Mindset Minutes Colm O'Reilly

Mindset Monday Challenge - Spread Kindness

This week’s Mindset Monday is inspired by Annie Lennox and Al Green. I won’t subject you to my singing voice but “think of your fellow man, lend him a helping hand.”

Altruism and acts of kindness have been proven to boost our own well-being. If you have all you need you naturally will start to check in on those close to you to make sure they’re doing okay. We can build our sense of abundance by starting with checking in and helping out others. Our brains reason that if we’re doing this, we must be safe and secure.

The simplest way you can do this is by checking in on someone you care about. You mightn’t need to actually do anything to help them. Very often the thing that we’re missing is someone to fully listen to us. And we’re all capable of listening to our friends and family and giving them the gift of being heard.

Or we can share a meme that will bring a smile to my face. This is another preferred method of kindness that’s easy to do, hopefully makes the people you care about chuckle, and puts a little love in your heart.



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Mindset Monday - Are you looking for truth or validation?

This week let’s ask ourselves if we’re looking for the truth or validation, if we’re looking for what’s right, or to prove we’re right.

We can use this approach when we’re conversing with ourselves and our thoughts. And we can also use it when we’re talking with someone. Drop the desire to be correct and instead enter conversations with an attitude of curiosity, seeing what you can learn and understand rather than proving your point.

It’s our ego that needs to be right. Sometimes this is very important, like we know it’s right to cross the street. Other times, it’s not so much. And it’s this need to be right that can cost us in connections, growth and opportunity.

Take the time this week to question your motives. Seek less validation and spend a little more time looking for what’s right and let me know how you get on.

If you’d like support with this strategy, reach out!



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Mindset Monday - Drop The “Yeah, But…”

This week’s Mindset Monday Challenge is aimed at improving your communication, and it involves dropping “yeah, but” from your speech.

Therapists like to say everything before the but is BS. When we say “yeah, but” we’ve really dismissed the other persons point of view, and are more interested in being heard and getting our point across. At the very extreme it shows that we might not have even been listening all that much.

When we hear “yeah, but” do we feel listened to, respected and understood? My guess is no. We feel like we’re in an argument of opinions, and it’s an adversarial style of discourse.

You might be thinking “yeah, but I really need to get my point across!” To that I’ll ask if you think your point will be more or less received without that phrase?

So what’s the alternative? To repeat back to the other person what you heard them say, to make sure you understood them. You can either parrot or paraphrase. There’s more to it, so start with that and let me know how your conversations go this week.

If you’d like to talk more about cooperative communication, just reach out.

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Matt’s Mindset Course Experience

Matt got in touch with me to run a 12-Week Mindset Course for his gym. In this short video he shares why he reached out, his experience, the benefits and advice to anyone considering the same.

If you’d like to set this up for your team reach out to me - colm@thementalhealthplan.com



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Tough Love Thursday - Avoidance and Distractions Are Not Mental Health

Lately there’s been a lot of arguments made for services to be classified as vital for mental health.

One problem is mental health is synonymous with mental illness. If you are severely depressed, or anxious, you absolutely need a professional to help you. Either through talk therapy, medication, or some combination of the above.

Building mental health is further along the continuum. It’s all the repeated acts of positive self care that add up to mental well-being, peace of mind, and happiness.

Any activity with the right intention and execution can build mental health. But any activity that’s used as a means of avoidance for a distraction isn’t contributing to your peace of mind. If you run to enjoy the endorphins and fresh air it can be a positive. If you only feel good about yourself after you’ve had your run, or run excessively while avoiding your obligations and difficulty conversations/self reflection, then it is no longer a method of building and preserving your mental health.

Mental health cannot be built only on what feels good. You need to address your self limiting beliefs, bad habits, unresolved memories, and embrace the “dark” side of development. This can be done through ‘making yourself’ study in order to improve your career, having raw and honest conversations with loved ones or professionals, and sitting with yourself to clear your jumbled up thoughts and feelings.

When you commit to the difficult, uncomfortable, or downright scary tasks of true self care, that’s where the real pay off of peace of mind and true mental health resides.



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Mindset Monday - What Can You Remove?

So often in life we feel the need to add something to our lives to make them better.

That can be adding physical things like a bigger home, new shiny phone, more clothes, etc.

Or it can be adding in practices like extra workouts, more experiences, more time reading or learning how to cook.

All of these things can be great, or they add to our stress if it creates a sense of angst because we’ve too much to do and not enough time or energy to do it.

That’s why this week I’d like you to investigate what you can reduce and remove? A simple practice I do is look for one item to throw away each day. Just one. This promotes calm through gradually decluttering the physical environment.

But we can also look at activities we can remove, like spending 20 minutes getting your daily coffee or watching Netflix past 10pm.

Finally, we can look at thoughts that are no longer serving and look to remove those as well.

Try a week of subtraction and see how it adds to your mental well-being.



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