Mind Time by Michael Chaskalson

Author:Michael Chaskalson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

Have you found your favourite Mind Time practice yet?

It’s great to go with what seems easiest and most attractive. And it’s also good to try other things out to broaden your range of skills.

AIM TO CHANGE YOUR MIND ABOUT BUSYNESS

To tackle these issues more productively, we can use AIM to help us to step out of automatic busyness in order to make more considered choices.

AIM develops our ability to notice the assumptions we make about our busyness and to question them. Developing our inquiry and meta-awareness helps us to spot our thoughts as simply thoughts rather than indisputable ‘truth’. For example, we have more chance of questioning our thoughts as they arise, pausing and saying, ‘Hang on – is it really true that I am getting more done by switching tasks?’ ‘Is it really true that being this busy means I am leading a meaningful, successful life?’ Allowing then ensures we don’t disappear down self-defeating self-critical pathways – ‘Don’t be so weak – of course you must stay busy!’ or ‘You just can’t stand the heat, can you? Why can’t you be as good as …?’

Sometimes we experience busyness as fulfilling and rewarding. Sometimes we would like to be busier or at least more challenged than we are currently. (Robert, whose story we told at the beginning of this chapter, felt this way.) As we become more aware, using AIM, we start to learn how and why we feel this way and to make appropriate choices.

But AIM also helps us to pick up, early on, the signs that our busyness is damaging our mental or physical health. We begin to spot unhealthy thoughts and physical pains rather than glossing over them in automatic pilot. We can then AIM to choose to use ‘downtime’ more effectively in order to rejuvenate. We talk about this much more in Chapter 7, which examines work–life balance.

Finally, with the practices of AIM, we can choose to focus on one task at a time in order to be more productive, rather than automatically seeking, and usually failing, to multitask. We notice when our attention moves away from the task in hand and so we have the opportunity to refocus.

Let’s move now to the second area where we can find ourselves caught in automatic reactions – change.

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