Directedmindfulness

Last night I was building this website.

And honestly? I was frustrated.

Buttons weren’t doing what I expected. Pages were disappearing. The homepage kept showing the wrong version. I felt that tight, irritated energy building in my chest.

And then I did something simple.

I listened. Not to the instructions. Not to another tutorial. To my own thoughts.

And what I heard surprised me.

“This is too complicated.”

“You’re not going to get this published.”

“Why is this so hard for you?”

The words weren’t neutral. They were negative. Final. Defeated. And the interesting part? The website wasn’t the real problem. My internal narration was.

The moment I noticed the tone of my thoughts, everything shifted. Not instantly. Not magically. But enough.

Instead of pushing through angrily, I stepped away. For 30 minutes.

Jut enough space.

During that break, I reminded myself of something simple:

There is evidence that I figure things out before. I’ve navigated complicated systems previously. I’ve learned tools I didn’t understand at first. I’ve solved problems that felt overwhelming in the moment. The frustration wasn’t proof that I couldn’t do it.

It was just friction.

And friction is opportunity for growth.

When I came back after the break, nothing about WordPress had changed.

But I had.

The thoughts were quieter. The urgency was gone. I wasn’t trying to prove anything anymore. I was just continuing. And that’s what Directed Mindfulness looks like in real time:

Pause.

Notice.

Choose.

Pause, instead of reacting. Notice, the actual words running through your mind. Choose, a response that aligns with evidence, not emotion. And know, that your thoughts are not you.

Sometimes the most powerful shift isn’t solving the problem immediately.

It’s interrupting the story that says you can’t.

And last night, the website got built.

Not because I forced it.

But because I stopped fighting myself.