What is mindset?
This is Part 1 of my 4-Part posts about mindset.
We’ve all heard this before: “Change your mindset, Change Your Life!”
But what is mindset, anyway? We can get various answers to that question depending on who we ask.
Just for fun, I Googled “What is mindset” and I got about 68,400,000 results in 0.45 seconds! WOW!
Then I went further and searched for mindset at Amazon, and I got a list of 9,277 books about the subject. Clearly, mindset is in the minds of many people, pun intended.
In addition, authors, gurus, and bloggers also describe different types of mindsets: growth, fixed, training, trusting, and so forth. They’re all good and well. However, I like Merriam-Webster’s simple definition:
“a particular way of thinking: a person’s attitude or set of opinions about something.”
In other words, it is our belief system that can be flourished (growth), leave as is (fixed), become analytic or calculating (training), or remove self-doubt or criticism (trusting).
The important fact is we can change our mindset if we really wanted to.
Mindset dictates our behavior, the way we perceive things and how we react to them. We can let go of things that do not serve us like feeling inadequate or a failure and be freed to embrace beliefs and life choices that genuinely resonate with who we are and the life we want to live.
How do we change our mindset?
We begin with the end in sight, our ‘Intentions.’ These are the outcome we are striving for that will guide us on what aspects of our mindset we need to change. Shown below is the complete steps that we will go through.
I will briefly describe the steps today, and in my following posts, we will go deeper into each step.
I suggest keeping a journal to write down your thoughts and actions. We cannot change mindset just by reading, wishing or dreaming. It needs doing!
Intentions:
Ask yourself – what do you want to create? Set goals, write a book, make money, lose weight, start a business, enhance your business, or incorporate strategies, etc. Knowing what you want is half the battle. The other half is to know the reason for wanting – your ‘why’ and how achieving your intentions feel.
Awareness:
Awareness is tuning into your thoughts. Being aware of what’s going on in your head. Identifying your automatic negative thoughts such as when you feel you’re not good enough or that you don’t know enough, therefore you need to learn more (ah! Those shiny objects). We’ll talk about what to do with those thoughts and feelings in the next posts.
Reality:
Reality is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. This is where intentions and awareness come together to bring us back to earth – what is possible and what is not. Sounds contradictory to what Napoleon Hill said, ““Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve,” but not really. This step is as important as the rest of the steps.
Daily Habits:
Finally, to solidify your newly ‘re-engineered’ mindset, it must be actively reinforced daily. Here we will look into a series of daily exercises that will allow you to achieve your goals and intentions you have for your life while enabling you to enjoy peace, balance, and happiness. These daily habits shouldn’t take more than an hour a day.
Here is your first Action Item: Write your intentions down, and we will get back to them in my following post.
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