Written by: Heather Madden, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
When we think of human evolution and survival, the variables are changing. A pivotal intersection exists between the mindset for performance and the mindset for emotions. Learning to work with your emotions and sustain belief brings strength, calm and choice into your everyday life. Everyone has a story of this time and emotions are the teacher of what was and all that can be. Emotions narrate a constant flow of awareness and understanding, they are tools for psychological safety, action and truth. Hitting the wall of your mindset transformation is often the sign that it is time for emotional development.
We live in an era of perpetual change, the pace of which is rapid and constantly in motion. This means that external forces of change will always interrupt our pattern of living, necessitating different skills in mindset transformation. Our mindset for performance subscribes to a linear, analytical and problem-solving toolkit for growth. This performance mindset is inextricably associated with success, a bias that skews the impact of emotional need and mental health. Some of the costs of this paradigm include work addiction, stress addiction and burnout, the latter being a virtually instant full stop to busy minds and lives, with devastating consequences.
In contrast, a mindset for choices delivers mental agility and resilience, with daily effort intentionally focused on interrupting stress and the tendency to over-function. By stepping into a discipline of self-directed resets each day, emotions have time to release and provide a deep connection with what you need, based on where you are at right now. The certainty and resilience derived from this simple exercise in emotional homework is deeply powerful. More emotional narrative increases learning capacity, refines decision-making and improves mental health, happiness and our lives at work. The boundaries you enjoy, the knowledge you can release anxiety and overwhelm, and the personal vision sparked all serve to allow for enjoyment, presence and acceptance of both the known and unknown.
This form of emotional core wellness involves slowing down and simplifying life to rest and reset often, because interrupting pace is THE game-changer and will allow necessary choices to reveal themselves effortlessly: letting go becomes a natural consequence. These are my starter steps for building emotional core wellness to break through the wall of your mindset transformation:
1. Set hard boundaries for time
Time is wealth and you will never get time back. This includes time with your children, your partner, your parents and that hard to manage catch-up with your friends. But the most damaging loss of time in your life is the inability to spend time with yourself.
Learn to value your time as a form of expenditure and remove all burdens on time, which often means hard boundaries with people you know and services you provide, particularly those which create inequity for emotional wellbeing and leave you feeling exhausted. Quietly transition away from busy to deliberately slow-paced. Work is a major element of your time: you are the boundary-setter through agility of focus and effort. Create a discipline for daily resets throughout your working day, recognise your signs of stress as you are pressured to over-function and enable personal responsibility for emotional safety by creating moments of freedom and release throughout the day.
2. Recognise and respect the toll of cumulative trauma in everyday life
Trauma is often cumulative, the result of small stressors across our different life bubbles, which eventually adds up the toll of acute trauma. Work, family, relationship, business-ownership, education, health and social media all carry constant levels of stress, and whether you perceive this to be good or bad stress, the impact is the same. Consider the impact of cumulative trauma on your health and wellbeing urgently. Burnout or breakdown is a real possibility and happens far more quickly than we realise.
3. Rest, more than you believe you need
Rest is a way of living and much more than sleep. Rest is putting your feet up, sitting in your garden, cuddles with your dog and making a beautiful meal for your family (sans the podcast, ‘rant’ and social tough-talk). Rest is anything which allows you turn away from the constancy of human over-functioning and processing thoughts and information. By quietening your mind, you begin to feel, and these feelings ebb and flow in a form of narrative that ensures you are safe, protected and understanding of yourself. Rest is something to crave and find solace within as often as possible every day.
4. Emotions are beacons of knowledge: they have a reason to be there
From the moment we are young adults, emotions are the thing we learn to avoid. Mental health is number one. By practising this belief every day, as often as possible, we begin to connect with our emotions, understand their major impact on health and wellbeing and develop the ability to listen to their lessons. Find your dominant emotion each day and make the effort to refine understanding from your experiences, the day’s scenarios and widen self-awareness. Define your emotional narrative: build a wide vocabulary of emotions to translate your feelings. Know your values: hold these close.
5. Remove labels and have grace in the moments
Labels are gross forms of bias and discrimination, and we reserve the harshest labels for ourselves. These labels are inextricably linked with modern attributes of ‘success’: placing people on pedestals, the overwhelm of social media snippets driving unfair comparison and the praise for being a busy person. They are pervasive in many facets of our world and degrade understanding of love, kindness and compassion. Labels reject the very simplicity of what we know is right.
The foundations of life start with being gentle within. Life comes down to simple memories: a whisper of connection, an unplanned love, a conversation with your child on a rainy day. Love is at the very heart of every single thing we give and receive: grace is the ultimate strength derived from this presence and gained from the wisdom of your experience.
It is the ability to ride the rollercoaster of belief each day and navigate emotional currency, presented by the circumstances of change, that makes you even more limitless. Change is so perpetual that is unpredictable, and uncertainty is the dominant universal emotion of our time. By developing a toolkit to intentionally interrupt stress in the busy construct of the performance mindset, emotional resilience is instilled and a mindset for choices follows.
Live Life Limitless.
Heather Madden
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Heather Madden, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine Heather Madden is a leader in mindset transformation and personal development. By challenging coping modality and building a lifelong commitment to managing stress, Heather helps others to break through barriers and achieve limitless life transformation, emotional core wellness, and values alignment. Heather founded the Live Life Limitless movement following her self-managed recovery from burnout and breakdown, triggered as a result of stress addiction, over-functioning, and multiple health setbacks including a chronic, sight-threatening eye disease and life-changing preventative surgeries following diagnosis of the BRCA1 genetic mutation. She hosts "The Interrupt Series: Stress, Overwhelm and Emotional Wellbeing", Interrupt Stress for Life live events, and regular Limitless Leaders and Live Life Limitless meetups. Her mission: Live Life Limitless: Choose, positive, make the choice. Mental Health is Number One.
