By Leo Babauta The holidays can be stressful, with shopping, travel, family gatherings, extra busyness, winter storms, and more. The chaos of our lives plays out in sometimes heightened form over the season. In this post, I’m going to share the practice I’ve been using to deal with whatever stress has been arising in my life. I call it Tightening and Softening. This practice of Tightening and Softening is about letting in more and more of life, just as it is. It’s about relaxing with the flow of life, so we can expand our capacity to be with ev...

By Leo Babauta I’ve noticed that so many people are feeling overwhelmed, scattered, and stressed – so much so that focus and effective work become incredibly difficult. So what can we do to be more effective in the midst of this scattered, overwhelmed state? Today I’m going to share the top three things I do to help myself find focus and effectiveness even when I’m at my most scattered. The Interstitial Pause The first thing I recommend is a pause between anything you do — I call it the Interstitial Pause. Basically, instead of switching from o...

By Leo Babauta Something I’ve noticed that derails a lot of people’s goals or attempts to form habits is the feeling that it’s pointless to even try. If it feels like it won’t matter if you do anything … why would you try? And so when people feel this, they will usually give up, understandably. But if we want to break through this barrier, then the opportunity is to learn how to work with this feeling of pointlessness. If we can find a way to feel empowered when things feel pointless, a whole new range of possibilities opens up for us — includi...

By Leo Babauta I’ve been diving deep into working with full commitment lately, in my personal transformative work and working with my clients. It’s fascinating work. The biggest stumbling point for people is the dichotomy between: Being detached from the goal, which can ironically make it more likely to achieve the goal. For many people though, this detachment can often mean you aren’t moving as strongly towards the goal, because you don’t care as much. It often shows up like getting up in the morning and putting the goal aside.Being fully comm...

By Leo Babauta At the start of the pandemic, in the midst of chaos and uncertainty, I launched Fearless Mastery, my small group coaching and mastermind program. It was actually perfect timing: my intention was to help people train to be open in the middle of uncertainty, so that they could do their purpose work with joy. Over the last 2.5 years, it’s grown into exactly that, and something much more. I’d love to tell you a little about what I’ve been learning, because it’s such a big part of my mission to help people train in uncertainty. In thi...

By Leo Babauta The feeling of being overwhelmed is extremely common in the people I talk to, and it’s becoming more and more clear to me that this is the default state for most of us. We’re overwhelmed by it all: all the things we have on our plates, all the interruptions and messages and emails, all the things online and on social media, all the news and chaos of the world, all the things going on in our relationships. It’s a lot! We can celebrate the abundance of our lives, but often we bemoan it. The problem isn’t the abundance, but our fear...

By Leo Babauta Our focus during the day is almost always muddled. We switch between everything, and at any given 5-minute period, most of us would often be hard-pressed to say what we’re focusing on. That’s not how our minds work most of the time. It’s no wonder we struggle to face things that are scary, uncertain, difficult and meaningful. If you want to write a book, for example, how would you face that if you’re constantly muddling your focus? Our focus is precious and sacred. And yet we often use it as if it were worthless. How would you us...

By Leo Babauta A lot of us want to make changes in our lives — whether it’s changing a bad habit like smoking or overeating, creating a new habit like meditation, or simply being less distracted or reactive during the day. Whatever the change, you’re likely to face internal resistance. There is a part of you that doesn’t want to change. If you want to change your eating habits, there’s a part of you who just wants to eat the donuts. If you want to exercise more, there’s a part of you who just wants to be lazy and relax. If you want to have less...

By Leo Babauta I’ve been noticing lately how much of our lives is spent wanting to do something, wishing we could do something … but struggling to move into action. What’s the struggle to make this transition all about? And how can we more consciously make the transition into action? Let’s look at a couple of typical examples so we can see what we’re dealing with. There’s a task I know I want to do (or maybe I feel I should do), but I keep putting it off. Something about it brings me uncertainty, and that makes it uncomfortable, so I put it off...

By Leo Babauta People I’ve been coaching lately have been stuck in indecision about what purpose they should pursue. At this kind of crossroads, we can become plagued by doubt. And that makes sense: if you’re not sure what your purpose is, then going after a single choice can feel really uncertain. How do I know if this is the thing? What if I suck at it, if I fail, if I make the wrong choice? But getting stuck in this kind of doubt and indecision is often much worse than making a single choice and failing at it. If you fail at something, at le...

By Leo Babauta I’ve worked with a number of people who want more spaciousness in their lives — more time for rest, play, reading, reflecting, self-care, hanging with friends and other loved ones. The challenge isn’t that it’s hard to create more time (for some people, it is actually very hard) … the challenge is that no matter how much time we have, we are not likely to experience it as spacious, restful, joyful, playful. We can create all the time in the world … but the truth is that we’ll probably have a very similar experience in that spacio...

By Leo Babauta Someone I know shared that they came back from a meditation retreat excited about the meaningful possibilities they’d envisioned on the retreat — new projects, opportunities, important stuff they wanted to create. So incredible to be excited about meaningful possibilities! And then they got home, and there were piles of tasks, emails and messages waiting for them. The urgency of those piles threw them off their best intentions. The urgency of piles throws off all of our best laid plans. We have to deal with piles all the time: Ta...

By Leo Babauta You might know that I’m a fan of simplicity and minimalism — but for me, it’s not just about having less stuff or even doing less. For me, it’s a way of moving through the world with lightness. Not lightly tiptoeing around trying not to make an impact, but with lightness in my heart. Moving lightly through life is like hiking up a mountain not weighed down by burden, but with a spring in your step. It’s the feeling of joy of facing a brand new day, instead of the heaviness we might feel if we’re dreading things. Moving lightly is...

By Leo Babauta Lately I’ve noticed a lot of people are feeling drained by life — the challenges they’re facing, their workloads, the anxiety of the world around them, and more. Someday soon I’ll write a longer guide to how to get yourself to a place of renewed resilience … but for today, I’d like to share how I practice when I just don’t feel much of a capacity to do anything. 1. First, I notice that I just don’t have it today. I’d like to crush life and get a ton of crap done, but today isn’t the day. I’m drained, depleted. 2. Then I ask: “Wha...

“You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last.” ~Seneca By Leo Babauta We could use a daily contemplation on how limited our time is in this life. Most of us avoid thinking about it, or get worked up or sad when we think about it. But it’s a powerful contemplation. Today I’d like t...

By Leo Babauta At the core of a lot of our difficulties is a lack of trust — especially trust in ourselves. Think about these common difficulties that most of us face: What to focus on: We don’t trust our hearts to choose what we’d like to work on right now.Indecision: We get stuck on indecision because we don’t trust ourselves to choose what we really want, and we don’t trust ourselves to land on our feet if things turn out differently than we’d hoped.Procrastination / resistance: We feel resistance to a difficult (scary) task and then avoid i...

By Leo Babauta It’s a simple fact: the pandemic has increased the amount of impulse shopping most people have been doing. There are lots of stats proving it, but you can simply take a look at your own life and the lives of people you know to see that it’s true for you. Why have we been more compelled to shop for clothes, gadgets, workout equipment, hobby toys and more? At the heart of it is uncertainty. We’re feeling so much more uncertainty these days, and we don’t know how to handle it. The higher the uncertainty we’re feeling about ourselves...