You can expand mindful moments by increasing both the length of time of mindfulness and the depth of mindfulness. Mindful moments expand when you are able to stay in your observer-self, continuing to see your own beliefs, thoughts and emotions non-judgmentally.

To create a mindful moment, you can develop cues for yourself. When you have created a mindful moment, you can develop specific self-talk and cues that help you stay mindful. Before we discuss how to stay mindful in the moment, let’s examine some of the different cues you can utilize to create mindful moments.

• Physical cues. You notice that:
  • Breathing is faster and more shallow.
  • Tension in your neck, chest, back or abdomen
  • Churning in your stomach
  • Your fists or jaw clenching or wanting to clench
  • The palms of your hands, forehead, or armpits sweating.
  • Your face reddening
• Emotional cues. You notice feeling:
  • stress
  • anxiety
  • fear
  • anger
  • confused
• Thought (cognitive) cues. You notice thinking:
  • Negative thoughts from beliefs that are either not true, partially true, or unproven
  • Fearful thoughts
  • Angry thoughts
  • Contradictory thoughts
  • Limiting thoughts

You can engage your observer-self to notice that what you are thinking and believing are causing your emotions, which have changed your breathing. When you become aware of limiting thoughts and replace them with hanging out in the mindful moment for a while, it’s expansive. And with your expansion, you may become aware that there are infinite possibilities.

It’s how you increase the length and the depth of this mindful moment and what do you do with it by making new choices from lower to higher levels of consciousness. Now you have different choices.

Activating and paying attention to the observer-self lengthens the time you are in mindfulness.

Now we can look at, “OK, so this happened. Being in my observer-self, I can notice what I feel, what do I think? Is this my automatic reaction? Is that how I want to think? Is that how I want to react?”

And if the answer is no, then you have to create more choices. Or maybe you want to ask yourself, “What are all my choices?” And that’s the depth, so within that timeframe, which you’ve lengthened, you can now create depth by creating more choices. When you have more mindful time, you can increase your creative and higher consciousness choices.

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.