With mindfulness being one of the cornerstones of the way I try to live, I sometimes think about how mindfulness practices can help us in software development. One mindfulness practice is "letting go".

What can we let go of as software developers? In essence: Our expectations. The more you have a set expectation of how something ought to be, the less open you are for discovering that it is not the way you envisioned.

Expectations can create a kind of narrow-mindedness: If you don't live up to the expectation, you fail. Be that your own or others expectations. But the thing is: You don't control whether you live up to expectations. All you can control is giving it your best shot - everything else is up to other people. And you don't fully control the result of your efforts either - factors outside your control can interfere even if the effort on your part is flawless.

If you are able to let go of expectations, something wonderful happens: All the useless mental chatter largely goes away. You know, all the unhelpful thoughts of "I hope we don't screw this up" or "oh god, what if we screw this up?". All the thoughts that aren't part of the effort of solving the problem. These thoughts have their roots, among other things, in expectations.

If we can let go of expectations, then we are free to simply do things, and focus all our attention on doing those things to the best of our ability. Doing this, we might still fall short. But by operating this way we still give ourselves the best chance to succeed that we can.

Letting go is something we can consciously practice by engaging in mindfulness practices, like slow, deep, conscious breathing or something like mindfulness meditation. In those practices, we practice being fully present with only one thing. If we are fully present with one thing, there is no room for expectations, or freaking out, or whatever else. It is an ideal that can hardly ever be fully realized. Fully being with just one thing is difficult.

But when we manage it, even if it is not a perfect focus, we implicitly practice letting go. Because to be fully present, we must naturally let go of any distractions. That means we can increase our ability to let go simply by practicing being more present with things. And that almost inevitably makes us better at the things we do.

Ending on a personal note, after 5 years of mindfulness meditation letting go has become something I can consciously engage in. It has gone from something implicit I practiced by meditating to a skill I can consciously use. How this is done is hard, if not impossible to describe. The best explanation to me is the following: Think about what it would feel like to be able to let go the same way you do when you go to sleep, but instead of right before sleep you do it while being wide awake and highly focused.

If you go on the journey to make mindfulness practices part of your life, you can, over time, learn this skill too. And I can only speak from my experience: There is hardly anything that has enriched my life, both working and personal life, more than being able to engage in letting go.