Is Mindfulness the Key to Change?
Many people scoff at the concept and idea of mindfulness and awareness and question whether it drives any lasting change. In reality, awareness is one of the most powerful tools in the process of change. Awareness alone may not be sufficient to create change, but it is often a necessary component to effecting change in your life. Most people can acknowledge that they engage in a number of bad habits that are negatively affecting their lives. They could be behavioral, emotional, physical, or cognitive thinking styles. At the simplest level, people realize that to break a bad habit, they are going to need a level of awareness in order to catch and change these habits. Any bad habit over time becomes unconscious and people engage in them often without even realizing it, which of course only serves to reinforce and perpetuate the bad habit. If you have any hope of changing things for the better, we must leverage mindfulness and awareness to become aware of our bad habits. Knowing what to be on the lookout for is certainly the critical step in making changes.
How Would Therapy Enhance Mindfulness and Change?
Unfortunately, many people know they have plenty of bad habits but don’t know what half of them are. It’s really hard to change what you don’t know or understand. Therapy is intended to help people unearth their bad habits and pull them up onto the radar screen so we can start mapping them out and connecting the dots to understand better why you do what you do and why you think the way you think. Through this discovery phase of therapy, people can identify all sorts of new bad habits. Here again, with new insights and information, we leverage awareness and mindfulness to focus on newly discovered bad habits and begin working on them. Therapy is also great at providing all sorts of tools designed to help replace your bad habits with new, healthier habits in their place. Therapy is fantastic at helping with learning and implementing tools to make change. Remember that all these interesting tools will fall flat if not for mindfulness and awareness. Catching the bad habits allows you to implement the new tools. All the tools in the world will be useless if you are not aware and you will keep doing what you have always been doing. Every tool you learn hinges on your awareness. Long-term change cannot be accomplished without awareness. In this context, mindfulness goes beyond being alert to your surroundings and yourself. It becomes the impetus for change and a happier life.
If you want to meet with a therapist to explore what makes you tick, feel free to contact IPC so you can schedule an appointment with one of our providers for a more thorough assessment. Please call us now at 763-416-4167 or request an appointment on our website: WWW.IPC-MN.COM so we can sit down with you, complete a thorough assessment, and help you develop a plan of action that will work for you. Life is too short to be unhappy. Find the peace of mind you deserve.
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