5 Ways to Live In the Present Moment, More Often

When we talk about living in the present moment, unlocking your potential, or even achieving happiness—the bad news is that there are no hacks, tricks, or shortcuts.

The good news is that if you put in the work, you can create what most people are striving for in life: meaning and purpose, deep connection to others, freedom of time and money, more energy, performing toward the upper limits of your potential, and fulfillment.

At Finding Mastery , our mission is simple: to increase the ability for people to live in the present moment, more often. Our approach is designed to demystify how to train the necessary mindset skills to live in the present moment, to deepen relationships, and to perform toward the upper limits of our collective potential.

There are many ways to live in the present moment, but here are five practices that you can implement into your daily life, starting today.

1.? Reprogram Your Brain and Thought Process

We have the ability to control our thoughts, which is a lynchpin for consistent high performance and growth.

Default State: The natural state of our minds is like a drunk monkey—with tens of thousands of thoughts running through our heads each day. In these modern times, our ancient brains are trying to figure out survival, which involves a healthy amount of scanning the world to find real (or perceived) threats. Without conditioning our mind, it’s easy for the fear-and-survival based brain to overwhelm the quality of our thinking patterns: leading to excessive worry, frustration, distraction, and negativity. These patterns of thought radically drain our emotional and physical resources.?

Level Up: The cool thing is that we can control our thoughts. By building awareness of the type of thoughts we’re having, we can guide them to be more productive, bringing us closer to our potential, as well as increasing energy and joy.?

Get Started: Set a timer and spend five minutes today indexing your thoughts as you have them. Just watch your thoughts. Then, categorize them as positive and productive or negative and unwelcomed. When the negative or unwelcome thoughts creep in, say hello and goodbye to them, and/or redirect them with a more positive and productive thought. Eventually, you will create a habit of having more naturally occurring productive and energy-generating thoughts. Don’t stress or judge yourself during this process. The key is the practice and the process of observance.

2. Prioritize Recovery

When you change your thoughts, your behaviors can change and you can live in the present moment more often.?

Default State: It’s part of the modern-day workforce to prioritize work results over our mental and physical health. But, as we all know, there’s a cost. By cutting down on sleep and neglecting hydration and proper nutrition, we are taking a short-term approach to a long-term proposition (human potential, let alone sustained high performance). The short and long-term outcomes are better when we place more emphasis on a durable and flexible mental state. Optimized recovery is part of that process. ?

When we are sleep deprived, we are actually functioning at a lower level, unbeknownst to our conscious awareness. We might think we’re doing A+ work, when really our brain is conserving its output by working at a substandard level.?

Level Up: There are many pillars to recovery - from sleep to diet to rest to hydration. Trying to change all at once can be overwhelming. Instead, focus on ONE small thing from one pillar to change today. Investing in changing one habit can often lead to positive effects in other choices we make. Incorporating recovery into our daily routine takes only a split second to decide. We dive into our pillars more and how to work with them in our Finding Your Best course.??

Get Started: Begin by tracking one of the recovery pillars. It could be how much water you drink each day for a week, how many hours of sleep you had the night before, or minutes of meditation you practiced. To get a new habit to stick, you first have to really want it.?

Be honest. Do you really want it? If so, here’s one way to increase the chances of making it stick: tie your habit to one you already have. For instance, if the pillar you want to train is drinking more water, tie it to a morning routine like brushing your teeth. Your trigger for drinking extra water will then be “Every time I brush my teeth, right after I will drink two glasses of water.”?

3. Give up Balance and Perfection

Working hard is no longer the differentiator for success (it is a requirement, though).

Default State: In today’s digital world, many of us are working long hours and the bar for success is ever-rising. Trying to be the top earner, best parent, perfect spouse, etc. is a potential recipe for burnout. By trying to be everything to everyone, we lose touch with who we are and instead mold to other peoples’ opinions of what we should be.?

Level Up: Rather than trying to do more, focus on being more. This can sound strange or abstract but understanding who we are and what we stand for helps guide our thoughts, feelings and actions. One of the best ways to do this is by training awareness, to be in the present moment more often. Mindfulness training is a powerful way to do this. Mindfulness is a skill that can become a state of mind and eventually a trait of being.?

Get Started: There are hundreds of different mindfulness and breathing protocols that people have studied. Let’s keep it simple. Set a timer on your phone for one minute. Close your eyes and follow your breath for one minute (each breath can take about twelve seconds: six seconds in, six seconds out). Try it once a day for a week. This simple breath helps with focus and presence. Taking you into the mode of being versus doing.?

4. Enhance Your Culture

Whether we realize it or not, we’re part of many cultures in our everyday lives.?

Default State: Our workplaces, families, hobbies/sports teams, and friend groups all have a set of rules and expectations they operate by. The most durable cultures are ones that are relationship-based: people within the group truly care for one another and collectively work toward a shared mission from that perspective. Inconsistently performing cultures act out of fear of making mistakes, intolerance, or upsetting others.?

Level up: Our actions greatly determine the tone and feeling of our cultures. Learn how your culture operates and how you can positively create more impact. Here are some actionable tips:?

Get Started:?

1. Write down all the cultures you’re a part of. Again, this can be family, hobbies/sports, groups, work, etc?
2. For each culture, write down one or two positive actions that frequently occur. ?
3. List the emotion this action elicits. ?
4. Once you’ve identified the action and the positive emotion, make an intention to do that action more often. Be about it.

5. Practice Gratitude

By seeking the good in things instead of the bad, we change our mindsets from being critical to optimistic.?

Default State: People who consciously point out the good things have more naturally-occurring positive thoughts and fewer negative ones. By practicing optimism and gratitude, we can make ‘looking for the good’ part of our DNA. Gratitude aids in a perspective shift in our lives. And we see both gratitude and optimism practices across the board for high performers.??

Level Up: Start off by getting a fresh journal and name it your “Gratitude Journal.” By creating a daily gratitude journal, we fire up our gratitude circuitry - this practice is an antidote to anxiety and foundational to joy, happiness, kindness and peace.?

Get Started: We recommend writing in your gratitude journal twice a day—once in the morning and once at night. In the AM, think of a few things that you’re grateful for. You don’t need to make a huge checklist. Just one or a few. And make sure to really feel into these things. This helps you start off the day with the right mentality. And towards the end of the day, write down 3 good things that you experienced throughout the day. This could be anything from someone smiling at you at the checkout line to you cooking dinner for a friend.

These practices will help you look for what’s good in the world and train you to be more optimistic.??

Living In The Present Moment?

Start small with these five habits. Consistency and practice with intention is more important than checking off the boxes. If you begin to layer these practices in your life, you’ll see the results start to blossom.

If you haven’t yet, grab our free Morning Mindset Routine audio guide which can help support a daily practice to begin each day with more presence and purpose.

And if you want to go deeper —?check out our Finding Your Best course — a step-by-step, deep-dive 7-module program that is specifically designed to give you everything you need to adopt a high-performance mindset, achieve to the highest level of your capabilities, and live with more presence.

Be here now.

With Fire,

MG