New Year, New Mindset
Life is always changing, so shouldn't the way we see it change, too?
But how do you change your mindset?
Modern sciences have shown us that the human brain is a vast arena and at times it is difficult to manage . Creating a mindset that reflects our personality and who we want to be, gives us a default to fall on when our minds and emotions drift from our control.
Whether you want a new mindset or are trying to keep inline with your current one, reassessing how you view the world on a regular basis will only help you achieve your goals and live the kind of life that you want.
Quick review, what is mindset again? Well if life is a series of movies and we are all starring in our own multi-film franchise, I'd like to think of mindset as the tone of those films, the underlying feeling that is driving each scene and our character. Tone shifts a morphs as our stories unfold but a good film has a solid foundational feel from start to finish. As so, when thinking of mindset it is important to consider our big goals and dreams, not just those in the near future.
Renowned psychologist and leading thinker Carol Dweck provides us the idea of a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed one. A growth mindset means a tone that is moving our story forward, keeping it interesting and allowing us to learn more. It means accepting that some days the tone might feel dull or extremely difficult, but in it all we are learning and progressing towards success, you know, Oscar worthy success.
Mindset is what influences our daily thoughts and actions. A mindset can be complex, yet simple; experience based, or entirely new; common, but unique. And with repetition, imagination, and healthy thinking patterns, we can empower ourselves to create new tones, new mindsets in our life that will help us move in the directions that we desire.
The tone to your current movie can be many things, here are five tips to creating or recreating your mindset for the new year.
New mindset first tip -
In this moment, what are your top three?
What are the top three in life that bring value and meaning to it. Think of the moments when you are most at ease, happy, content. These can be general or specific, conceptual or physical; think people (family, employees, students), entities (your business, soccer team, or church), concepts (creativity, exploration, intelligence), actions (writing, singing, surfing) or even physical things, whatever it may be that holds merit in your current existence.
For some of us this changes often, for others not much. If you have a hard time thinking of just three, try zooming out, make it more general, what do your values have in common? For example: your work, family, softball team, and best friends may seem like different attractions but what they share in your life is a sense of stability, a value of security & safeness. That’s one top three…
Mentally reassessing what brings value to our lives allows our conscious and subconscious thought to flow in the direction of maintaining those positive influences. It creates a mold that our mindset can fit, to better tune the tone of our stories towards what brings us joy.
New mindset second tip -
Notice how you experience time in parts of your life.
Time is a driving factor in our lives, yet we all can experience it differently. Think about the time you spend at work, at home, with your family, friends, with your pets, with yourself... In what parts of your life does time feel too fast or too slow? How can you improve those time flows? Speed things up, slow things down. Maybe you realize you need to eliminate that time flow all together; do something different.
Our brains often want to make Time out to be a ruler of our lives, but in reality we control how time exists. A part of resetting your mindset is reevaluating your control over time and understanding that any given time flow of your life might take a few moments to change, but once you start thinking about it, it will eventually change.
"A part of resetting your mindset is reevaluating your control over time..."
Three -
For about a week, ask yourself often: “is this fun?”
Sometime it feels like something can only either be fun or not, but in reality positive and negative emotions do not need to balance out. It is possible to live a life filled with more positive, happy, fun emotions. This starts with recognizing the most fun and fulfilling parts of your life while sub sequentially understanding the lack of those parts.
This one can be tricky because of course not everything we do can be fun, and there are different levels of fun. Maybe writing this blog is fun for me but so are adventurous vacations, because of my desired lifestyle, one will be more frequent than the other. Fun is where our beings feel more free, joyful, and engaged. No one wants to watch a not-fun, boring movie. That defeats the entire purpose of watching a movie. But boring is different to everyone so when recreating your mindset, it is important to find a tone that leans towards your kind of fun.
Whether your reasons for wanting a new mindset are specific or more general, figuring out what brings you some sense of joy and what does not will ultimately guide you in your desired direction. After about a week, it will become more of a habit, making it that much easier to keep your mindset in the tone that you want. And if you feel it slipping away, start asking yourself again for another few weeks.
Fourth tip -
If you created a person from your gratitude, what kind of person would they be?
This might feel like a weird one but try it. For me, Gratitude would be calm, cool, and collected. She would be full of knowledge from a unique career, happiness from her created life, overflowing with self-confidence and a desire to give.
Think of this tip as a different way to explore what you are grateful for. Trying to attribute character traits to things you are thankful for in your life forces a zoomed out look, allowing your mind to understand what has led you to that gratitude.
This new formed person is someone who you want around often. They bring a sense of joy and perspective to the everyday routines and help your mindset stay in the direction that you want it.
New mindset tip five -
Understand the types of action in your life story, and think more thoughts that lead to positive action.
In a movie script, action can take many forms. It is how a character moves, when, where and the types of interactions they are having with other characters or themselves. When that script is brought to screen, all of these action pieces come together to create the illusion that what is really driving the character are their own thoughts.
In real life, that is just the case. What is driving our action is thought, but not all thought is important, and not all actions are significant.
When creating a new mindset, you must reflect on your actions and imagine your actions. Start by considering moments from the past that felt inline with the mindset you want to create today. What kinds of thoughts and thought patterns led to those moments? What would you have changed to render a different result?
Now take those thoughts into the future. Generally think about the kinds of things you want to accomplish and bring those past positive emotions into that future thought, while changing them to fit that new picture. What will your thought patterns look like in these future moments? Sometimes I start by thinking of about the future stuff first and then looking at the past for positive thought patterns that might help.
Remember, you are creating a new mindset, all of these five tips are brainwork, purposeful, mindful thinking. How long you want to spend in that thinking is up to you. For this tip, I would suggest mindfully zoning into your thoughts in a peaceful environment for about twenty to forty minutes. along the way, imagine and create the thinking that you want but do not see!
Along the way do not forget to imagine and create the thoughts that you want but may not find.
The idea of mindset is already abstract and complex. To find ways to change it means allowing ourselves to think abstractly, complexly, and overall imaginatively. Finding ways to take a few steps back and outside the perspective of our lives, makes it possible for us to recreate and edit out mindsets as often as we would like.
After you try these mindset changing tips, share your success with a thought below. Cheers to a new year, new mindset.