Framing Your Mind: Live, Love, and Matter

As a clinician, if you’re a practitioner, you know what it’s like to have one of those chaotic days. You’ve got patients with all sorts of conditions and you’ve got those emotional ups and downs as you go on as health care practitioners. I’m aware that a lot of us struggle with how to reconcile that internally.

I think, as clinicians and anyone in health industry, there’s such emotional labor that goes with that. And we can’t help but be sometimes reactive, and I can certainly attest to that.

I learned a really good strategy which I’ve started in committing:

Framing Your Mind

The first one is having these mental triggers to preframe our brain to think positively and to really think about, bring a bit of consciousness to the lens of how I want to see the world.

Brendon Burchard talked in his book,  The Charge: Activating  the 10 Human Drives That Make You Feel Alive, three questions that sets the direction of one’s life:

Did I live? Love? Matter?

Every morning, he asks these question and anchor it to something that he already does. For him, it’s the morning shower, for me, I set my alarm clock with those reminder. So, I straight away as soon as the alarm clock goes off, I lay there for a moment and think of the words “live, “love”, and “matter.”

Live

So, how do I live my best life today? How will I be an example of living today? And that can be interpreted in many different ways. But for me, that is something exciting, something new, and something different perhaps. Saying yes to something.

Love

As humans, we are very connected people. How will I show love in some way, show compassion or empathy?

I often think about, with work and being in the clinic, the point, the second one, how do I love, and I often apply that—I fed it to patients. So, how will I show this one, really step above, where I mean to do that every time. But I’m going ‘this is my extra one percent that I’m giving to this’, and it could be in a form of notes, looking up a certain thing for you, or make this other different recommendation, or I’ll just go really above and beyond like, “Ah, I’m really showing extra love to this person.”

Matter

And the third one, “​matter​.” We have all these goals and they’re very personal goals. Sometimes they’re very audacious goals. So, am I moving the needle towards that? Am I doing something that matters, something that I think matters?

So asking those three simple questions, first thing, is just priming my brain to see that throughout the day. Framing your mind would make you recognize the opportunities to live, love, and matter and be proactive.

And then, in the evening, you can do the same but reflectively.

Highlighting the Positivity

I look throughout my day diary that I’ve done throughout the week, then I will sort of pick apart what are the things that lived, loved, and mattered. In doing so, I’m creating my own highlight for those simple things.

But that’s not the end game. Learn to love changing things up, progressing and improving. It’s just the day to day little checkings that will assure you that you’re on top of that—being more proactive rather than reactive.

You’ll just see it in as the forefront of your mind. You bring it to your consciousness.  It’s just brought a bit of joy and excitement to very simple things that can make a difference.

The world is a beautiful or a chaotic place, whichever way we choose to look at it. It ties in nicely to framing that positivity, and making those the highlight things and choosing to say it as the altruistic, nice world in which it is. - Justin Smith