What Is Your Mindset?
“Mindset’ is a word people are hearing more and more as professionals across industries begin to shift their focus to internal goals and motivations. Grasping the concept of a good mindset can help you be successful in every facet of your life–but what really is a mindset anyway? Before you can begin achieving things with the right mindset, or even figure out what the right mindset is, you have to know what the definition.
In the simplest terms, a person’s mindset defines their way of thinking. It’s your frame of mind and it encompasses what you think, how you think, and how you react when things happen. For instance, people with a positive mindset are more likely to be happy, nice, and persevere when hard times come their way. On the other hand, someone with a negative mindset may feel like they deserve it when bad things happen to them or they might say things like, “It was only a matter of time before something went wrong.”
What’s the Big Deal??
As you can imagine, your mindset is extremely important to happiness and success. Your thoughts have a direct impact on how you feel and what you do, and therefore, your mindset affects what you believe you can accomplish and what you are willing to accomplish. Ultimately, your mindset affects every part of your life. It defines how you interpret and make sense of the world around you.
In other words, your mindset is a very big deal and, since it relates so closely to your attitude and beliefs, it’s important for you to take the time to define those things as well. A good exercise is to sit down and list out some of your core thoughts and beliefs. Perhaps try responding to some basic situational prompts and write out how you would feel and react in different scenarios.
Alternatively, you can think back to a recent time you when were faced with a challenge of your own or perhaps someone else solved one of their problems. Think about how you felt, how you reacted, and how you think your mindset affect your actions and reactions. With this written out, you’ll begin to have a better understanding of what your current mindset is. Once you define it, you might even find ways to improve it.
Positive Vs. Negative
Your mindset has immense power over your attitude, accomplishments, and life in general. If you have a negative mindset, it will be easy to feel as though nothing ever goes your way and it will be even easier to give up when things stand in your way of happiness.
A bad mindset can easily leave you feeling drained of hope, drained of energy, and completely drained of willpower–especially if you feel like you’ve been hit with one piece of bad news after another. However, if you find yourself in such a position, don’t be so quick to give in. There is extensive study being done on the power of mindset, and the well-known placebo effect in itself is the perfect example of just how powerful your mind can be.
The placebo effect is a phenomena that occurs in scientific trials where one group of participants thinks they are being given a medication to treat an ailment they are suffering from, but in reality, it’s nothing more than a sugar pill that has no real effect on their body. Still, the placebo effect has shown that–even if a person isn’t being given any medication at all–the belief that they are being cured leads to actual measurable improvement in their condition.
This is the power of the mind at work and, if you take a moment to reflect on it, you’ll quickly realize what this means for your goals and your mindset as a whole. Plenty of people make goals and dreams, but how often do they really believe they’ll achieve them? The right mindset means believing in the goals you set and making a realistic plan to reach them. With the right mindset, you’ll be able to see just how powerful your mind really is.
While it’s natural to feel a bit of self-doubt, those with the right mindset will be able to set goals and continuously work towards them, standing up and trying again when things don’t work out exactly as planned. If you commit to having the right mindset, you can reach your goals in no time.
