How Mindfulness Can Help You Take Charge of Your Life

Are you just coasting along and accepting the defaults in your life? Take charge of your life with mindfulness. This post from Scott Hanselman explains why and how!

I’m setting a goal for myself to finish my half-finished book relationshiphacks.com this year. In an attempt to make that happen (and because the recent podcast with my wife was wildly popular) I’m going to try to blog some guiding principles. Then I’ll attempt to collect the feedback and comments, improve the posts, then move them into the book. Yesterday I posted about “An allowance system for adults.”

In this post on I want to touch briefly on the concept of “mindfulness.” When I was younger I didn’t know this term so I said “don’t live your life by default.” Phrased alternatively, “don’t let your life happen by default.”

I mentioned it years ago on a podcast and Paul Apostolos did a very nice blog post where he paraphrased:

Teach your children to make life choices rather than just let life happen to them.

Now, to be clear, stuff happens and this isn’t always possible. There’s luck, there’s planning, there’s inherent privilege, but the root idea of mindfulness and awareness is crucial. As they say, “Luck Is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”

I met with a young mentee today who is considering not just leaving her job but also moving to a totally different career. What I appreciated about her perspective and questions was that she clearly was going into the future fully aware of the possibilities. She embraced both the potential good and bad possibilities with a conscious and mindful awareness that was inspiring.

She wasn’t going to just “let whatever happen, happen.” She wasn’t going to just start the game and accept the defaults. She is opening up the options menu of life and trying to change the settings consciously.

I’m doing my best to teach my kids this, hopefully by example. Yes there are things they can’t change about themselves, but the one thing they can change (or try) is how they think and how they act. I catch them saying things like “I’m not good at math.” They have tapes that are already starting to run in their little heads that feed them negativity and inaction. The defaults are just doing nothing. Humans (myself included) can be very lazy. I want them to build up their reservoirs of self-esteem and “I can do it” so they don’t accept the defaults.

Source: Relationship Hacks – Mindfulness – Don’t live your life by default – Scott Hanselman