2 Mindfulness Techniques for Staying Calm, Equanimous and Inspired on Your Path of Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship can be a wild ride, right? It can feel risky.
Whether you’re a mindfulness trainer, coach, healing arts or mental health practitioner - from somatic experiencing, to therapy, to mindfulness training in organizations, to shamanic healings to energy workers - you most likely are finding yourself in a field of possibility, lots of options and directions to go in, and challenges that accompany the path.
One element of this risk is: It can be filled with ups and downs, and uncertainty around every corner.
⚫️ How will my program launch go?
⚫️ Who will join my program? Will anyone join the program?
⚫️ Am I truly making a difference in my clients’ lives?
The flavors of uncertainty can feel vast and unending.
The second element that can contribute to the riskiness many of us feel on this path of being a client-centered service provider is this: how strong are your emotional regulation skills?
Attachment theory can help us gauge this emotional regulation skill set, offering a psychological context for how well you can emotionally regulate yourself when anxiety, fear, anger, frustration or overwhelm emerges. What resources do you call on? Do you avoid the pain, or go into distraction mode?
Attachment theory is a psychological framework that makes sense of the ways in which you orient toward yourself and to the world (interpersonally). In theory, your attachment strategies as an adult may be determined by the way your caregivers (or important attachment figures) oriented toward you in early development. Attachment is adaptive and malleable. It can have a significant impact on our ability to be authentic with others, to go after our passions, to explore what’s most meaningful to us, to be willing to get our needs met in life, and to enjoy reciprocally meaningful relationships.
I support my clients in a two-fold way:
1.Psycho-education and self-mastery: Coming to understand the tenets of secure and non-secure attachment styles, so that they can move through the world with more awareness, compassion, and skillfulness (and get more space from the parts of self that are protective, restrictive, and motivated by pain, fear and potentially unmet needs).
2. Meditation: I offer a meditative and behavioral skills approach for strengthening one’s resilience and expanding one’s capacity to explore what’s most meaningful to them. This mindfulness strategy set is designed to help people cultivate and embody a life of fulfillment, true belonging, authenticity, and to do so with emotional resilience and equanimity.
If you’re a mindful entrepreneur, providing mindfulness training, coaching, healing arts or mental health services to your clients and community, then this career path may be your form of exploration.
⚫️ Does it light up your heart and mind?
⚫️ Do you feel energized by the type of work you’re doing?
⚫️ Does it feel ‘aligned’ in mind and body?
These questions can point you into the direction of clarity.
And so, in the face of this exploration, we get to RESOURCE ourselves. Otherwise, we can get swept away by overwhelming emotions, or protective inner parts that emerge when unfamiliar circumstances arise (and there are MANY of those on the journey of starting a client-centered service business).
In this blog post, I’m sharing 2 mindfulness techniques for resourcing.
What is resourcing?
Resourcing essentially means that you’re employing a strategy that supports emotional regulation and allows you to access resource sense experiences in the body and mind. This can take the form of
⚫️ Somatic neutrality
⚫️ Joy, satisfaction, gratitude, inner peace
⚫️ Confidence, courage, reassurance
⚫️ Having a complete sense experience (regardless of the quality of the sense experience, be it sadness, joy, or another quality).
⚫️ Transmutation: Perhaps a challenging emotions shifts into something neutral or pleasant
⚫️ Replacement in mental talk space: Encouraging, positive thoughts
Let’s dive into two strategies I recommend for staying emotionally regulated on the journey of mindful entrepreneurship!
See Hear Feel:
This is an Appreciation mindfulness technique within the Unified Mindfulness ULTRA grid of mindfulness techniques.
This mindfulness technique is all about paying attention to what is actually happening in the present moment (and is oftentimes what we would associate with ‘mindfulness’).
See Hear Feel offers you the opportunity to cultivate 3 main attentional skills, which are concentration power, sensory clarity and equanimity.
Concentration power is the capacity to focus on any object of your choosing. Whether that’s the breath moving in and out of the lungs, or noticing your hand, or placing the attention on sounds in your environment, the object you choose doesn’t matter as much as the attentional skill of concentration that you place onto it. Another word for concentration is ‘stability’.
Sensory clarity is the capacity to know what sense experience you’re paying attention to or experiencing in any given moment. One level of knowing is to discern if the sense experience is visual (See space), auditory (Hear space) or somatic (Feel space). Emotions, taste and scent categorically can be sensed in Feel space.
Sensory clarity is also about knowing the contours of a sense experience (rather than the content). This can include temperature, location in the physical body, spatial qualities, density, movement or change, volume, and even the arising or passing quality of a sense experience.
Lastly, equanimity is a non-interfering quality of attention. It’s an abiding. Equanimity is the absence of craving or aversion.
Craving can be understood as pulling in, holding onto, or wanted something to last forever. We oftentimes apply craving (unknowingly) to pleasurable experiences or moments. We want it to last forever! This creates suffering.
Aversion is the not wanting quality, which can be experienced as pushing away, or storing emotions inside, or avoidance. Do you ever notice a challenging emotion arise, and then your attention darts to quick fixes or ways to avoid it or distract yourself? Watching a movie. Grabbing a drink. Surrounding yourself with people or a flurry of social activities (so as to avoid being alone with your thoughts or emotions). Overworking. These are ways many people apply aversion to sense experiences.
So, equanimity is a highly important attentional skill that allows you to have a complete sense experience, no matter the quality of that sense experience, and to not interfere with it. This leads to purification and greater contentment in life.
Watch the video in this blog post to practice See Hear Feel mindfulness technique.
2. Mindful Resource Practice
This mindfulness practice is a Nurture Positive technique, which is centered on cultivating sense experiences across internal See, Hear, and Feel sense gates.
Unlike Appreciation techniques (like See Hear Feel), this is NOT a practice where we sit with the actual experiences in the presnet moment (at least not exclusively). Rather, we are creating, inducing and nurturing forward desired and reparative sense experiences. New thoughts. Resource emotions like joy, gratitude, confidence and more.
The impact of this practice style is to settle your inner sense system and create the foundation for exploration. We want to find ways to access a sense of grounding, reassurance, stability, and inner security. And so, I guide my clients in a process to uncover what offers that uniquely for each client.
This is great for accentuating qualities of reassurance, self-validation, unconditional support, acceptance and soothing --- and is infused with the tenets of secure attachment.
This practice is designed to help you strike the bell internally, finding resourceful scenes through imagination, and then installing the resources by applying mindfulness (concentration, clarity and equanimity) to the resources as they become available. This ultimately strengthens the resourceful qualities and thoughts, allowing them to become more familiar to the body mind and thus more available more often.
It’s essentially a technique that helps you train the resilience muscle across the somatic landscape and mental landscape. It gets stronger with repetition, practice and iteration.
It’s optimal to practice this regularly (2x/week or more) to allow this resource to internally expand and reinforce itself more and more over time.
The second half of Mindful Resource practice is about practicing exploration, particularly saturating the mind body in the ideal vision you have for your life and business as an adult today.
I guide you in elevating your life’s vision across all the internal sense gates, bringing it to life and full form to help strengthen the muscle and convert your vision into a resource to then help you gain momentum on your path.
You’ll learn how to mindfully activate it vividly within your somatic and whole sense experience, installing your desired outcomes and feeling states internally in support of your greatest momentum in the material world.
If you want to make space for authentic exploration and to take meaningful risks, you’ll LOVE this technique.
The benefits of this mindfulness technique include:
⚫️ Compassionately and inclusively moving through challenging emotional seasons (and staying steady on the path)
⚫️ Consistently staying in touch with your purpose (even when doubt peaks in)
⚫️ Moving beyond fear, inner blockage, anxiety, or overwhelm
⚫️ Healing the critical or punitive voice within, and strengthening a new, encouraging, hopeful and positive internal voice.
⚫️ Managing your energy more efficiently (so that you’re not getting drained by repeating thought cycles and dense emotions)
⚫️ More time, energy and space to take meaningful steps toward achieving your goals and making your impact (rather than leaking energy with anxiety, stress, overwhelm cycles).
These two mindfulness techniques have changed my life personally.
I’ve gone from constant anxiety, fear, catastrophic thinking and overwhelm, to being a steward with more balance, focus, purpose, inspiration and capacity to DREAM and fully explore.
I’ve gone from debilitating fear that blocked me from being seen, or taking the most impactful actions (because deep down, I was afraid of succeeding and didn’t feel worthy) -- to feeling open, expansive, flowing and confident. These internal resources have led to taking tremendous ACTION, courageously launching new programs, getting out there and actually being of MORE service to more people. Not to mention 5x my income as a by-product.
Mindfulness is such a potent way to resource, and to keep one’s ship steady amidst calm waters and stormy waters alike. It’s truly a vital resource in the greater holistic tool-kit for making your impact sustainably. Running your own business isn’t easy. It takes consistency, emotional resilience, mindset management and tactical strategies that truly move the needle.
I want to see you making your impact for years to come. I want to see you THRIVING, and not falling to the pressure and overwhelm that can sometimes peek into client-centered businesses (especially at the start-up phase). I want to see you taking consistent, impactful steps forward without feeling totally drained, ungrounded or steeped in doubt.
You can feel calm, confident, inspired, creative, on purpose and truly impactful (not to mention financially stable) on this path of being a client-centered service provider. Mindfulness is one of multiple tools to explore in cultivating this vision of entrepreneurship into real life experience.
Next Steps
I invite you to explore practicing the Appreciate mindfulness technique (watch the Youtube video to access the guided meditation). Then hop in the Youtube comments and let me know how it went for you!
If you feel called to expand more this season (your impact, your revenue) and do so in a holistic and sustainable way, I’m here for you.
Click here to learn more about my 1.1 Mindful Impact Coaching (and dive into my free resource down below).
Honoring you,
Jess Lipman
Mindful Business Coach
Unified Mindfulness Certified Trainer
Calling all mindful entrepreneurs and client-centered service providers in mindfulness, the healing arts and mental health fields.
If you’re a mindful client-centered service provider who wants to strategically build a sustainable online service business, this is for you. Build an aligned, effective offer to help you enroll your ideal clients into your program (without compromising your values or vision). Whether you’re just starting out, or you’re already making $100K+ annual revenue, this course will offer vital perspectives and questions that are relevant at ANY level of business.
