Big Changes Start With the Right Mindset
“The mind has a powerful way of attracting things that are in harmony with it, good and bad.”
If you go to the dictionary, you will find a long list of definitions for mindset, mind, and set. Interestingly they all come before success! Mind-set (noun) beliefs that affect somebody’s attitude – a set of beliefs or a way of thinking that determine somebody’s behavior and outlook.
Is your mind set?
Mind (noun) seat of thought and memory – the center of consciousness that generates thoughts, feelings, ideas, and perceptions and stores knowledge and memories
Set (verb) focus on something – transitive verb to focus on a goal or task – had set his mind on it.
This is not a grammar lesson, and maybe it doesn’t matter how you spell your mindset. What does matter is you need to better understand what it is if you wish to be successful. There I spelled it with one word. I’ll continue to spell it with one word; you can use two if you wish. The spelling is less important than the understanding of just how critical your mindset is to you, especially if you are in a highly competitive environment like sales, sports or business.
Go back and read the denition of mindset again. “A way of thinking that determines somebody’s behavior and outlook.” Every day we have choices to make. Life is all about choices. We choose between right and wrong, good and evil. Being positive or negative.
The Impact of Mindset
Think about the impact of mindset. Say you awake and tell yourself, “Am I ever tired this morning, this is going to be one very long day.” Where do you think your energy level is going to be? Let’s wake up and say to yourself, “This is going to be a great day. I can’t wait to get to it.” How many dragons do you think you could slay? How we think subconsciously impacts our conscious behaviors. Psychologists call the study of this phenomenon, cognitive behavioral science. It truly is fascinating. It has been proven repeatedly that our internal self-talk determines our attitude, disposition and actions. Think about the person who has said for years, “I’m great with faces but terrible with names.” Repeating this over and over do you wonder if the mind has taken it as fact and only concentrated on facial recognition, totally ignoring the name, as you have convinced the mind the name isn’t important.
The good news is we can change how we think. We can retrain the mind. Like so much in life, it won’t happen overnight; however, it is much easier than you might think. The key is to consciously catch your negative thoughts. In our example with names, if the person caught himself or herself saying they were not good with names and began having their inner voice say, “I’m getting better at remembering names, I just have to concentrate.” Then use whatever trick works for you, name association, using the person’s name in conversation right away to focus on it, whatever.
How often have you heard world-class athletes comment how they visualize winning their race or event? Their “mental coach” has become as important as their “performance coach” in their training and conditioning.
If you work in the sales arena, you probably know some top sales professionals who appear to always be “up”. They are optimistic, have an organized mind and success just seems to come to them. They have learned, usually from experience, or a mentor, that a person who is an effective thinker is more successful. By effective thinker, I mean someone who controls and leverages his or her inner voice. This person understands the power of visualizing success, of believing in themselves, and believing in their clients. Their positive self-talk enables them, it doesn’t distract them. This encourages them to take action, thinking about it alone does not bring results. They are in a “do-mode” “pivot-mode” and more times than not they’ve thought about this specific situation as a possible outcome so they are also prepared for it and able to engage.
How Can We Improve Mindset?
Define your own success-
Catch yourself when the comparison begins and remember what you defined success for you as. This will keep you focused and on track to take actions towards your definition of success.
Practice positive self talk-
I’m sure that like the rest of the world you make some mistakes BUT you also do things right and you take them for granted. Try to focus on the things you do right and acknowledge yourself for doing so. Reflect on what you failed and learn from it so you can improve on it, your challenges are your opportunities to grow. This will also help you reduce the negative self-talk.
Focus on growth-
Read or audiobooks to grow your skillset, improve your communication, this will not only improve your mindset but will also give you skills for growth and increase your self esteem.
There are so many other things you can do but I truly believe these are essential and super practical. Remember that once your mindset changes, everything on the outside will change as well.
For similar posts read Authenticity & Alignment
