Mindset
What is Mindset Work?
I would describe Mindset work as the origin of personal leadership. It weaves together the internal processes of thinking, feeling, believing and habit-formation that are required to achieve any goal we set for ourselves across the life-span. We truly only have control over our inner landscape: what we think, what we feel, what we believe and how we act. When we invest in developing our Mindset, we take full responsibility for our work and our lives.
Who Are You, Really?
To begin with, who are you? You are not your name, or the role you play in your family, or the career you’ve created, but social conditioning runs deep, as do family and societal norms, beliefs and values that we inherit from a young age. This can lead us to walk through life at times ticking the boxes we feel we’re meant to tick, yet somehow disconnected from our hearts and life-satisfaction.
When was the last time you checked in with yourself? Are your actions in alignment with your beliefs? Are you really living the life YOU want?
What Do You Think About?
Almost all of our thinking is habitual. We learn what to think very early on from family and social environments, but not how to think. We often aren’t aware of our current thinking’s limitations until presented with a different way of thinking. And we’re rarely aware of the distinction between mental activity and focused, supportive and aligned thinking.
Can you control your thoughts? Or do they control you?
What about your emotions? Who’s in charge?
How Do You Feel?
How we feel really matters.
How do you feel when you wake up? Are you energized? Excited for your day? Or do you wake with dread?
I know from first-hand experience that feeling can be as habitual as thinking. I used to feel at the mercy of my feelings, and during that time a lot of my attention was looking back at things that had happened to me, or that hadn’t worked out, or looking at my current circumstances and feeling powerless to change them. I felt caught in a loop and didn’t know how to get out.
Now I know what I want to feel, and I can choose the thoughts that lead me to feel that way. My focus and attention are on what I’m headed towards, rather than the rear-view.
What Do You Believe?
It’s hard to out-perform your self-worth, and in my experience, self-wroth is a recurring theme that impedes living our best lives. It’s not who you are that holds you back, it’s who you think you aren’t, and much of what you believe about who you are and what’s possible for you, was cemented in during your earliest years.
Does that mean you’re stuck? NO!
A fundamental piece of my work with people, teams and communities is exploring who we really are underneath all the social conditioning, the experiences that had us conclude limiting beliefs, the traumas and the systems in which we live and work.
Through this we discover so much about ourselves that we transform from the inside-out, we gain control over our own minds, connect to our power and living from this place creates exceptional results in our relationships, our health, our careers and our lives as a whole.
There is much more to say about Mindset, but suffice to say that at any stage of life, under any circumstances, Mindset work helps us develop the thinking, feeling, self-belief and habits that allow us to define what we really want, set the goal as we would a destination in a GPS, and grow into the person we’ll become on the journey to get there.