO have the power to change.

Setting the foundation to build your mindset and strengthen your mindset muscle begins with knowing what you want and why you want it. When you can connect to your vision for your life and set goals, you have your future self to route for you and support you through the change process. The process from there really comes down to putting in the effort and using the energy of your hope for and belief in your future self to create a plan and then to take decisive action—consistently.

As always, it’s most effective for long-term sustainable change when you start small and develop your own inner trust muscle. You have to trust yourself; you have to believe in yourself. That is where you have to face—and at times wrestle with—the discomfort of any lingering experience of fear or shame. If you haven’t believed in or trusted your own abilities in the past, then it will try to come back and convince you that it won’t now either.

Setting up your plan based on your vision for your life and the goals that support your vision with action steps gives you a roadmap to follow. You want your goals and action steps to be simple, specific, doable and desirable. You build on these steps over time as you begin to trust yourself and believe that you not only can, but that you WILL follow through. For example, if you want to move more, you might begin with putting on the clothes you want to move in and wearing them for the time you want to move. The next time, wear the clothes and move for 5-10 minutes. Plan each detail such as the days you will do this and specifics of what you will do for the week. Review at the end of the week and check in with what happened when you did follow through and what happened when you didn’t. Understanding your own pitfalls, blocks and inner saboteur as well as what motivates you gives you valuable information about how to move forward. Self-reflection and self-awareness will guide your process. You can apply this process to anything you’d like to integrate, change or do.

When you do this consistently, week to week, you will be strengthening your mindset muscle, which will draw you closer to your vision for your life. If you are someone who prefers step-by-step specifics, try the going through these steps below to begin strengthening your mindset today.

1. What do you want?

2. Why do you want this?

3. What will allow you to get what you want?

4. When will you do the action that allows you get what you want?

5. What fear or shame comes up for you around taking this action?

6. Where can you start small and put these actions into place?

7. Now create your plan.

8. Now reflect on how it goes and learn from your struggles and from what motivates you.

9. Practice, be consistent!

10. Re-evaluate.

If you go through these steps to strengthen your mindset muscle so you can align yourself with your vision for your best life, I would love to hear how it goes. If you’d like a refresher on the 10 steps to create a life you love, you can revisit the full overview HERE or go to the blog and read about each step in depth. Change is challenging and yet necessary for growth. The stronger your mindset is through the change process, the more alignment you will experience with your vision for a life you love. Practice strengthening your mindset muscle and you will feel the impact within your life in so many positive ways.

The final area of wellness that I will address here that is essential to living a long, healthy, happy life of vitality is developing and using a consistent meditation practice. Just as a reminder, the foundations of physical wellness that I have addressed so far are sleep, nutrition, and exercise/movement. The foundations of mental wellness that I have addressed here are the benefits of a strong social support, core relationships, remaining open-minded and curious, and the willingness to take on challenges and life-long learning.

Meditation offers health benefits that impact mind and body. Meditation addresses the stress response allowing us to access the relaxation response which creates increased mental wellness, creative expansion while releasing uncomfortable and non-useful thoughts and emotions.

Meditation is certainly not something new that I have talked about here! In fact, I’ve mentioned it over and over (as it is one of the primary ways that I keep myself sane) because I’ve see the direct impact that it can have on a variety of struggles for those that I work with, including anxiety, emotional eating, eating disorders, panic attacks, depression and limiting thoughts and beliefs—which directly impact the ability to take action. Meditation is one of the core practices that I have studied both in relation to my yoga studies along with all of the emerging research within the therapy, mental health and wellness world—and all of the benefits really are pretty vast and astounding.

When you are able to add in even just a small amount of meditation daily, you can have a tremendous return on your time investment in the way of health and wellness benefits. As little as five minutes a day can impact stress hormones, neurotransmitter production and circadian rhythms. Twelve minutes a day has shown an even greater impact such as improving telomere length of neurons in the brain (which indicates a younger brain!) increasing focus and concentration and decreased cognitive decline. Not to mention that meditation improves your self-awareness and reduces emotional reactivity which is one of the most valuable ways to improve the quality of your life on a daily basis.

There is often a lot of confusion about meditation. People tell me all the time, “I can’t meditate, I can’t get my mind to be quiet.” This is the primary misconception of meditation. The fact is that meditation is not about turning off your thoughts and sitting in perfect silence. I can tell you from experience that this is not what happens, and definitely not when you are just beginning the practice. Now maybe a long-long time meditator can silence their mind for long periods of time, but most of us have A LOT of thoughts constantly running through our minds. So let’s say that you generally have 100 thoughts a minute, and through a concentration and meditation practice you have 60. That will still feel like A LOT of thoughts, but it is still an improvement! With more practice maybe you’ll have 45 thoughts a minute, and with more 30, but again, that may still feel like a pretty active mind.

The purpose is not to silence your thoughts, the purpose is to distance yourself from the thoughts, to not be so reactive to the constant stream of emotionally provoking thoughts which may only cause stress and tension. In meditation you learn how to witness your thoughts rather than respond to them. This is the true practice, to recognize that you are not your thoughts and that they do not define you. Traditionally meditation is done in a seated posture and connecting with a single point of focus. This single point of focus could be your breath, a word or phrase, an image, a candle flame, or an image you create in your mind such as a sphere of light.

Mindfulness meditation is about being aware of all external and internal potential distractions, such as sounds, body sensations, thoughts and emotions and the mindfulness process invites you to simply notice them. You can even label them for exactly what they are. Here’s an example, as you sit and observe your internal and external space, if you hear the sound of a car, plane, ticking clock or someone talking, you simply label it as a sound rather than letting your mind consider the story of the sound. When you get into the story of the sound you will most likely evoke emotions and then thoughts, such as “ugg, that’s so annoying, I’m trying to meditate and that car keeps honking it’s horn.” That’s how we typically address annoyances in life, however mindfulness invites you see the honking just a sound, no thoughts or emotions necessary. Do you see how this may help improve your response to other potential annoyances in your life?

Meditation is allowing your mind to fully focus on one thing, and when you find you are distracted, you bring your focus back to that single point of awareness—that one thing. It really doesn’t matter so much what your point of focus is so long as you make a consistent effort to maintain it. Not judging your experience or getting involved in your emotions is helpful as well.

The most important element in order to reap the benefits of the practice is to be consistent. Daily is ideal, and even 1-15 minutes is great. If daily does not feel doable quite yet, you might start with 3 days a week and increase as you are ready. I am planning to roll out some support for those interested in a supportive community of beginning/skeptical/interested meditators in the fall! Stay tuned for updates! If you find you’d like some support getting started now, feel free to reach out. No matter how you start, try not to get caught up in the details, it is the experience and practice that matters most, not that you have the right chair, lighting, props or anything else!

If you have been implementing these eight areas of wellness that help support a long, healthy and happy life I’d love to hear how they are working for you!