Now that you can add more time to your moment of mindfulness, you can also add more depth. The depths feels a little bit like sinking deeper into your mind where you can access greater creativity and where you can develop a variety of choices as to how you would like to respond.

Can you hang out in the mindful moment? It’s the place of creativity, innovation, connection, it’s where you can tap into the collective intelligence. This is where you can access your own inner knowingness.

By living in the mindful moment you can sometimes access universal thought and knowledge.

From the depths of mindfulness comes expanded creativity.

When you’re living or being in the mindful moment, where do the new ideas, the creativity and insights actually come from? Were they already there in your mind, or in the collective unconsciousness mind?

Self-confidence at one level comes from the conscious mind, our thoughts. At a deeper, more powerful level, it can come from faith – from our inner divinity, it transcends normal thought. Sometimes it allows us to do things that our conscious mind doesn’t believe we can do.

In the mindful moment, which we sometimes call the space, it’s like being a collaborator with something unseen. You have to allow yourself to be completely receptive within this space. The concept of allowing is a passive yet necessary part of creativity and creation. Your intent is the active part. You must accept the paradox the when you are in the space of mindfulness, you have intent. Examples would be to develop a new strategy, solve a problem, resolve a conflict, in short, to create something new, but you must receive when passively mindful. You can’t force answers; however, you can catalyze them by asking yourself quality questions.

In the mindful moment, what questions can you ask to give yourself a continuum of conscious choices? The better the questions you ask yourself, the better the answers you will receive. Instead of asking questions like “what’s wrong with this?” ask yourself “what are the possibilities here?” Another question could be “how could this work for everyone?”, “everyone” including not just me and you and your clients or the users of a product or service, but also family members.

Got Willpower?

Would you like more willpower? When we are on auto-response, willpower is not in play. When you lengthen and deepen your time/space of mindfulness, you enable your willpower. This creates the opportunity for higher consciousness thinking, in and of itself. But if you lengthen and then deepen that, if you think of this in a 3-dimensional framework, you have more time and while normally, you only have one, automatic response, you can deepen it by creating more choices. You can start to practice these choices at any age.

Below is a link to a funny video about “The Marshmallow Experiment.” In it, Walter Mischel at Stanford University demonstrates the concept of delayed gratification and willpower. In this study, a group of 4-year old children were each given a marshmallow. They had to promise to wait 20 minutes before eating the first marshmallow. As you will see in the video, some could wait, while others couldn’t. The researchers followed each child into adolescence, showing that those with the ability to wait were actually more adjusted and determined. They also scored an average of 210 points higher on the Scholastic Aptitude test.

Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mWc1Y2dpmY

What do you think? Would you be able to wait, or have you been able to develop willpower and “acceptance” as you learn to cultivate a passive response to creativity? Thanks for sharing.

Exercise to expand the mindful moment:

The expansion is literally like imagining your mind becoming bigger and wider. You can now observe with your observer-self; before you react in your usual, automatic way, you can create more time, giving yourself the ability to think about different ways to think and to react to what has happened, possibilities that represent a higher and higher consciousness.

Exercise to develop your observer-self. What’s a leadership challenge in your professional or personal life to which you have a significant emotional reaction? Can you be in your observer-self and become aware of all the thoughts you are having that, in turn, are creating the emotions that you’re feeling? How would you like to respond? How will you respond and why?

For questions about this post or for information on becoming a fearless leader, contact Dr. Cathy Greenberg and The Fearless Leader Group at (888) 320-1299 or by email at hello@fearlessequalsfreedom.com.