Mindfulnessandwillingness

How mindfulness techniquesand Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)can help with your career change

By Rob Archer – Director, Bloom Psychology Ltd

i. Why Mindfulness is important

Making the decision to change career boils down to a series of

moment to moment

decisions. Do I sit and work on my plan, or not? Do I make a list of possible employers or put it off til the weekend?In time, by becoming more aware of ourselves – not just our thoughts but our emotions andsensations – we can respond to the world in a more open, real way. Instead of allowing our mind to interpret everything, we can make a more

conscious decision

of how to act.The choice whether to do something important only occurs in the

present moment

Noticing

yourself choosing between doing what’s important to you or spending timestruggling with your thoughts, which you cannot control, is the first step to a valued life.Therefore, being mindful of the present moment allows us to ask one important question:

Given what’s important to me, what am I willing to do and experience to move me inthat direction,

in this moment

We do a lot of

thinking

during a career change. But our experience is that thoughts seemto go round in cycles, and often

distract

us from our values.Whilst we’re ‘up in our heads’ distracted by thoughts, we are not making progress.We believe that the key is

not

to try to change our thoughts

, which is often impossible,but to change our relationship to our thoughts, so that we can make progress towards whatwe value in life.

ii. What Mindfulness isn’t.

The biggest misconception about mindfulness is that it is a tool to relax. It isn’t.If it

relaxing, then fine, but if it isn’t, that’s fine too. The goal of mindfulness is presence.What effect does this have on our lives? Are we better for this? Do we make better decisions? Do we have more fun this way?If you think about presence in its other meaning, it means literally being in a room, having animpact on others. Maybe this is what we mean when we say someone ‘has presence’.Mindfulness means contacting the world

as it is

, deliberately, and non judgmentally.After all, how often are we truly present in what we do? Too often, we’re living up in our heads, not really noticing (or appreciating) what’s going on around us.