Mindful Mondays #7: Rainy Day Edition đ§ď¸
22 Lessons from Past Year Reviews, Anti-Time Management, and a trippy documentary about therapy.
Good morning, and welcome to another edition of Mindful Mondays.
Itâs a rare rainy day here in San Diego, complete with thunder and lightning. This morning I got to listen to the rain during my meditationâone of my favorite âmeditation objects.â
While many meditators focus on the breath, you can choose just about anything as your focus for mindfulness meditation: sounds, sensations in the body, even a visual object like a candle flame. Why not experiment and find out what works for you?
Chrisâs Writing
Iâve Done Tim Ferrissâs Past Year Review For 5 Years. Here Are 22 Lessons I Learned
Many of you will remember the Past Year Review from my last essay. You may have even tried it yourself. In this article, I gathered my reviews from the last five years and looked for common themes and lessons I could extract from my life experience, and came up with 22. Hereâs a sample:
âIf you donât know what to do next with your life or career, just pick something and go for it. Itâs better to try something and fail than to sit around doing nothing and overthinking it. We donât figure these things out by thinking or even journaling, but by trying things and finding out what works.â
Book I Just Picked Up
I was browsing through a brick-and-mortar bookstore yesterday and came across Anti-Time Management by entrepreneur & executive coach Richie Norton. I mostly bought it because it featured a back-cover blurb from Susan Cain (her book Quiet is a must-read for introverts).
I read the first 50 pages last night. To be honest, Nortonâs writing style is not exactly clear or concise, but he seems to have some next-level ideas. Case in point, his adaptation of Aristotleâs concept of Final Cause to the arena of productivity. Hereâs an example: instead of saying âI want to become a writer,â thus putting becoming a writer at the end of an indefinitely long to-do list, Norton suggests
Decide who you want to be.
Act from that identity immediately
Taking Nortonâs advice, you would replace âI want to become a writerâ with âI am a writerâ and start acting like one now. What do writers do? Write every day, read voraciously, hang out with other writers, and share their work with the world.
You could apply the same principle to becoming a runner, a musician, or a digital nomad. The point is, we often insert a bunch of unnecessary steps in between our present and the thing we want to do in the future. What if you could skip all of that and go straight to the thing you ultimately want?
Documentary I Watched
Last week, my girlfriend and I watched Stutz, a Netflix documentary that actor Jonah Hill made about his therapist, Dr. Phil Stutz. At least two of my clients had recommended it to me, so I was excited to check it out.
I was already somewhat familiar with Stutz, as Iâd read his book The Tools when it was published back in 2013. Stutz is quite a character, and over the years, developed his own idiosyncratic style of therapy, focused on the use of a number of âtoolsâ which he teaches his clients. Based in LA, he became a go-to therapist for many screenwriters and others in Hollywood.
The âtoolsâ are a combination of mindfulness, visualization, and other techniques. Iâve tried a few of them for myself if youâre wondering what I think of them, well, I think theyâre pretty cool. Theyâre also pretty unique to Stutz and I donât think theyâre the be-all end-all of therapy.
That being said, I agree with Stutz about one really important point: I believe in giving clients something that will help them right in the first session.
Clients come to therapy to be get relief from their suffering, not to sit around and analyze it endlessly without getting better. If I have a mindfulness exercise, homework assignment, or even just a reframe that I think will help someone feel better in the first session, I believe I have an ethical obligation to share it with them.
Quote of the Week
âLearning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.â â Fyodor Dostoevsky
Thatâs it for this week!
By the way, if youâre interested in trying a Past Year Review, it looks like I may be offering a free Zoom call sometime this week or next to guide you through it. Hit reply to this email if youâre interested.
As always, I appreciate your feedback on Mindful Mondays. What did you think of this weekâs edition? How can I make it more useful to you? Let me know in the comments, by email, or on Twitter.
Thanks,
Chris Cordry, LMFT
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Never heard of that book before. The title is intriguing. Let me know if you'd recommend it after you finish.
âDecide who you want to be.
Act from that identity immediately.â
I LOVE this, and especially the attention you draw to the habit of loading a bunch of BS activity between ourselves and the real life we say we want. But honestly, I think most of us would be too scared to simply start living as our future dream selves. ďżź How to be in relationship to that fear, or even how to use it, seems to be the question. Wisdom?