Background

Mindfulness is the art of being conscious and in tune to everything happening around you. By failing to be mindful, our minds can wander through many different thought processes, which can ultimately lead to mental health problems such as depression. These thought processes are busy focusing on things that happened to us in the past, and things that may happen in the future, when really we should be concentrating on the present as it’s all we are truly in control of.

The act of being mindful is thought to be beneficial to people for a number of reasons, the most obvious being the bettering of mental health issues such as anxiety or obsessive compulsive disorder. It is also thought to improve physical health such as chronic pain, as well as a person’s general well-being.

I chose to develop a mobile application around mindfulness with a degree of life coaching interpreted also. By developing this application, I hope to guide users, as well as educate them, to some basic concepts of both mindfulness and life coaching by first determining what is important to the user in their day to day living.

When setting up a company, one of the primary requirements for success is identifying the core values of the business. Similarly on a personal level, in order to be the best person you can be, a person must identify their core values to help guide their behavior and choices. By identifying the right core values for you, a person is better equipped to deal with decision making as they will be more focused and driven to what’s important to them. Some examples of personal core values would be; honesty, creativity, loyalty etc. The “All About Mindfulness” mobile application will firstly determine a user’s core values in life by completing a short questionnaire / profile form. From this, individual programs can be developed for each user with motivational affirmations and helpful mindful tips that are in line with their core values.

A major part of life coaching and mindfulness is to enable people with the ability to identify the positives in their lives and focus on them as opposed to the negatives / problems. There will be a function in the application where the user can complete a “Thankful Diary” at the end of each day by identifying 3 main things arising from that day which they are thankful for. Using this diary, there will also be a function within the application which will compile everything a user has been thankful for over a certain time period and forward this information in an email to the user. The main aim behind this function is to enable our user to look back at all the positives if they find themselves looking back at any negatives.