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5 Helpful Books to Start Your Mindfulness Journey

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Mindfulness Journey

Do you ever feel like you’re just operating on cruise control, completely oblivious to what you’re actually doing? It sounds like a strange out-of-body experience, but even losing focus for just a second while you work could become frustrating. Your mind might drift into procrastination, or you could have a hard time controlling your thoughts.


These are experiences that everyone has at some point in their lives. The feeling that we’re not entirely aware of our situation, that we’re overwhelmed with what’s around us. It’s enough to make us feel anxious or, in some cases, physically sick and unstable. This is where mindfulness comes in handy. It’s a basic human ability to allow us to be more aware of not just our surroundings, but also our mental state. It’s the ability to keep your thoughts in check, to be able to react to situations properly without exaggerating the situation in our minds.


Mindfulness isn’t something special. It’s not an ability for gifted and talented people, and it’s certainly something that everyone can possess. However, unlocking that potential to become more mindful can be tricky, so here are five helpful books that can get you started on this wonderful journey of becoming more aware of yourself and your surroundings.

1. 10% Happier

Dan Harris

10% Happier is a fantastic introduction to the world of mindfulness, hence why it’s right at the top of this list. Other books in this list (bar the last one) will sound spiritual and philosophical, which is why they can be difficult to digest. 10% Happier, on the other hand, is a book written for people that want a serious, yet enjoyable read to help them tame the voices inside of their heads.

2. The Untethered Soul

Michael Singe

The Untethered Soul is a journey into a timeless question with many interpretations: who are you? In this book, Michael Singer explores the question of identity and how it can be found in our consciousness and our ability to observe the world around us.

3. The Art of Happiness

Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler

A unique take on mindfulness, written with the aid of one of the world’s great spiritual leaders. This highly accessible book dives into many key areas of human experience while also touching on important principles in Tibetan Buddhism and applying them to everyday scenarios.

4. The Miracle of Mindfulness

Thich Nhat Hanh

Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh offers a wonderfully rich and lucid guide to practicing mindfulness in this book. It’s full of practical advice and skills that can help you become more aware of your surroundings. From simple tasks like peeling fruit and washing your dishes, this book reminds us that every moment is unique and holds an opportunity that is waiting to be explored.

5. The Mindfulness Colouring Book

Emma Farrarons

And lastly, an accessible book that isn’t just about reading. Working with your own hands is a fantastic way to soothe your anxiety and defeat stress. This small book of beautiful illustrations gives you a practical way to explore your inner creativity and draw out your mindfulness while providing you with something to focus on.

These five books all offer a unique and different take on mindfulness, but they can all be used to kickstart your mindfulness journey.

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The Importance of Thinking Big and Believing in Yourself

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Believing in Yourself

When it comes to overcoming fear or discouragement there are two popular phrases that most of us have likely heard time and again. “Think Big” and “Believe in Yourself.” And while they’re great suggestions, there are two questions that many of us have thought about when hearing these encouraging words. “What does that mean?” And ‘Why does that matter?”

What Does Thinking Big and Believing in Yourself Mean?

Thinking big sounds easy, but it may not come easily. It means to consider your perspective and expand it. For example, if you’re hand-making a thing and selling it online, that’s great! But could you hire people to make 10 times as many things? Could you sell the training on how to make the thing? Could you create an entire community around the thing? Looking beyond the now, the day-to-day, and seeing what an idea, a business, a hobby, or skill could become, could lead to thinking big.

Believing in yourself is critical to success. It’s not having an unrealistic belief in your abilities or chance or ignoring the risks to success. It’s understanding who you are, how you work, and what you’re capable of. But it’s understanding that accurately and truly, from your own understanding and knowledge of yourself and ignoring limitations and restrictions put on you by society, your upbringing, or just plain doubt.

Why Does Thinking Big and Believing in Yourself Matter?

Thinking big is critical to rising above day-to-day existence. Whether it’s moving from a hobby to a business or just finding a new job, if you can’t focus on the bigger picture, on what’s possible, how can you possibly move from where you are? And it’s not required that you take that step, if your hobby is your hobby and you don’t want to leverage that into a multi-million dollar-a-year job, that’s ok.

But knowing and understanding the possibilities lets you make that decision with all the necessary information. And if you are looking to make a change or adjust your life, it’s critical to make the best choice for you. Thinking small, thinking ‘inside the box’ won’t give you the opportunity to really change much. It will keep you where you are, doing what you’re doing. Thinking big is the key to success and positive change.

Believing in yourself is the key to success and positive change. Thinking big allows you to lay out the goal. Believing in yourself is how you make the plan toward your goals. If you understand how you work, what you value, and what you can accomplish, you can use that to make a plan, a series of achievable steps, to get to the goal. If you allow others or your own self-doubt to convince you that you can’t accomplish these things is the surest way to fail to accomplish them.

Believing in your capabilities, your ideas, and your drive is critical to overcoming all the challenges that face anyone trying to make a change in their life. From going back to school to starting a business to learning to play the guitar, change is hard. Without a strong conviction in your own yourself, it may well be too difficult.

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How Positive Thinking Affects the Mind and Body

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Mind and Body

When you’re down on yourself or your business, it can be tough to even ponder positive thinking. However, there are a wide variety of benefits to focusing on the bright side. Optimism can help your business, your mind, and your body. Let’s take a look at a few of the benefits of positive thinking:

Build Skills

Positive thinking allows you to build skills that you might not otherwise be able to build, as you can focus on how to build the skill and the technique required, instead of panicking about how you’re going to be able to build it. The more time that you spend worrying about learning something and working yourself up about your lack of skill, the more time you aren’t focusing on mastering that skill. This means that once you’ve wrapped your mind around the idea of positive thinking, it becomes possible to build the skills that you need far faster than you would have previously imagined.

Boost Immunity

Positive thinking can also work to actually strengthen your body’s immune system. This means that instead of your immune system being constantly dragged down by negative thinking and stress, making you sick more frequently, you may actually be able to boost your immune system by focusing on positive ideas instead. This could mean fewer sick days, fewer doctors visits, and fewer days laid up feeling generally unwell. A strong immune system is better for your overall health, but also helps you make it through your day to day tasks more efficiently without the worry of falling behind due to illness.

Increase Overall Resilience

You can also increase your overall resilience by focusing on the positive things in life instead of the negative ones. This can help you to boost your overall resilience as a person, both physically and mentally, so that you can become more powerful and focused. Instead of wasting time worrying about all the things that could happen tomorrow, you can instead focus on the things that are happening today and managing them as well as possible. This level of resilience can help you to go much further in life, allowing you to brush problems off your shoulders and keep moving forward.

Cope with Stress More Effectively

Those who don’t manage stress effectively quickly find that it eats them alive. Stress can cause a wide variety of physical and mental symptoms if it isn’t managed well, and can lead to serious health issues such as high blood pressure, migraines, and heart issues over time. Taking the time to focus on the positive instead of the negative can help you manage the stress that you are experiencing and reframe it more accurately, in a way that you can manage more effectively.

While these aren’t all of the benefits of positive thinking, they’re certainly some of the most noticeable. For busy business owners, focusing on the positive aspects of life can sometimes seem overwhelming, but it’s often well worth the effort.

Keetria is an entrepreneur, wellness advocate, and brand strategy coach for creatives & entrepreneurs with 16 years of public relations expertise working with some of the world’s leading brands, startups, media personalities, and entertainers. If you would like to work together, don’t hesitate to reach out!

 

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3 Powerful Ways Meditation Can Benefit your Mind and Body

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There’s no point in doing something if it doesn’t benefit you, right? This is something many people consider when they contemplate starting up a meditation routine. They consider it to just be sitting down and being quiet…not much else is involved with meditation, right? 

Wrong. Meditation has never been a holistic hoax, and that still stands. While some benefits of meditation are very superficial, there are actually a variety of important mental and physical benefits that practitioners of yoga experience when they meditate.

What are those benefits? There are honestly too many to mention in just one blog post. However, there are three powerful benefits that any meditation skeptic should know about:

Meditation is great for anxiety and soothing the physical soul.

Your nervous system is the gateway to all of your bodily functions. From how you think to how you move, your nervous system is an amazing thing…and meditation can greatly affect how it functions.

Being specific, meditation activates your parasympathetic nervous system. This directly relates to your rest response — or how calm and relaxed you are physically and mentally. While many people associate rest with a mental state, it can also affect how your body functions overall. This relates to your heart rate, blood pressure, immunity, digestion and blood pressure. Meditation also helps to lower your stress hormones through this system as well.

Similarly, meditation can also help you sleep at night. While it obviously relates to your body physically shutting down, meditation also calms your racing mind, making it easier to turn in at the end of the night.

Meditation improves your creativity and productivity.

A clear mind is a mind that comes up with great ideas. When you have a bunch of thoughts racing around your brain, it can be hard to settle on one idea and fully realize it. Meditation helps to clear away these thoughts, making room for your creativity to shine through.

Think about your mind like a cluttered desk. What can you do with a cluttered desk other than clean it or walk away? Meditation is the process of cleaning it, allowing work to actually be done at the desk. This is the perfect illustration for how meditation makes a person more productive. A clear mind is a mind that gets things done.

Meditation makes people happier.

Meditation is calming, and being calm leads to being happier. When someone meditates, they let the weight of the world fall away from them and they experience a small taste of enlightenment. Meditation helps a person to process thoughts, get rid of negativity, and clear their mind.

The fact that meditation relieves stress is one of the biggest benefits of meditation, but not just because of this obvious relaxation benefit. A relaxed person with little stress in their life will obviously be happier than someone who has a life filled with stress and minimal downtime.

One final benefit of meditation — it’s a great way to take some time out to focus on yourself, not the clutter of everyday stressors and irritants. Take some time out of your day to meditate. You’ll be glad you did.

Keetria is an entrepreneur, wellness advocate, and brand strategy coach for creatives & entrepreneurs with 16 years of public relations expertise working with some of the world’s leading brands, startups, media personalities, and entertainers. If you would like to work together, don’t hesitate to reach out!

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4 Valuable Tips for Staying Mindful on the Go

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Reads for Budding Entrepreneurs

A common misconception about mindfulness is that it’s entirely the absence of thought. However, it should be obvious that this is wrong — it’s not called mindfulness for nothing. To be mindful is to (simply put) accomplish two things. First, you clear your mind. Second — and this is the important part — you focus on the present environment and the world around you within that very moment.

No past, no future. Just the moment you currently exist within.

The problem is that as entrepreneurs and busy people, we don’t often have the time or ability to shut off our brains and focus on what’s really around us. That’s why when the moment occurs, we all have to strike while the iron is hot.

Your Daily Commute.

It’s probably a good idea to avoid spacing out while you’re driving to work, but that doesn’t mean you can take some time during your commute to be mindful. This is much easier if you take the train, bus, or subway to work. You aren’t having to worry about the rules of the road and it’s easier to let your mind wander and focus on the world around you.

If you do drive, try and make it to work a little early. Don’t try to be mindful while driving, but instead for a few minutes once you get to work. Sit in your car, turn off your brain and take in your environment.

Make Food Mindful.

Being mindful isn’t just about drifting away and taking in the sights. It’s also about savoring all of your senses — including your sense of taste.

You’ll find time to eat during the day, which means you’ll find time to be mindful. The food you’re eating doesn’t have to be from a 5-star restaurant in order for mindfulness to occur. Even if you only have time for a Hot Pocket at your desk, take the time to notice the flavor and only the flavor. How does the food feel? How does it taste?

Before Sleep.

You aren’t a robot — you’ve got to sleep sometime! If you don’t have time to be mindful during the day, simply make time at night. About five minutes before you’re scheduled to go to sleep, let your mind wander and experience the world around you.

It’s actually easier to be mindful when your mind is already looking forward to shutting down. Practicing mindfulness before bed is one way to be more successful at the exercise, and it’s also simultaneously relaxing so you can fall asleep faster.

Emotional Awareness.

We’ve covered things like sight, sound and taste, but mindfulness also encompasses another spectrum of yourself: emotions. Examining your emotions in the present is a great way to get in tune with them and ease stress.

This can be done at any time during the day. One idea is to consider focusing on this during any bathroom breaks you take at work. Wash your hands and focus on feeling the water and soap, then look inward and assess your emotions. This takes only a few seconds and can still leave you feeling at ease.

At the end of the day practicing mindfulness will only add positive effects to your life and it doesn’t cost you anything to try it. Be sure to take some time out of your day to monitor your thoughts so you can become better at fine-tuning your emotional awareness.

Keetria is an entrepreneur, wellness advocate, and brand strategy coach for creatives & entrepreneurs with 16 years of public relations expertise working with some of the world’s leading brands, startups, media personalities, and entertainers. If you would like to work together, don’t hesitate to reach out!

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How to Stay Mindful When You’re a Busy Entrepreneur

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Entrepreneurs live very busy lives. They go, go, go and never find the time to fully come to a stop. If this defines your own life, consider this: you can be just as productive while still having inner peace and a way to put your mind at ease when you do find some downtime.

Many entrepreneurs might think this is ridiculous. A way to stay busy while still being able to relax when you need to? Preposterous! The truth is that it’s entirely possible thanks to one helpful technique: mindfulness.

Mindfulness is the ability to focus entirely on the present, and that’s in the most literal sense. Not the current day or the current week instead of a far-off to-do list. No, mindfulness means focusing on each second as it passes; being utterly and completely in the moment. It’s unrealistic to say you can always tune out your busy day, but practicing mindfulness gives you a place to escape when it’s time to put work down for the night.

But…how can you stay mindful and practice mindfulness when you have such a busy schedule to adhere to? I have a few tips that can make it work for you, no matter how packed your schedule is.

Skip the evening…go for a mindful morning.

Many entrepreneurs feel the pressure to practice mindfulness during the evening, right after they (maybe) finished up their to-do list. While this is the time when it’s most helpful to be mindful, don’t leap into mindfulness right after you round out your day. Instead, practice mindfulness when it’s easiest — during the morning.

In the morning, it’s a lot easier to clear your head. Right after you wake up, you haven’t thrown yourself into the thick of the day. At night, you’ve already got a ton of work thoughts swirling around in your head.

Set aside time for short breaks.

It’s not to say that you need to take whole 15-minute chunks out of your day to practice mindfulness. Instead, set aside little bite-sized pieces of time (like three to five minutes) to let go of all of your thoughts and slip into being in the moment. This can help to keep your mind sharp and focused during the day, and it also keeps your brain from going 100 miles per hour non-stop throughout the day.

Indulge the senses.

One of the most important aspects of mindfulness is, well, being aware of your mind and what it’s feeling. The best way to do this is to directly stimulate the senses as much as possible.

A great opportunity for this that doesn’t interrupt your schedule is your lunch break. Put aside your phone and focus only on your food. Savor each bite and catalog the flavors, smells, and textures of what you’re eating. Is it cold? Is it crunchy? Does it make you feel nostalgia or bring up a memory?

Master Mindfulness doesn’t have to be difficult

Being in the moment means truly feeling every emotion and sense that passes through your body. Once you’ve mastered this, you’ve truly mastered mindfulness.

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How Practicing Mindfulness Can Change your Life

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what is mindfulness

No one is ever entirely free of stress…or are they?

Stress is something that we consider a standard in life. Sometimes stress is direr than it is simple. We stress as teens studying hard for tests and as adults stressing over how much money we need to make to break even. Stress creates a very cluttered mental space, which then begins to impact other areas of life, like productivity and health. In short, stress is something that we don’t want but that seems almost inevitable, especially as professionals.

This is where mindfulness comes in. You may have heard the term in passing, but are you familiar with what it is and what it can do for you?

What is Mindfulness?

To keep things simple, mindfulness is being very aware of the world around you on a moment-by-moment basis, as well as accepting it simultaneously. People assume that this is simple — aren’t we all already living and experiencing every moment of our lives? Experiencing something and actually being 100% aware of it, however, are two different things.

While it’s true that we are physically present for all of our lives, we aren’t always mentally present. The opposite of mindfulness is mindlessness, or essentially running on autopilot. Many people don’t fully understand how much of their life is spent lost in thought, avoiding outside stimuli.

Say that you’re walking down a busy city street. What are you doing? Are you keeping your thoughts to yourself, running through your daily to-do list? Are you listening to music from earbuds, lost in the sound and not paying full attention to the world around you? Both are examples of clogging our minds with something in order to avoid being cognizant. Someone who has embraced mindfulness is fully living in that moment, noticing things, and taking them in.

What Can Mindfulness do for you?

Mindfulness is often associated with total positivity; it’s something written off as a new age, existentialist way of avoiding life’s problems. However, it’s exactly the opposite.

Let’s look at stress and mindfulness. When someone who is used to mindlessness is confronted with stress, the negative emotion, and thoughts of the future cloud their vision. Anxiety gets in the way of productivity. Someone who is mindful, however, fully accepts the stressful stimuli and then formulates a plan based on their acceptance of their current predicament.

Practicing mindfulness can help reduce the harmful repercussions of stress, like panic and anxiety. Realize that stress is a state of being, an emotion — it isn’t a situation itself. When someone is mindful, they don’t experience stress because they experience a situation, not the harmful emotional side effect that comes with it.

Thus, mindfulness is growing in popularity as a way to increase productivity. When we are mindful of our surroundings, our emotional state and what we must do, we are much more likely to seize the day and get things done with no negativity involved.

Keetria is an entrepreneur, wellness advocate, and brand strategy coach for creatives & entrepreneurs with 16 years of public relations expertise working with some of the world’s leading brands, startups, media personalities, and entertainers. If you would like to work together, don’t hesitate to reach out!

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