Lately I’ve been feeling blah. Life is meh. Translation: I’m settling for mediocre.

How many of us are guilty of setting life to autopilot? 

Recognize Your Current State

I know I’m of defaulting to running on autopilot. So when I came across a book by Chris Barez-Brown called Wake Up! A Handbook to LIving in the Here and Now, I grabbed it. This might also help explain why I enjoy listening to Evanescence’s Wake Me Up Inside.

Be Proactive

If I hadn’t come across the book at the library, I wouldn’t be here writing now. While that was reactive on my part, at least I recognized that my subconscious was in control and decided to do something about it. When you’re on autopilot, you just go with the flow. You’ll do whatever takes the least amount of effort thinking-wise, and doing nothing sounds wonderful — NOT. Or if you do decide to do nothing, at least be intentional about it like for avoiding burnout, etc.

Take a Deep Breath

When we’re stressed or alarmed, we start taking shallow breaths. That is, we’re breathing with one-third of our lungs, and that’s not optimal. Instead, we should look to do what babies do, breathe so that our bellies rise and fall. It’ll leave us having more engery and feeling less stressed.

Why is this important? Well, change is difficult. While facing a difficult task whose parameters have yet to be defined, we need to step back and relax in order to think clearly about how we’re going to tackle it.

I’ll write more about what I’ve leraned in subsequent posts — how about Bookish Wednesdays?

Our purpose is hidden in our joy, our inspiration, our excitement. As we act on what shows up in our life our purpose shows up.
— James King