Hello fellow young professionals, entrepreneurs, creators, lovers and hustlers:
It’s with great humility, excitement, and gratitude that I launch the first segment of my new weekly column in the spirit of #WellnessWednesday with you. My intention in creating this column is to inspire you every week with 1 game-changing life idea centred around being the most notable version of yourself. As I ferociously write my book, Living a Notable Life, for you, these concepts I’ll be sharing weekly are the best of the best ideas I’m exploring in realtime, pre-released. The only place these are shared are live at my workshops and seminars, until now. I hope you enjoy them and that they take you one step closer to being the best version of yourself.
With love and light,
Julian
Founder of Notable
On Insta @ProjectMindful
Let’s Get Mindful
Our mood begins with our mind. If it were not for your mind you wouldn’t have decided to read this.
And our minds create the ability for thoughts.
Just think about it.
Mindfulness is essential to arrive at the destination where we all want to be. That coveted destination is clarity. Thus, it is the first step in the Clarity Formula (I’ll take you inside the Clarity Formula in my #WellnessWednesday column in weeks to come).
Everything about our behaviours results directly from our thoughts, so we must become acutely aware that this is the igniter of our behaviours, feelings, and actions. Even our personality, to an incredible degree, is a result of our thoughts since we can always transform or alter our personality based on how we think we should or shouldn’t be. Want to be nicer? More patient? Perhaps, you want to be less negative? Maybe your partner asked you to be more sensitive – the decision to do so is based first on your thoughts and then on your values which we’ll get in to when we discuss the Value System section in the coming weeks.
Without being in a state of mindfulness though, we cant put ourselves in a place where we can observe our thoughts. For this reason, I swear by mindfulness. What is life if we can’t observe and control our thoughts? Living life in a place where our thoughts seemingly control us without any influence of what we actually want to think is a scary thought. I don’t believe that we as humans, as sisters and brothers are genetically disposed to either be positive or negative – no chance! And, let’s just say that it is the case, that some us were selected to be negative while others positive, he did it so that the “negative” people have an opportunity to learn how to work through negative thoughts, through the demons which by the way I too know all about, in order to arrive at the positive place of light and love. And, to the naturally pre-disposed positive peeps reading this who don’t have to work through the negative, who don’t have to push past the internal demons, you have less to work through and therefore even more responsibility to spread your contagiously unique light and love.
Ultimately, if you have a negative outlook on life or a positive outlook on life it is a result of what your mind thinks. A result of your thoughts. Once we get mindful of, well, our minds, we can start to intentionally re-think how we want to think about everything. But until we take this first step in the Clarity Formula we can’t begin to get clear, to make positive change, to create a personal movement internally and externally, because we won’t even know that it’s happening.
By being mindful of our thoughts we can take the first step toward being the person we actually want to be. That doesn’t happen by accident, sorry but it’s not happenstance here, if we want a better life we’re going to have to mindfully and lovingly journey to get there.
The conscious mind must become your best friend so that you can consciously re-think the learned negative thoughts in your subconscious mind.
Want to destress? If you’re mindful it’s so much easier to do it. It becomes very much controllable when we are mindful enough to see stress, and then slow down, start to breathe intentionally and ask the important questions like:
Why am I stressed?
Why do I feel anxious all of a sudden?
Did I eat or drink something differently today that could have caused this?
Did I sleep more or less last night?
Was I just around someone who brought negative energy to me?
Am I going down a negative thought tunnel that is causing internal friction?
When we are mindful we can actually observe our thoughts and our behaviour which then allows us to make positive, empowering, changes.
For instance, shifting your breathing is the part that will let you feel the most noticeable difference but that won’t happen until you become mindful that you feel the stress, anxiety, and/or friction on the inside. Once you recognize it, you can then slow down and breathe.
Let me tell you something about stress: Breath is the enemy of Stress.
But there’s even more to Mindfulness. Mindfulness creates space for the next step in the Clarity Formula; Gratitude. Without intentionally living in a state of mindfulness which gives us the ability to become aware of our thoughts so that we can prioritize them, we would never even think to create space for Gratitude.
Next week we’ll talk about Gratitude.
With love and light. Stay Notable,
Julian Brass, Founder of Notable
Julian Brass is the Founder and Spokesperson of Notable Life (creator of Notable.ca the Notable Awards, and Notable Yoga @ Equinox). He is a life coach, motivational speaker, inventor, certified yoga instructor and soon to be published author. His first book “Living a Notable Life” is coming soon. Follow him at @ProjectMindful on Instagram and visit his personal site for more info: JulianBrass.com