skills4mind

10 Tips for Motivating Yourself to Practise New skills and Pursue Your Goals

Do you see little improvement in your skills? Or struggle to see how can you achieve the life you want to have and be the person you want to be? I’ll give you 10 one-minute tips for motivating yourself to practise new skills and pursue your goals.

Physicalising

In this practice, you are going to learn the skill that is called Physicalising because what we do is take the painful feeling and imagine it as a physical object. The purpose of this practice is to learn a new and more flexible way of responding to painful feelings instead of fighting them or running from them. Many people find imagining painful feelings as physical objects help in the process of acceptance. But no exercise works for everyone.

Affectionate breathing

During this practice, you are going to focus on your breath to allow you to find a sense of grounding and acceptance and develop compassion for yourself. We tend to take the routine functioning of our bodies for granted. But, when we pause to consider how miraculous it is that we’re here, breathing, and alive, it’s easier to feel kindness and affection for ourselves and those around us.

Giving and receiving compassion

During this practice, you are going to focus on your breath to allow you to find a sense of grounding and acceptance and develop compassion for yourself and others. The in-breath nourishes your body by bringing oxygen to all your cells and it energizes you by subtly activating the sympathetic nervous system. The out-breath subtly relaxes you as it activates the parasympathetic nervous system. People tend to only think about compassion for others and overlook themselves. And yet we need to put the oxygen mask on ourselves first to be able to assist others. We need to breathe in for ourselves – to tend to ourselves – before we can tend to others. In this practice, the breath is a reminder to include yourself in the circle of your compassion and to stay connected with others. In-breath is a reminder to be kind to yourself and it helps to extend a caring frame of mind to others through the out-breath. This makes compassion complete. It can be especially helpful when you are in a conflict with someone or in a caregiving situation.

Brief body scan

For grounding, opening up, and contact with the present moment.

The compassionate u-turn

This practice is based on the three universal expressions of compassion: soft gaze, soothing touch and gentle vocalisation. And it’s called the compassionate u-turn because we usually behave like this toward others when we feel compassion but we can also give compassion to ourselves in the same way. This practice specifically activates the self-kindness component of self-compassion.

50 sec “Dropping Anchor” practice

Dropping anchor is a useful skill for handling difficult thoughts, feelings, emotions, urges and sensations more effectively. It helps you to ground yourself in difficult situations and develop more self-control. It can be used as a ‘circuit-breaker’ for any problematic behaviours.