Micro-Practices

We participate in mindfulness exercises to build our brain’s capacity to take charge of our consciousness. Practice empowers us to:

Face what is happening inside and around us
Shape our spontaneous actions and reactions
Awaken, realize and nourish our well-being goals

Like exercising a muscle, mindful daily activities allow us to shape the neural networks that we want to encourage in our brain. This frees us from acting solely on our brain’s unconsciously-acquired autopilot that may or may not serve us in the present moment.

Action promotes learning and the engaged repetition of that action upgrades the status of learning to “deeply embedded” in our brain’s circuitry. All is takes to promote mindfulness awareness and decision-making is a little practice… practice that begins and ends with “the right fit” for us. In a nutshell, this means that if we’re not used to a “focused attention” practice that is 10 minutes long, we start with fewer minutes (See “Start Slow and Go Slower”).

The following Daily Practices are empirically-validated ways to create a mindful brain that are more spontaneous and than the formal Daily Discipline exercises. The Micro-Practices occur when we take what my friend and mindful CEO, Dave Wine, calls “a pregnant pause.” We call the time it takes to complete these exercises “micro-moments” because they fit into our day with relatively little effort.