Change Your Mindset, Change Your World
Changing your mindset is instrumental to becoming the best version of yourself — one who follows through on your commitments to yourself, crushes your goals, and lives a life of intention.
Welcome to day three of Becoming the CEO of You. On day one, we started discussing new beginnings and yesterday we started to get to know yourself better by exploring your values. If you didn’t get a chance to go through the values workbook or if you are new to Living to Learn, click here.
The activities we will be going through over the course of this month will be to help you become the best version of yourself, what I call Becoming the CEO of You. Over the month we’ll break down the strategies that can help you conquer the most important thing you can ever conquer — yourself.
“If you conquer yourself, then you conquer the world. “ — Paulo Coelho
The strategies we’ll go through will cover the following five areas (and potentially a bonus one as well if I like how it comes together):
- Knowing Yourself
- Creating Goals
- Adopting Mindsets
- Embracing Habits
- Practicing Self-care
Mind Your Mindsets
Mindsets are defined as the established set of attitudes you have. While values are your what you judge to be most important in life, your mindsets are the attitudes you have why the world is the way it is. Like your values, your mindsets have a direct impact on your thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and actions. Mindsets also tend to be something that we don’t consciously recognize as they are habitual.
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” — Wayne Dyer
Often we will make decisions without really understanding what the factors are that are influencing those decisions. A key step in Becoming the CEO of You is to know why it is you do what you do.
There are three basic mindsets that you should know — fixed, growth, and benefit. There are a number of other mindsets that exist, but these have the most pervasive effect on how you approach challenges and opportunities in your life.
The mindsets above are fairly easy to identify and more often than not, our mindsets shift depending on the type of situation we are in or the topic that we are dealing with. For example, I am a voracious learner and am constantly looking to learn, grow, and improve; except when it comes to math. I have a deep and well entrenched mindset that I can’t develop math skills. I know I can, but my immediate attitude is to avoid.
You can uncover additional mindsets you have by grabbing a notebook and spend time writing down the thoughts you’ve had when you’ve:
- encountered something new.
- moved outside your comfort zone.
- when you’ve failed to accomplish a task.
This also has the benefit of helping you identify specific areas when you might have a mindset that is holding you back. Note these items down and use the strategy “five why’s” to uncover the reason you have this mindset. With math, my mindset is that I am dumb when it comes to math. Why? I’ve struggled for a number of years with math. Why? I didn’t understand the concepts being taught. Why? I didn’t learn the foundational information. Why? I had a teacher who handed me the answer key. Why? Who knows, but I am guessing he was sick of me asking questions.
How to Improve and Change Your Mindset
Once you’ve identified what mindsets you have and in regards to what situations, there are several strategies that can help change your mindsets:
- Practice mindfulness: Mindfulness helps you separate you from your thoughts and helps you move out of negative thought cycles. It is incredibly freeing to come to the realization that your thoughts aren’t you, they’re just thoughts.
- Practice daily gratitude: Gratitude helps you reflect on all the good things that have happened in your day. Pick three things you are grateful for each day in your journal.
- Detox from social media: While we might go on social media to disconnect, research shows that the endless scrolling on social media actually increases your stress levels and can foster negative mindsets.
- Journal daily: Journaling is a great way to uncover the thoughts that are rolling around in your head that you might not have been aware of or that you have been stewing over every since “that incident” happened.
Take time today to spend some time thinking about the mindsets you have and trying out at least one of these strategies.
