Cultivate Your Mindset

Have you ever succeeded in accomplishing something you thought was impossible? Did you visualize the outcome? Many of us can recall a time in our lives when we set our minds to a task and achieved it. Your mind plays a crucial role in setting the stage for the process that led to your success.

That stage is your mindset. It’s a set of assumptions, methods, or notations that creates a strong motivation within you, enabling you to continue to receive and accept prior actions. It encodes your interpretations of and responses to different situations. Psychologist Carol Dweck from Stanford University has studied how having a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset can significantly influence how you live your life. Your mindset plays a key role in how you react to the various opportunities and challenges you encounter throughout your life.

A positive, active, and achievement-focused growth mindset can make a significant difference regardless of your goal. Some believe their core abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. This perspective fosters a love for learning and resilience, which are essential for unlimited achievement.

Others believe that their core qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. Those with a fixed mindset think that they are either good or bad at something based on their innate nature. They also believe that these qualities alone, without putting in effort, lead to success.

Cultivate Your Growth Mindset

Cultivating a growth mindset can boost your motivation and make you more willing to seek out opportunities to develop your skills. It also helps you focus more on your most desirable and important goals in life.

In 2016, research published in the journal Frontiers of Psychology, revealed the most effective motivational technique for improving performance. An extensive aimed to determine whether one motivational method is the most effective for enhancing performance. More than 44,000 volunteers participated in testing three different motivational techniques to see which was the most effective:

1. Self-talk (saying to yourself, “I can do better”)

2. Imagery (imagining yourself doing something better)

3. If-then planning (for example, “If I start to doubt myself, then I will remind myself that I have the skills!”)

All three techniques improved performance, but self-talk was the most effective. Thinking and saying to oneself, “I can do better next time,” boosted the effort people put into an activity.

You can rewire your brain’s patterns by consistently feeding your mind with new, empowering messages. Watch your self-talk and consider making changes if necessary. This is the “can-do” mindset that can positively impact you if you embrace it.

• Create a specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound list of everything you want to accomplish in your life. Limit yourself to just five items.

• Set small goals each day and week to accomplish. There is power in breaking things down and working towards them little by little instead of feeling overwhelmed by the idea of the finished goal you want.

• Realize that it is possible instead of telling yourself why it isn’t.

• Be aware of your self-talk and replace negative thoughts with positive ones.

• Use the skills you already have. Concentrate on your strengths, develop them further, and continue to improve over time.

• See failure as a steppingstone for a comeback.

• Keep moving forward even if you only make baby steps.

Changing your mindset about your ability in a specific skill may mean mastering it through disciplined practice. It takes conscious effort to transform and adopt a positive mindset focused on success.

“A positive attitude causes a chain reaction of positive thoughts, events and outcomes. It is a catalyst, and it sparks extraordinary results. ~ Wade Boggs