Every endeavor that we set upon starts with an idea. The invention of the wheel, the design of computers, the first trip to the moon. All of these started out as an idea before becoming a reality. This is why it is so crucial for you to have a sense of who you want to be in life if you’re going to find success and happiness.
The mindset that you embrace is more important than your people skills, more important than your abilities, and more important than any other competency you may currently have or that you may develop in the future.
Your mindset is what will allow you to achieve your dreams and accomplish your goals. It can help you improve your surroundings, allowing you to become a happier person, attracting more positive people and situations to your life.
Unfortunately, for many, as they strive to achieve their goals and dreams, they struggle, getting caught up in the moment or becoming stuck in their failures. They end up losing track of why they are doing what they’re doing and find themselves merely going through the motions.
You don’t have to continue to live this way. Once you start to shift your mindset, you will notice that everything else in your life changes with it and you will begin to find greater success and live a happier life.
According to Carol Dweck, a renowned psychologist and psychology professor at Stanford, the beliefs, thoughts, and ideologies that you firmly believe in are what determines your quality of life. Your mindset is a mix of these elements and is the traditional set of different attitudes you nurture, as well as those that shape the rest of your life.
Her research into the human mind also established that there are two different kinds of mindsets; growth and fixed. It has been determined that if you possess a fixed mindset, you have the opinion that you are born with a specific set of qualities that can’t be changed.
You believe that the traits that you possess are fixed, and there is nothing that you can do to develop them further or improve them.
A growth mindset, on the other hand, is one that allows you to think differently. When you possess a growth mindset, you believe that you can become better. You know that you can always learn new things, build new skills, and work on your shortcomings. With a growth mindset, whatever you want in life is achievable.
What many people fail to recognize is that these two mindsets aren’t mutually exclusive, but they are in fact complementary to one another. Everyone starts out with a fixed mindset; you have particular talents and skills that you already possess, that you may think are unchangeable.
To transition into a growth mindset, you have to ask yourself than to determine what you want to achieve in your life specifically. This leads to asking yourself how you are going to get from point ‘A’ to point ‘B,’ or rather, how you’re going to change your ‘fixed’ abilities to reach your goal.
Making this subtle shift in thinking begins to transform your mindset from a fixed state into a growth state. You have figured out where you need to change and take the necessary steps to actively work on those areas, allowing you to mold your thought process into something that is positive, productive, and evolutionary, giving you the capabilities to change your life.
The challenge for you becomes identifying your current mindset and determining a goal for yourself that will allow you to implement growth strategies in your life that you can work toward achieving.
Learning to Transition Your Thoughts into Actions
Now that you’ve determined the kind of mindset you currently have, you now have a mental roadmap of everything that you will need to do to obtain greater success and happiness in your life.
While you may have set goals in the past, there is a substantial difference between setting goals and actively pursuing them. This includes all the steps you need to take to reach your goals.
Change is a natural part of life, but actively enforcing it in your daily life is going to be a challenge. This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, or even that you should be worried about making the appropriate changes in your life, it merely means that you need to prepare yourself for some hard work.
Change is a gradual process, that will take time. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t help it along a bit. Here are four different ways that you can help yourself implement change in your life.
Don’t Try to Change Too Many Things at Once
One of the most significant mistakes that people make when they try to make changes in their life is trying to do it all at once.
Unfortunately, this way of thinking only sets them up for eventual failure. When you try to change too many things in your life you can quickly become overwhelmed and disappointed when you aren’t able to achieve any real, lasting change.
This will lead to you losing the motivation you once had, abandoning the journey, and never successfully changing a thing in your life.
Change is a gradual process, so you need to pick just one trait or characteristic that you want to change and start explicitly working on that one thing. You have to focus your entire energy on improving that one aspect of your life.
When you focus on one specific thing at a time, you increase your chances of sustaining change by over 70 percent. So, when it comes to implementing changes in your life, you have to avoid trying to change too many at the same time.
Create Clear Goals That are Achievable
Every successful person has a habit of setting goals and reviewing them. The process of learning to set goals is what allows you to turn your desires and dreams into reality. When you learn to create clear goals that are achievable, you will immediately see an improvement in your life, your clarity, and your mindset.
When trying to shift your mindset, you have to have a definite purpose and desire. You must be specific about what you want out of life. Take the time to write your goals down, because the act of writing your goals out by hand helps to engage your brain and allows your subconscious to get a handle on your goals.
When it comes to writing down your goals, writing down a vague goal, like ‘I want to lose weight,’ will lead you to see vague results and ultimately fail to achieve the goal. The more specific you can be with your goals, the better your results.
Simply saying, ‘I wish to be rich,’ isn’t enough because you will have little understanding of how you are going to accomplish this goal. While you can keep your desire to be rich as a long-term goal, you need to create short-term goals that are actionable and that will ultimately move you closer to your long-term goal.
It is important that all of the goals that you set for yourself be actionable. You will never be able to reach your goals if they aren’t broken down into smaller, achievable steps.
You want to make sure that the goals that you set are challenging, and that will make something of you to achieve them. Making goals challenging is why you break them down into easily achievable steps.
While your goals should be challenging, they shouldn’t be so challenging that you aren’t able to achieve them. Try not to get in the habit of setting unrealistic goals that are too hard to reach, as this could result in you losing hope and ultimately failing to shift your mindset.
Make it a Habit
In order for you to realize your goals, you need to turn your actions into a part of your daily life. This means that the steps that you’ve determined you need to take to reach your goals need to become a part of your lifestyle.
While you can probably create a list of the many bad habits that you have, you may not be conscious of the good habits that you already possess. To reinforce these good habits and build better habits as you move forward in your journey to shifting your mindset, you need to pay attention to your good habits. Each habit has three parts:
• The trigger
• The behavior
• The reward
The event that causes you to start a specific behavior is known as the trigger. This can be something you see, hear, taste, feel, or think about that automatically starts your mind reacting, causing it to enter into autopilot to get the reward it desires. If you have a sweet tooth, a bowl of candy will automatically trigger you to reach into the bowl to grab a handful of sweetness for your taste buds.
The behavior in this example would be automatically reaching out and grabbing some candy out of the bowl without thinking. Making the reward the pleasure of eating the candy.
Our genetic ancestors developed this system of habits as a way to help us survive by making specific behaviors automatic. This allowed them to avoid having to think about what to do in a given situation consciously.
While you may think that your triggers come from external cues, your habits are more often than not, triggered by your thoughts. The thoughts that you have can trigger both positive and negative mental patterns.
For example, if you watch the news and see a story about another murder in the city, it may automatically trigger the thought that the city is a scary and dangerous place where only bad things happen.
Because the media continues to highlight adverse events, you associate big cities with danger, which triggers the habit of reinforcing negative thoughts. The reward in this example is that you feel safe where you are, away from the city.
The key to shifting your mindset is to recognize the triggers for your bad habits and turn them into good practices. This process can take a long time, especially if you’ve had a bad habit for a while because your brain is wired to jump into autopilot as soon as the trigger appears automatically. To counteract this, you need to become aware of your triggers and make a conscious effort to act differently.
For example, if you are prone to hitting the snooze button in the morning, and you want to change the behavior, then you need to find a way to form a new habit. To do this you may want to consider setting your alarm clock across the room, so you have to get out of bed and walk across the room to turn it off.
This will give you the time you need to consciously become aware of the situation, allowing you to counteract your habit of hitting the snooze button. At the same time, you want to think about what your new reward will be.
Once you’ve started turning your bad habits into good ones, it is crucial for you to remain consistent. It will take time for you to change your habits as your brain develops new neural pathways and begins to recognize the value of the new reward.
Longtime habits can take you months to change, and you will probably slip back into your old habits along the way. If this happens, don’t give up, remain persistent, and you will eventually turn your bad habits into good habits.
Be Accountable
The final step in your journey to transforming your thoughts into action is being held accountable for your actions, or non-actions. When it comes to enforcing change in our lives, we tend to take our time in implementing the changes we need to shift our mindset.
To help you hold yourself accountable, you need to enlist the help of your friends and family and bring them on as a transition buddy. Your transition buddy will be the person that you talk to about what steps you’ve taken on your journey and outcome of your efforts.
Learn to Say No to Negativity
Learning to challenge your current mindset and teaching yourself how to change your thoughts into action is the first step in shifting your mindset to obtain greater success and happiness. However, it will do you no good if you are going to allow negativity to rule your life.
This isn’t to say that being hesitant and weary about all the new changes you are making in your life isn’t normal. However, if you begin your day looking at all the ways that something could go wrong, you’ll end up feeling terrible at the end of the day because you spent your time and energy anticipating the worst to happen.
To combat this tendency, you have to learn balance. Negativity, or even positivity, alone is not the problem, it is their constant presence in your life that become problematic. It is up to you to find a way to even out these two mindsets so that your plans are realistic.
Admit There’s a Problem
The first thing that you need to do is to admit that you have a problem. Ask yourself the following questions:
• When you have an idea, do you automatically point out the drawbacks of the idea first?
• Is this done out of the fear that you’ll be too upset if you ‘look forward’ to it?
• Do you justify this habit by calling yourself a realist?
If you hesitated before answering any of these questions, then you have a problem, and you will have to work hard to get it fixed.
Recognize your Triggers
We spoke about triggers in Chapter 1, and just like with your habits, your negativity can be caused by a specific trigger. Negativity usually stems from fear.
When you have a negative outlook regarding a particular issue, the odds are high that you have an irrational fear that has become associated with that issue.
In order to rid your life of negative thoughts and actions, you need to identify your triggers and the concern that are leading you to engage in this negative thought process.
Everyone has their own vulnerabilities. The only way that you can move on from these is if you can consciously identify your weaknesses so that you can develop a better way to construct a more productive dynamic regarding your particular fears.
As you work toward changing your mindset, it is important to remember that negativity will cloud your vision. If you want to find success and live a happier life, you need to find a way to eliminate those things that are holding you back, including your fears and vulnerabilities.
Surround Yourself with Positivity
We are a lot like sponges in that we absorb everything around us. This includes our behavior patterns, thought patterns, ambitions, and traits, among others.
The patterns of your behavior that you’ve developed over the years are based on what you see around you. This is why it is essential to be careful in choosing who you surround yourself with.
Negative influences in your life might come in the form of a friend or family member who finds fault in everything. If you want to shift your mindset, you have to say no to this negativity and eliminate the toxic people that you have in your life.
Not only are they helping to shape your own negative thoughts, but they can drain your energy, resulting in you feeling worse about yourself.
It is vital that you spend time with positive people who enjoy life, make you laugh, and encourage you to grow into a better human being. You need to be proactive in making new friends and combating the negativity that you’ve surrounded yourself with.
Stop the Negative Self-Talk
Negative self-talk is like having an enemy by your side, continually telling you what a lousy person you are. It is the number one enemy of positivity and can quickly derail your drive and motivation. To get rid of all the negative self-talk, you have to become conscious of your thoughts.
As you become more aware of your thoughts, you’ll find yourself going into an endless stream of negativity, when this happens, stop what you’re doing and take a couple of deep breaths.
After you’ve calmed your mind a bit, clearly define the problem that you are experiencing and determine what you can do to fix the problem. Challenging your negative inner voice is a great way to fight your inner critic.
There are some simple things that you can begin to incorporate into your daily life that will help you eliminate negative-self talk from your life for good.
Meditation
One of the best ways to control your mind and eliminate negativeself talk is daily mediation. It requires you to focus on your breathing while being mindful of what goes in your mind without any judgment.
The latest research shows that when you meditate, you are actively changing the structure of your brain through what is called neuroplasticity. This process means that new pathways are being built, resulting in your mind learning how to relax when dealing with stressful situations.
Practicing mindful meditation for the long-term helps to increase the gray matter in your brain, which is what is responsible for allowing you to make better decisions that are more in tune with your emotions.
Journaling
Actively journaling helps you to look at your current situation from a distant perspective and know more about yourself in general. When you regularly write down the activities, you performed during the day and the feelings you had, you’ll learn to recognize what matters to you and what is trivial.
The more you write down your feelings and experiences, the more you notice patterns in your life, like negative thinking. Recognizing these kinds of patterns will allow you to make the necessary changes to shift your thinking.
Practice Gratitude
As you are writing in your journal, begin to practice your gratitude for the things that you have in your life that you are grateful for. The things that you are thankful for don’t have to be grand things, like owning a house or fancy car. They can be a simple as being grateful that you can put food on your table.
Find Ways to Give
When you are able to give to others, you experience a particular joy, and you begin to feel good about yourself, which generates positive energy. Spend time donating your time to help those in need and be grateful for what you have and find happiness in what you have contributed.
The more you do this, the more positive thoughts and energy you will have and the harder it will become to fall into the trap of negative self-talk.
Avoid Playing the Victim
Psychological studies have shown that learned helplessness is a strong reason for people to be pessimistic. If you start on the downward spiral of pessimism, and you feel like the world doesn’t care about you anymore, you need to stop and reflect. You need to determine what the problem is and take the responsibility to overcome it.
It is much easier than you may think to slip into a passively negative mindset. This is especially true as we grow older. As we age, we start to blame those things around us for all of our problems. This allows us to showcase ourselves as the victims.
Playing the role of the victim is dangerous in a couple of ways. First, it allows us to shirk all responsibility for our actions and our lives. Unfortunately, without accountability, we lose control of our choices and our lives.
Secondly, playing the victim is an inherently harmful role. When we think of a victim, we automatically see them as the subject of some sort of negative impact. This results in mentally telling yourself that your negative outlook on life is justified.
By addressing your negative mindset head on, you are already well on your way to resolving it and changing it into a more positive mindset. By overcoming the circumstance you’ve surrounded yourself with, you can become a more successful individual and more independent person.
Demand Discipline from Yourself
You should now be starting to see the bigger picture in life. You know precisely what is at stake, and you know that in order to get what you want you have to work hard. The only thing that you are lacking right now is a way to make sure you do accomplish your goals. This is where learning discipline comes in.
Committing to something is the easy part of shifting your mindset, the hard part is having the willpower and personal discipline to see it through. While you may think that you want to do something, and you may believe that you are willing to go the extra mile to do it, you are still just thinking random thoughts.
Discipline is not something that you can think about, mull it over, and just hope that it will grow on you, it is something that is demanded if you want to change your mindset successfully.
There are seven techniques that you can implement to help you get a handle on your self-disciplinary actions.
Substitute your Habits and Thoughts
When you are looking to gain a new skill, or change your mindset, you may tend to think about the outcome that you don’t want. You may tend to think about negative results rather than your dream. In order to develop discipline, it is essential that you change your thought process and begin to think about what you want. Focus on the outcomes you desire so your brain transforms and works toward finding a solution.
One of the main problems that people face regarding discipline is that they aren’t able to see any alternatives for their problem. If you’ve had problems with discipline in the past, it may be because by focusing on the wrong outcome, you quickly lose your motivation to make any real, and lasting change. If you want to obtain discipline, you have to replace your current habits and thoughts.
Eliminating Distractions
When it comes to gaining self-discipline, an absolute must is being able to remove distractions. Many people, tend to lean towards working late at night so they can get some peace and quiet, thinking that they will get more done.
However, given how productive people are during the day, the best way to maximize your potential is to work during the day. To eliminate distractions during the day, schedule specific blocks of time where you disconnect from distractions.
During these blocks of time, you need to turn off all electronic devices, shut your door, and focus on the task at hand. You can start off slow, by setting aside 15-minute blocks of time throughout your day, and gradually work up to an entire hour of distraction-free time.
It is crucial for you to remember that you are just as important as any of the dozens of interruptions you field a day, so start acting like it if you want to become more disciplined and achieve your goals.
Create Positive Affirmations
The idea behind affirmations is that you become what you think about. Your success or failure in any area of your life depends on how you program yourself. It has nothing to do with circumstances.
Unfortunately, we are continually receiving negative programming throughout our life and unintentionally absorb this programming, leading us to believe it is correct.
Recent studies have shown that, because of this negative programming, 77 percent of what we think is negative, and works against us.
Boosting your motivation and self-discipline is easy if you use positive affirmations. Starting today, begin to make a mental note of any negative words that you think or say and turn them around, rephrasing them in a more positive light.
Choose the words that make you feel good. When you need to accomplish anything, simply repeat your favorite words or motivating sentences to help permanently raise your mental state.
Your possibilities with positive affirmations are endless. They can help you to develop self-confidence, finish big projects, change your job, close big deals, be more creative, learn a new language, and change your mindset; the list of possibilities is endless, and can accelerate your success.
Observe Your Conditioned Movements
Most people will repeat their old movements and actions with the same bad results. This results in nothing ever changing in their lives. To succeed in shifting your mindset and finding greater success and happiness, you need to be able to recognize these damaging practices.
You will never be able to succeed if you continue to condition your life based on your past and repeating patterns that have convinced you that you can’t succeed. Repeating comfortable movements that kill your progress will only lead you to failure.
While some of the automatic movements in your life are necessary, like taking an umbrella with you when it’s supposed to rain, or like stopping when the cars in front of you are braking, the rest tend to be negative. The toxic negative movements in your life need to be changed if you want to find success and happiness.
One efficient way to break these toxic conditioned movements is to observe yourself and eliminate the obstacles that get in the way of your progress. Figuring out what leads you to participate unconsciously in these kinds of movements will allow you to become better at disciplining yourself.
Detach Yourself
If you’re like most people, you probably fill your day with things to do, without thinking about the time you need to consider and enjoy your inner self.
You want to live as fast as possible, doing everything you feel is necessary to lead a fulfilling life, but you never seem to be able to finish all the tasks on your to-do-list. No matter how much work you do, your to-do-list continues to grow.
Thankfully, there is a way that you can avoid this trap and recover your discipline by doing what matters and getting better results in the process. The method is harnessing the power of detachment.
In order to organize your thoughts and recover your discipline, you need to disconnect from the world on a regular basis.
Detaching yourself for a few minutes every day will help you to recharge your mind and become more disciplined. When you stop moving and taking in information, your subconscious mind begins to organize your thoughts and detect hidden opportunities.
To become more disciplined, take five minutes every day, or when you are starting to feel overwhelmed, and detach from the world. Let your mind reorganize strategies and provide you with a more precise vision.
See the Bright Side
A quick way to eliminate your stress and obtain self-discipline is to begin thinking that everything goes in your favor. Consciously try to see only the bright side. Look at the world and believe that everything helps you.
Replace every negative thought with a positive one and come to understand that in some way even the bad things in your life will benefit you.
Obstacles and setbacks will make you smarter and provide you with ways to reach your goals faster and prevent you from making more costly errors in the future.
When you chose to only focus on the good parts, you will quickly become enlightened after your initial discomfort. This will allow you to see hidden opportunities and develop new ideas for managing other obstacles in your life.
Changing your point of view, and seeing only advantages, will help you. They will make you smarter, stronger, and give you strategic vision.
You can’t force change. Change has to be gradual and organic. It is the only way that you can be sure that you won’t slip into bad habits. While it is critical that you make a conscious effort into your new lifestyle, it is just as essential that you do so in moderations to avoid losing your motivation after just a few months.
Find the Balance
When you are trying to improve your self-discipline, it is important to remember that it’s all about balance. Being able to find your balance is the ultimate technique that you will need to master if you genuinely want to change your mindset.
Changing your lifestyle isn’t an easy thing to do, so while you will want to see instant changes, and work yourself to the bone to accomplish this goal, it is essential for you to remember to cut yourself some slack and let the changes evolve as they see fit.
Change is a lot like falling in love, as much as you may want to, you just can’t force change.
Strive for Success
Thoughts are an extremely powerful tool when you are trying to shift your mindset. However, actions are decisive. The actions you take are the difference between an idea and the actualization of that idea. This is why it is so important to take time to focus on the activities that will help you achieve your goals.
While it is difficult to properly identify everything that the phrase ‘strive for success’ embodies, the best way to look at it is you have to be prepared. The act of striving in and of itself is about being ready to face every curveball that could possibly be thrown your way.
Unfortunately, life has an infinite number of curveballs that it can throw at you, and you won’t be able to avoid them all just because you are thinking positively. And what’s worse, is that any one of these curveballs has the power to completely obliterate your positive thought process if you’re not careful.
This means that you will need to put in just as much effort into striving for the things you want, as you do thinking about the things you want.
To help you learn to strive for success, you should start using this success mantra daily.
While intent fixes failures and insight improves innovation, it is integrity that sows the seeds of success.
Most people, when they read this success mantra daily, they are seeing three Positive Commandments, which help them to draw on lifestyle changes that allow them to help themselves.
Re-read the mantra and notice that each of the mantras have a secondary point that it is co-dependent on. For instance, the first point talks about intent, but in relation to fixing your failures.
Let’s take a closer look at the three points and their co-pilots to get a better understanding of how they can help you strive for success and change your mindset.
Intent is Everything
For some people, luck plays a factor in how they live their lives. However, it is important to remember that the most authentic achievers are those who naturally understand that their success isn’t merely a game of chance, but a purposeful calculation of the possibilities that are derived based on how far they have pursued them.
This means that your ability to succeed isn’t dependent on some finicky old woman named Fate, it all depends on you. Your success depends on what you are doing. You need to stop living in constant fear and anxiety over something you have no power to control. This is an extremely damaging mindset to have.
Instead, figure out the factors in your life that you do have control over and see how they add up, so you can finally start taking control.
How to Fix Failures
The one factor that has the most co-relation with intent is the notion of failure. Just about everyone is daunted by the idea of failure. Luckily, you don’t have to be a part of the pack anymore because you know exactly what you want and exactly how you are going to get it.
You are driven, and your willingness to commit is your most significant strength. Your drive and commitment are all manifestations of your control over the situation, and your ability to recognize your own power is critical. You know that the only way to fix your failures is by acknowledging that you have control over them.
Understanding the ‘I’ in Insight
When you were growing up, you were probably told over and over that the reason you need to understand the bigger picture when working as a team is that there is no “I” in team. This phrase is a childish way of explaining a fundamental ideology.
You see, there is an ‘I’ in insight, but that isn’t so you can sit back and pass judgment on those around you. Rather, it is so you can put yourself in another person’s shoes and see precisely what they see. The ability to truly understand what needs to change comes from understanding how other people see the situation as well as how you look at it.
Inspiring Innovation
The consequence for insight, according to the success mantra, is innovation. The mantra claims that once you can properly explore insight, you will become more innovative and creative as a whole. This becomes the truth because now that you have obtained all this new information about how your problems can be fixed, you can begin to think of ways to fix them.
Idolizing Integrity
It’s all too easy these days to get caught up in a web of lies, and easy way out’s in today’s pessimistic world. This is why it is vital that you hold yourself to a higher standard. Setting a higher standard for yourself will not only define the kind of person you will be but the kind of energy you will attract to your life.
You may find it difficult to hang on to your integrity, ideals, and trustworthiness all the time, but it will be well worth it in the end. It is also essential to keep in mind that you can never really succeed unless you are doing so with integrity.
Sowing the Seeds of Success
The final point in the success mantra is the correlation of success to integrity. The entire idea of sowing the seeds of success is a lot like gardening. The planting of seeds in the garden is the beginning of the process. The process is long and complicated, but with some patience, you will experience success.
If you really want to succeed, you will have to strive to achieve success, by taking the long way and eliminating shortcuts. While this is going to take a lot of hard work, it will be worth it when you are able to change your mindset and obtain greater success and happiness in your life.
Going After Your Goals
Cee Lo Green is a successful musician who can be quoted as saying, “You have to dream big, wish hard, and chase after your goals because no one is going to do it for you.” Through the last several chapters, you’ve learned that success can be cultivated, and your freedom redefined by changing the way you think.
The end goal is that you will be able to walk away more confident with a new mindset that will allow you to obtain the success and happiness that you’ve always dreamed of having in your life.
You are a smart and savvy person, and you know that in order to achieve this, you have to go after your goals. Achieving your goals and going after them are two entirely different things.
To turn your goal getting attitude into the proper mindset, there are a few things that you’re going to have to keep in mind. There are five things that you will need to keep in mind while you work on going after your goals.
When it comes down to it, the only person that has the capability to hold you back from achieving your goals is you. If you know what you want, and you know what you have to do to get there, then you need to take action and just do it. You need to believe in yourself and figure out how you can realistically accomplish your goals.
Don’t Keep Score
When embarking on a path of self-growth, it is a bit unrealistic to tell you not to keep score, especially since you, like so many others, tend to be your own worst critic. However, when it comes to achieving your goals, it is important to understand that it will take time to accomplish them.
If you are always obsessing over every little setback, failure, or progress that you experience on your journey, it will do nothing but slow you down and make you edgy and impatient.
Keeping score during your journey will only make it more difficult for you to move forward in going after your goals. You need to address your goals calmly and purposefully if you want to find success. While it’s alright to check in on yourself and measure your progress, it is entirely counteractive to your journey to keep score along the way.
Focus on Yourself
For our entire lives, our parents have compared us to our cousins and their best friend’s kids. It has been done so often, that we are now starting to compare ourselves to others in our lives. We look at other’s material achievements, comparing our current situation and possession, and obsess over the differences.
Unfortunately, when we spend time comparing ourselves to others, those comparisons begin to distract us from the progress that we’ve been making and brings us back to where we started.
Nothing good can come from comparing yourself to others, so it must stop now. You have to begin to realize that you are your own person who is making your own way in the world. You are no one but yourself, so it is high time that you begin focusing on yourself and stop comparing yourself to others.
Keep Your Head Up
No one likes to deal with failure. It has a tendency to overwhelm your consciousness and take over, burrowing deep down through your mental peace until the only thing that you can think about, day and night, is that one goal that you failed to fulfill.
Failure is something that is extremely hard to deal with. However, it is important that you know and understand that your failures do not define you. The same holds true with your successes.
So, if your successes and failures don’t define you, what does? The only thing that defines you as a person is how you react to and deal with your success and failure.
If you want to achieve your goals and finally find the happiness in your life that you’ve always wanted, you have to stop wallowing in self-pity every time you experience a failure; using them instead as tools.
Your failures can give you more than you could ever have imagined, so learn from them and own them. Never keep your head down over a defeat. Instead, learn to celebrate the fact that you have learned how to move past them.
Stop Dawdling, and Take Action
Everyone has experienced dawdling in their life. Have you ever had that moment, when you’re ready to sit down and tackle the mound of paperwork on your desk when you suddenly realize you need a pen? You go to get the pen and realize that your desk drawer is a mess, and it needs to be reorganized.
The next thing you know, you’ve lost hours reorganizing your entire desk, drawers, re-filled your printer, and organized your notes. This is what is known as dawdling.
Dawdling is setting about doing little shadow jobs that you believe are necessary, but that doesn’t amount to anything, letting your surge of motivation get used for trivial tasks.
To combat this issue, schedule out blocks of time to do specific tasks, and make sure you only spend that block of time doing just that one thing. If you begin to stop multitasking, you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish throughout the day.
Remember Why
As you make your way through the hustle and bustle of changing your mindset and going after success and freedom, it is really easy to lose track of the reason why you are going on this journey. This is one of the most common problems that people face when they are on a self-growth discovery.
What’s worse, is how hard it is to come back from this and get back on the right track. As you start on your journey, it is essential for you to make a list of all the reasons why this particular goal matters to you and why you are going after it.
Sit down and pull from your memories and feelings, making sure to draw yourself a verbal picture that will be able to bring you back to the exact moment when you decided what goal you wanted to accomplish.
Take the time and care to complete this step because remembering is about more than just facts, it’s about the connections you have with the goal.
Conclusion
As you continue on your journey, it is important that you remember that your biggest strength is that you are capable of changing your mindset to help you shape your life into exactly what you want it to be. The most significant challenge that you will face is seeing it through.
Positivity is as much a choice of lifestyle as it is an achievement. It is a lifestyle choice that will allow you to build your way to a more important tomorrow, which is the entire reason you set out on this journey in the first place.
By taking steps to transition your thoughts into action, learning to say no to negativity, demanding discipline, striving for success, and going after your goals, you’ll be able to slowly shift your mindset so that you can obtain greater success and lead a happier life.
