How To Become The Person That You Want To Be — The Mindset Routine
A step-by-step guide to changing your mindset and worldview
Getting Clear About Our Current Mindset
Having a rock-solid mindset that is serving us is the foundation for success in life and business.
If we want to change our worldview, we need to develop awareness about our current mindset.
How are our current personality, behavior, traits, and preferences?
Taking stock about where we start from is the first step for becoming the person that we want to be.
Inspiration & Preferences
To get started, take a moment to answer these easy questions. Create a note file on your computer or phone to write your answers down, so you have them stored.
What inspires you and what are your preferences?
- List three people that you look up to.
- Why do you look up to these people? What traits do you like about them?
- List three people you can’t stand, that you don’t like.
- What traits do you not like about them?
- List five things that you love doing and could do all day.
- List five things that you hate doing and would never want to do.
Now, after having answered these questions, think about how your preferences could hold you back from reaching your goals.
Where would you need to be more balanced to reach your goals?
Take one minute to reflect on that and brainstorm.
Now let’s look at how you would describe your current character:
- How would you describe yourself right now in three sentences or less?
- What is your personality like? (Have you done the Myers Briggs test?)
- What are your good and bad habits?
- What are your five biggest strengths?
- What are five of your weaknesses?
- What negative thoughts are regularly coming up?
- What was your upbringing like? How would you describe your childhood
- What thing from the past do you sometimes dwell on and replay?
- What worries do you have about the future?
- What is holding you back most from reaching your number one goal?
- When you’re angry, who are you currently angry at? What do you blame?
- What traits would describe your character best? (Example: Thorough, disciplined, procrastinating, shy, extroverted etc.).
- If you could imagine others gossiping about you, what would they say?
Take some time to go through these questions. Don’t just read through them, actually answer them for yourself and write it down.
Now, after having answered these questions, think about how your current character and your behavior might hold you back from reaching your goals.
Take one minute to reflect on that and brainstorm.
What Do You Want?
After knowing where we are, we need to get clear on where we want to be.
We often have some vague idea about we want in the future. But not very often do we become very clear and detailed about these dreams.
What do you really want? How do you envision your future?
Let’s design your dream life:
- What do you want? Define your ideal future 5–10 years from now, make it as detailed and clear as possible. Where do you want to live, what do you want to do each day? Where will you live?
- What are you going to offer to the world to get there? What will your business be? Who are you helping and with what service or product? What exactly will you do?
- Create your perfect day in your ideal future, from the moment you wake up until you go to sleep. Describe in detail what you see and how you will feel and let that become your vision.
Of course, it is not always easy to know exactly what we want in the future, but it is good to just start with something and get more clarity along the way.
If you now compare your preferences, behavior and current character with your dream life, what gap do you see?
What traits, behaviors, and mindset would you need to adopt instead?
What person do you need to become to have that dream life?
Take one minute to reflect on that and brainstorm.
Who Do You Want To Become?
In order to do what we have never done, we must be willing to become someone we have never been.
We are constantly evolving.
What kind of person would we need to evolve into to achieve our goals and dreams?
Defining our new personality:
1. What would the best version of yourself look like which easily accomplish your dreams and goals? Describe it in only a few sentences.
2. What skills and strengths would this character have?
3. What new strengths would that personality have that your current doesn’t?
4. What weaknesses would that personality not have any more, which your current one has?
5. What good habits would that character have and what bad habits would it be free of?
7. What fears, worry and judgments would this character be free of?
10. What past events and stories would this character be free of?
11. What new traits would this new character have?
12. How would a normal day look like for this new character?
14. If you could imagine others gossiping about this new character in a positive way, what would they say?
Now that we are clear about what we want and who we need to become, let’s look at what is necessary to get there.
How To Make It Happen
We know how our current self looks like, what we want and who we want to become.
We know what needs to change and what type of mindset we need to adopt.
Our biggest weakness, however, is that we tend to forget that we can always change.
So we need to remind ourselves regularly that change is possible and then start stacking rocks on our mental scale, so we actually start to believe and adopt our new mindset.
As with everything that we need to do consistently, we are going to make a habit out of our mindset work and batch it into a mindset routine.
The Mindset Routine
Our mindset routine will combine three ingredients:
Affirmations + Visualization + Emotion
Since our nervous system cannot tell the difference between an experience that is happening right now and one vividly imagined, we can stack rocks and change our beliefs with these three parts.
Affirmations
A good affirmation looks like this:
Money is a good thing and I deserve large sums of it. I use it to improve myself and the world around me. I feel at ease and powerful.
It is stated in the present tense, does not include negations like “don’t, won’t” and states how it will make you feel.
Come up with a list of the most important affirmations you want to implement. Use the traits from your personality that you have come up with above and create affirmations from them.
Also, include reminders about your new worldview and that change is possible as affirmations.
A list of 10–20 affirmations is enough for the beginning.
You can then record your affirmations and save it on your phone so you can replay that recording in the morning and evening.
Visualization
When reading through the affirmations or listening to them, they need to bring a picture to mind that shows you in a situation where this affirmation has become reality.
Come up with a detailed picture and make it colorful. Come up with one picture for each affirmation.
What can help with that is to have a vision board where your most important affirmations are represented as a picture of situations, objections or people that already possess your desired mindset or traits.
Just collect a number of pictures from Google that represent your future dream life and your desired personality and put them together like a collage.
You can then look at that board before you go through your affirmations.
Emotions
This is probably the most important ingredient and the one that many people forget.
New Personality = Clear Intention + Elevated Emotion
Our affirmations and visualization make up a very “clear intention”.
What is missing is how that would make us feel, the “elevated emotion”.
This is where we use the feelings that you have put at the end of your affirmations.
How would you feel right now if what you envision where already the case?
Summon that emotion right now and let it go through your body.
When you dwell in that positive emotion while you are vividly visualizing your future self, your body will simply think that this event is happening right now.
Your positive emotions are releasing chemicals that condition your body and hardwire new circuits in your brain. This is neuroplasticity.
This is how you truly change your mindsets and beliefs.
The Full Routine
- Read or listen to your affirmations
- During each affirmation, visualize yourself in a corresponding situation. Use your vision board to help you if necessary.
- Feel the positive emotion that you’d have in each situation and let them run through your body.
- Read your goals as if they were already accomplished and visualize yourself in a corresponding situation. Use your vision board to help you if necessary.
- Feel the positive emotion that you will have with these goals accomplished and let them run through your body.
When to do the routine?
A good way is to include this little mindset routine into your morning routine and evening routine.
Put it at the end of your morning routine so that you have the transition to directly work on your most important task afterward.
In the evening, do the routine just before you get ready to go to sleep. It might be helpful to listen to your affirmations while you are already in bed and getting close to falling asleep.
In that state, your brainwaves are starting to change and you have more influence on your subconscious mind.
How long should it take?
That depends on how many affirmations you have. In the beginning, it is good to start with less and make it short and sweet so you can be consistent with it.
10 key affirmations and 10 minutes should be enough.
Keep In Mind
Of course, you can and should change your mindset by actually going out, taking action on your goals and getting actual feedback and reference experiences.
This means accumulating small wins and proving to yourself that change is indeed happening and you are becoming someone else.
We just do both things, because the mindset routine provides a solid foundation which makes it easier for you to actually accumulate those real-life experiences.
And with that new foundation, nothing can stop you anymore.
When are you going to get started?
Need some inspiration for better habits?
I’ve put together my personal top three habits in a little e-book.
They will make you make you become calmer, more focused and allow you to feel more at peace.
