Masawa Minute 26
How to cope with plans falling apart? | Some thoughts on impact | + More!
This is the Masawa Minute — mental wellness, social impact, and impact investing snippets on what we’re pondering + where you can get active.
Welcome to the last newsletter of 2020. What a year it has been! We are thrilled and honored to have had the opportunity to share our journey with you — thank you for being a part of it. We wish you an incredible year — one that’s kind to your mental health and full of exciting opportunities. Cheers!
Watch
A couple of weeks ago, Joshua spoke on JumpScale’s panel on founder wellbeing. In case you missed that, don’t worry — there’s a recording you can watch to catch up!
Joshua appeared on the panel alongside Bedriye Hülya (The Wellbeing Project), Karla Garcia Teruel (Growth Empowered), and Daniel Roth (JumpScale). They spoke about the importance of investors paying attention to the wellbeing and resilience of entrepreneurs, how to approach the challenge of boosting founder wellbeing, and more. It’s certainly a treat!
What we’re reading…
⭐️ You don’t have to be grateful for everything
We’ve all heard the benefits of practicing gratitude. Mindfulness. Connection. Positivity. However, there’s still a lot of space for things to go wrong. It’s easy to get into the rationalization process of “I shouldn’t feel bad over this, at least I have x, y, and z. Someone else has it worse.” This thought process can be problematic, as it leads us to compare ourselves to others to an extent where we decide we’re not worthy of any improvements in our lives as we still have it relatively well.
Gratitude shouldn’t mean invalidating your experience. That prevents you from processing what’s going in in your life and acknowledging your feelings. It makes you dismiss your pain in favor of someone else’s, and that doesn’t help anyone.
Instead, if you want to practice gratitude, make it authentic. Don’t lie to yourself and pretend to be grateful when you’re not. Practice validation along with it — it doesn’t have to be a choice between the two. Your experience can exist simultaneously with others experiencing worse situations. That doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful. In the new year, choose to practice gratitude and mindfulness in a way that works for you.
Why I Quit My Gratitude Practice to Improve My Mental Health
🌪 How to cope when all your plans are failing (again)?
While the hopes of seeing the end of the pandemic are looming on the horizon, there’s still a long way to go. It’s not going to be easy, especially for those of us who need planning and certainty in our lives to feel secure. So how do we deal with the ground beneath our feet continually shifting?
One way to do it is to overcome the mental barriers. We should tell ourselves that it’s okay to deviate from a plan and go about our day differently than we’re used to. A helpful thing might be focusing on the future and distancing yourself from the distressing here-and-now. That’s also useful for embracing the ability to adapt instead of clinging to the comfort of the plans that were made.
Reframing the situation is another useful tool. While it can be really hard in the moment, we should try viewing those situations as an opportunity to learn and mature. We could turn this hardship into a setting for personal development — that way, it can become a catalyst for transformational change. There’s a lot to be learned from 2020, but one of the important lessons is that our strength doesn’t come from having our lives perfectly planned out. It comes from making one decision at a time.
How to Cope When Everything Keeps Changing
🌊 Thinking about our impact
Masawa’s Impact Partner Lilian Lehmann has taken a look at how we think about impact, both internally and externally. One cannot be achieved without the other — to create a large-scale societal change and positively affect millions of lives, it’s essential that the people who are making that change happen take care of their wellbeing first.
2020 has been a year that has proven this to be true more than ever — all the experiences and challenges thrown at us made us aware of the fragility of our wellbeing and slapped us awake to the need to take care of ourselves, each other and the world we share. A lot needs to happen until the world becomes better and the future seems less gloomy, but we can only overcome this challenge once we take care of our own health.
That’s why we choose to emphasize and enhance both internal impact through taking care of our investees’ organizational health and external impact of increased global mental wellbeing. If you’d like to get more insight into this, read the full article on our website!
🌬 Stressed and overwhelmed? Just breathe.
If all the tasks and obligations coming with an end of a year have left you feeling stressed, science has a solution for you — just breathe. While it sounds like rather simplistic advice, there has been lots and lots of research about the benefits of breathing exercises (the kind of breathing that’s done intentionally and mindfully). Why does that work so well?
When we’re under stress or experiencing strong emotions, logic won’t go a long way in helping us regain control as in such a state, the part of our brain responsible for rational thinking is impaired. Breathing techniques can help recover at least some control over the mind. That happens because different breathing patterns are associated with different emotions — so changing the rhythm of breathing, or, more specifically, lengthening the exhales, can signal relaxation and help us calm down.
Mindful breathing techniques are a very convenient tool to have in many different situations. It’s worth considering doing similar exercises daily for the longer-term benefits, but if you don’t feel ready for that right now, start with this. You’ll feel a change in no time.
Research: Why Breathing Is So Effective at Reducing Stress
⛅️ Some words on resilience
A perfect way to end the last newsletter of 2020 is to end it with an article about resilience — and here it is.
Adverse situations are looming around every corner and they are usually accompanied by a whole bouquet of negative emotions. So what should we do when faced with these inevitable hardships?
The answer could be resilience — but what exactly does it mean? It can appear simple to define, but upon a closer look, we realize that so much fits into this term. Yet, understanding resilience is critical. Only then do we learn that no solution can make us become resilient overnight. Each of us is coping differently, recovering at different speeds, and that’s okay. We can only become more resilient if we focus on it and put in consistent work, but even when we’re improving, it’s okay to admit that we’re hurt or lost or not bouncing back as quickly as we’d like to.
Please take a closer look at the article as it lays out beautifully what a definition of resilience entails. And let’s have one of the takeaways for this year be that coping and recovering differently is nothing to be ashamed of.
✨ Masawa Thoughts
2020 is almost over!!! It’s been a rough year.
We at Masawa are incredibly grateful for you (and that you open our emails so that our stats are good) and your commitment, in some form, to increasing mental wellness for all. We hope you take the opportunity to rest fully in the next two weeks and recharge for 2021 ’cause we all need full batteries to tackle the challenges in the new year!
💭 In Closing
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Give someone a big [virtual] hug today + take care of each other! 🤗😘
Gabija works as a Marketing & Communications Coordinator at Masawa. She lets her vision of a more just, sustainable, equitable world guide Masawa’s story and inform the work towards transforming global mental wellness to make it accessible and accepted.
