A Mindful Perspective
Welcome to my podcast! I'm Nick Levesque, and I'm on a mission to help you navigate life's challenges with a mindful perspective. Join me every week as I dive deep into the realms of mindset, spirituality, and personal growth. Drawing from my own experiences, I want to provide you with tools, strategies, insights, and inspiring stories that will help you go from where you are now, to where you want to be.
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A Mindful Perspective
3 Habits That Changed My Life (Not What You Think)
We all know the classic habits that improve our lives—exercise, eating healthy, and reading—but today, I want to share three powerful habits that transformed my relationship with myself. These are the small, everyday shifts that made the a significant difference.
🚀 Here’s what we’ll cover:
✅ Habit 1: The power of daily check-ins with yourself
✅ Habit 2: Why doing nothing on purpose is not a waste of time
✅ Habit 3: The underrated habit of keeping the promises you make to yourself
These small shifts have had a massive impact on my life, and I hope they do the same for you!
📌 Timestamps:
0:26 - Habit 1: Check-in with yourself
4:27 - Habit 2: Doing nothing on purpose
6:55 - Habit 3: Keeping promises to yourself
Let me know in the comments—which habit are you going to try first?
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📲 Instagram: @nicklevesque_
🎙 Podcast: A Mindful Perspective (Spotify & Apple Podcasts)
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Hello everyone and welcome to A Mindful Perspective. I'm your host, nick Levesque, certified Spiritual Life Coach, and I'm here to share insights into my journey of mindfulness and self-discovery. Each week, we'll explore mindset, spirituality and personal growth to help you navigate life's challenges, with practical strategies and inspiring stories. Let's dive in. Today, I wanted to share a few habits that have really helped me significantly in my own life, and they're not the typical habits that we, you know, often hear about, such as going to the gym, reading all these different things. Okay, these are all very beneficial, of course, but the ones I want to share today are just personal ones that I've implemented over the years that have really helped me develop a better relationship with myself and better connection with myself, and I hope that by sharing these with you today, it can help you as well. The first thing that I want to share is to make sure that you're regularly checking in with yourself, okay, and what I like to call daily check-ins, and this is so important because oftentimes, we check in with everyone else, right, we check in with our friends, we check in with our family, we check in with our co-workers, but when was the last time you truly took a few moments out of your day to check in with yourself, okay, and really put your own needs first and prioritize yourself. And I think this is so, so, so important, right? And for me personally, what that looks like in practice, in order to kind of turn that into a habit, initially, when I started doing this, I would set an alarm in my day and I would actually set two alarms in my day, one in the later morning and one in the early evening and when that alarm rang I would pause everything that I was doing and for those few moments I would just check in with myself, okay. And the simple questions that I would ask is number one is how am I feeling right now? And secondly, what do I need right now? Right, really making sure that I am prioritizing myself. So, as an example for me kind of what that looked like is, let's say, you know, I would check in with myself, right, the alarm would ring, I would check in with myself.
Speaker 1:Maybe I was very stressed, maybe I was very anxious, maybe something happened throughout that day and I was just really tuning in with myself and I was very nervous. So, first and foremost, I would ask okay, how am I feeling? Okay, well, part of me is feeling stressed right now, part of me is feeling very anxious right now, and I would try to take that a little deeper and really tune into my body and develop that connection with my body as well. Okay, making sure I understand how my body is receiving the stress. So for me, for example, when I'm you know, when part of me is very anxious or very stressed, typically I will feel that in my gut. Okay, like in my gut, I can feel that anxiety coming up and on. Even if we go a little deeper to that as well, I would also tune into the sensations, right. What does that feel like for me? Okay, so, my anxiety is located in my gut, but what does that feel like more specifically for me? A lot of the times, it's kind of like this jittery feeling or kind of this knot in your stomach, right and truly just tapping into that and developing that connection with your body, I think is so, so, so important, because our bodies are trying to talk to us on a daily basis, right, so it's so important to understand the cues and when it's trying to speak to you, and I think this is a really good way to tap into that and become aware of your sensations and get to know your body, okay.
Speaker 1:And the second question that I asked myself is what do I need right now? Okay. So, for example, if you've been stressed all day maybe you had a really stressed, stressful day at work, as an example, okay. And then all of a sudden you tune into yourself. You're really, really stressed out, okay. Well, what do you need right now? Maybe you've been so busy all day that you haven't even got up and drank water yet, okay. Maybe you've been so busy all day that you haven't even had a meal yet in your entire day, right. So no wonder you're feeling off and you're feeling stressed and all these different things. You haven't even taken care of yourself yet, okay. Or maybe, as an example, you're feeling very restless or anxious or maybe frustrated about something and you need to kind of release that energy. So maybe you need to go for a quick walk with your dog or you need to get up and shake, right. Kind of like a quick somatic release.
Speaker 1:But really getting in tune with what our bodies is trying to tell us is so, so, so important. And also the question what do I need right now? Make sure that we are putting ourselves first, make sure that we are tuning into what our needs are at that specific moment in time. And for me, what I noticed is doing that a few times a day, like eventually it became automatic and became a habit, but I found that it just helped me understand, build that relationship with myself, with my emotions, with my body, right, and make sure that I'm not abandoning myself and that I am showing up for myself. And it's helped me establish and build a certain level of self-trust, which I think is so, so, so important, right? And, as I say many times, in my personal opinion, the most important relationship you have in your life is the relationship that you have with yourself, right. That sets the foundation for every other relationship in your life, in my personal opinion. So it's so important to check in with yourself every day and make sure that you're nurturing that relationship, right? So, if I asked you that question today, have you checked in with yourself? Tune into that, right? And if you haven't, maybe take a moment, pause me if you want, and tune in with yourself.
Speaker 1:The second thing that I want to share that's really helped me in my life is literally taking time to do nothing on purpose, and I know that sounds very simplistic and even strange, right, it's like, why would you just take time to do nothing? But I think sometimes we're so busy doing that we forget to just be. Right, there's the doing mode and the being mode, but sometimes just being and allowing ourselves to be is, for me personally, it's it's kind of like a moment of rest and it's making sure that you're prioritizing yourself. Okay, and in practice, kind of what that looks like for me personally is like, let's say, I do this a lot, especially in summertime. I will literally go outside. I don't bring anything with me, there's no phone, there's no music, there's no books, there's no nothing.
Speaker 1:I sit in my chair and I'm just in tune with whatever's around me, right, I just kind of sit there and I'm just present with what is okay, I take a moment. It's almost like kind of like a mindfulness practice, if you will, but I'll kind of take this moment to just you know, okay, the sun's hitting on me, it's feeling very warm. I also take a moment to just kind of tune into my senses, right, what am I seeing? What am I hearing? The birds are chirping and just tuning into that moment and allowing myself to simply just be and simply relax, right, and I think it's so important, even if it's five to 10 minutes in your day or you're doing this, you know five to 10 minutes a few times a week.
Speaker 1:Just taking that small amount of time to prioritize yourself and to recharge and to unplug from everything, because we are so connected to devices nowadays for me personally has been a game changer, and I know, again, this sounds completely simplistic, but again it's about showing up for yourself, right, it's about showing up for yourself, prioritizing yourself and making sure that your needs are met, right. So, again, just scheduling time for yourself to do absolutely nothing, right? So for me personally, again, you could do and this is something you can do in many different ways, by the way right, maybe you want to go outside? You're just outside, like I do a lot. Maybe another thing that I do sometimes is I'll literally just sit down in the shower and just allow myself to just be there, right, and just be, just feel the warmth of the shower. If I'm hearing anything, some people will put candles as an example right, for the smell. There's so many different ways. Maybe you just lay in bed for five to 10 minutes and just close your eyes and you just allow yourself to just sit there and be or just eat. You can keep your eyes open if you want, right. The whole point of this is just to allow yourself to relax and to just settle in, right, and just to be with yourself for five to 10 minutes. So this doing nothing for me again has been a profound game changer in my life, and the more I did it, it actually became a habit and now I make sure that I prioritize that and prioritize myself. So tip number two is really doing nothing on purpose.
Speaker 1:The third thing I want to share is more like a philosophy, but I've been practicing this a lot, which has kind of turned into this habit, but it's to keep the promises that you make yourself. Okay, because when you follow through on the commitments that you make for yourself, you help yourself build that relationship with yourself. You help yourself build that relationship with yourself, you help yourself build confidence, you help yourself build that self-trust all components of nurturing yourself, which I think is so, so, so important, okay, and it doesn't matter how you show up. If you show up for yourself in the ways that matter right to you and whatever your experience is. I think that's so important for me personally. That's like many different things in my life. Okay, when I said at the beginning of this episode that I do daily check-ins with myself, I do daily check-ins with myself to make sure that I'm okay to tune in with how I'm feeling. That's a promise that I made to myself because I know how important that is Right.
Speaker 1:Another thing is for me personally, the gym is a big thing. Okay, so obviously I love gymming. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that I'm a gym guy. Okay, but part of that is having to wake up at 5am and, you know, go to the gym and all these different things. But that's a promise that I make to myself because I'm aware of the benefits that it has, right. So keeping that promise that I've made to myself has helped me build that self-trust and that self-confidence. Because I know one thing for sure If I can wake up at 5 am six days a week and go to the gym, I can do a lot of things in my life, right, and that's something that gives me a lot of power.
Speaker 1:Okay, and it doesn't matter in what ways you want to do that for yourself If you say, hey, I want to start journaling 20 minutes before bed every night, or hey, I want to start journaling first thing when I wake up, as an example, right, and you show up for yourself consistently. Just watch for yourself what happens, all right. Watch the results that are going to happen in your life, in your own subjective experience. I can promise you that you're going to benefit from that. Okay, and obviously I want to be very clear here. We all fall off track, myself included.
Speaker 1:Okay, yes, we keep the promises that we make to ourselves, but sometimes life happens okay. Sometimes maybe there's a day we're not feeling it at all. Maybe sometimes there's a day that you know we just didn't show up for ourselves and that's okay. That's completely okay. It happens right. Maybe you showed up for yourself in a different way, that way, and that is perfectly okay. This is not about being perfect. It's about the consistency. The thing is you get back on your high horse after you've fallen down, right?
Speaker 1:So for me personally, keeping the promises that I've made to myself in my life has really helped me build that confidence and that self-trust and that overall relationship with myself.
Speaker 1:So again, number three keep the promises that you make to yourself.
Speaker 1:So these are just a few of the habits that I want to share with you today, because these are habits that I've been practicing and implementing in my life for quite some time now and I've really seen benefits from these, right and again, it's not the common gym, it's not the common reading, all these different things those are all amazing, by the way, but these are just different things that I've developed in my own personal journey that have really helped me again connect with myself, trust myself and build that relationship with myself, right, and I hope that these habits can do the same for you. So, that being said, that's all I've got for you guys on today's episode. If you did like the episode, please feel free to leave a comment or review, share it. It really helps bring awareness to what I'm trying to do, which is really kind of you know, spread this podcast on a broader scale to really help people just navigate everyday life challenges. So, again, with that being said, I hope you have a good week and I will catch you guys next week. Thank you.
