What is mind management?

Back to: Mind Management Mastery Course

Hello and welcome to our first lesson in Mind Management. Each lesson is divided into a video followed by some mind management exercises.

• You will need to keep a journal during the course, so you can write down your thoughts, ideas and strategies for how you want to incorporate the lesson into your life. It is especially important to keep a record of the responses you want to habituate during this course.
• The lessons can be done at your own pace. You have three months to complete the course. However, it is recommended that you do no more than one lesson a day, allowing you to practice the selected mind management exercises during the day before you move on. Mind Management is a practice, you are going to train your brain to make sure that it works for you rather than against you and that involves practice, practice, practice. It might seem weird, forced or contrived in the beginning, and progress is slow, but with repeated practice you will habituate your responses and they will seem natural to you. The most exciting thing about mind management is that you can shape who you want to become.
• You can come back to this lesson as often as you like, when you are ready to move to the next lesson, mark complete at the bottom of the page.

Design your Practice

To kick-start your mind management here are some mind management practices you can use.  Before you move on to the next lesson, take some time to focus on the following practices.  We will build on these practices as you go through the course. 

Practice 1

Slow down. During this week do a go slow. As much as possible slow down your mind, your speech and your actions.

Practice 2

Mindful pauses. Insert mindful pauses into the day. Whenever you remember to, regardless of what you are feeling, thinking, or doing, pause for just a moment, take a breath and then go on with whatever you were feeling, thinking or doing.

Practice 3

Who is talking? During the day, as often as you remember to, stop and without judgement, identify whether your emotions were dominating the moment, whether your prefrontal cortex was holding the fort or whether you were in your mindful self. You don’t have to do anything with the awareness. Simply step into your Mindful Self, connect with who’s talking, silently verbalise who’s talking (My feelings are doing the talking, my PFC is doing the talking, My Mindful Self is doing the talking) and then go on as you were. Note: As soon as you do this exercise you have gone into your mindful self from where you are observing what your brain is doing.

• Your emotions are talking when your attention is attached to how you are feeling.
• Your PFC is doing the talking when you are detached from your emotions and using the executive functions of your brain: thinking, analysing, worrying, problem solving, planning, controlling, organising.
• Your Mindful Self is doing the talking when you are aware of what you are feeling, what you are thinking and/or what you are doing.

Practice 4

Course Target: Select a course target. This is some aspect of yourself that you would like to deal with over the course. It can be a bad habit (e.g., substance dependence, shopping, hoarding, gambling, over-eating, picking at your body, counting, checking), or a behaviour you want to change, e.g., aggression, submission, talking too fast, explaining, worrying, detaching, self-pity, blaming, controlling, or any other aspect of the way you think or what you do that you would like to deal with during this course. During the course, apply this target to the various exercises you do and you can use the MMM Start-Up and Stock-Take to help you keep your focus (see below).

If you haven’t done so already, please register for the course.

Register

You can increase the power of your mind management by starting each day with the MMM Start-Up and end it with the MMM  Stock-Take.    You can include the practices in your start-up to help you keep your focus on your mind management. It’s free!

Finally, go the whole hog and register for a Mind Management Group. There is nothing like joining a group of like-minded people to help you stay engaged. The group is facilitated by a psychologist, you can attend a group at our premises or you can do it online, it costs $AU15 per group, unless you have a current mental health care plan (Australian residents), then there is no out-of-pocket expense for you. Is this the time to take your mental health seriously?

If will be great if you can write a (short) comment with your reflections, so that you can share your thoughts and ideas with other members.