I now have a much more positive outlook on life. I can warmly recommend the Mindfulness course to anyone who is suffering from work-related stress.
This year has been one of the most stressful and exhausting years of my life as I am finding it very difficult to balance between university, my job and personal life. I decided to take this Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on ‘Mindfulness for Wellbeing and Peak Performance’ to better understand my weaknesses and improve my everyday performance. This course is developed by Monash University, which is one Australia’s leading universities. This was a short 3 weeks course with 3 hours of weekly study and I completed it by listening to it while I was driving to university or work. My house is far from both the places, almost an hour drive and with traffic that doubles the time so I always listen to something that helps me stay focused on the road and keep me awake.
Before I started this course, I really wanted to know about techniques that reduce my stress levels. I wanted to learn how to improve my overall wellbeing as a person. This course not only helped me understand why I feel a certain kind of way on some days, but it also helped me improve my efficiency as an employee at work and as a student in university. In this course I learnt how to incorporate mindfulness practices into my life and why it is important to protect your own mental health.
The part that resonated with me and helped me was cultivating self-compassion and emotional health. Self-compassion entails being warm and understanding toward ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism. On the contrary, I could not relate to some parts in the course where they talked about mindful communication as sometimes we meet people who are superficial and do not even understand anything with a deep meaning or intention.
“ This course helped me understand that it is okay to be easy on yourself and that we need to be kind to ourselves just like we are kind to the people around us.”
Self-compassion and emotional health is the part in my life is where I struggle the most, I always feel like an imposter even after achieving so much and working hard every day of my life. This course helped me understand that it is okay to be easy on yourself and that we need to be kind to ourselves just like we are kind to the people around us. I always feel like I am not doing enough and cannot make peace with things that are out of my control. To combat that, we need to start looking at ourselves through a different eye in order to appreciate the things we have already achieved. After my own research on mindful communication, I came to a conclusion that involves applying principles of mindfulness to the way we correspond with others. These principles include setting an intention, being fully present, remaining open and non-judgmental, and relating to others with compassion (Sigma, 2021).
After finishing this course, I feel more confident in my skin and will continue to have hope and keep uplifting myself because no one else will do it for me. Being optimistic is the key takeaway for achieving mindfulness is what I learnt in this course. Being mindful does not mean that somedays I would not have my down days or be upset, of course I would but picking myself up from the downs of life is the greatest lesson I learnt in this course and will keep learning as I grow older.
My action plans to become more mindful for wellbeing are paying attention and being present in the moment. I will do so by putting all my focus and energy in the task I am doing in the moment by giving myself a time frame to complete that specific task. Deadlines work best for me and help me stay in track. To achieve high performance at work and university, I will be action and solution oriented. I will always present solutions first rather than dwelling over spilt milk and mistakes. I will do this by writing all my goals down and completing them one by one.
References
Sigma, 2021. Sigma Assessment Systems Inc. [Online] Available at: https://www.sigmaassessmentsystems.com/mindful-communication/ [Accessed 12 04 2021].
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