Your Mindset is Everything. Learn Why Your Success Depends on it
The mind is a powerful thing. It has the power to influence virtually everything in your life. Find out how your mindset is everything to your success and happiness here.
“There isn’t a person anywhere who isn’t capable of doing more than he thinks he can.” – Henry Ford
I’m sure you have heard the word mindset before. It’s like lately, everyone is talking about it and how it is the key solution to everything in our lives.
In all honesty, they are not lying when they say “Your mindset is everything”. It’s everything in your life, in your business, in your success, and your failures.
Your Mindset is Everything and Why Your Success Depends on it
Your mindset determines what you experience and the ideas you are open to. It sets your success in life, love, and business. Your mindset can be fixed in some ways about certain situations and ideas or you might have a growth mindset that allows you to grow as a person and live a happier life.
If you aren’t clear on what a mindset is, or why it matter, you won’t know what you need to do to change or grow. In this article, you’ll learn what it is and why that matters to your success.
But you might be wondering why am I talking about this? What does this have to do with blogging?
Well, it has everything to do with blogging and that’s exactly why I decided to talk about this.
Although blogging is continually growing and being accepted as a business nowadays, it is still underestimated by many. Blogging has the tendency to be a very lonely journey and without a right and strong mindset, you will likely to fail or quit before even beginning.
That’s why I thought this topic should be one of the pillar contents of this blog. My hopes are that this will help you as much as it has helped me.
What Is a Mindset
The dictionary definition of mindset is this: a way of thinking, and/or a mental attitude or inclination.
Mindset, according to Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, is the view you adopt, which determines how you live your life, you see the world, and make decisions. In other words, it is your perspective or your view of the world. It’s your beliefs about your abilities and qualities that form how you do things or see things. It’s your normal attitude or mental state.
Simply put, your mindset is the combination of your beliefs, thoughts, emotions, assumptions and attitudes. These aren’t just your conscious thoughts and beliefs, but also what’s in your subconscious.
Your mindset encompasses how you view yourself, your place in the world, and the world around you. And that means that it determines your decisions, choices and actions, including how you relate to others and deal with stressful situations. It also influences and shapes your outcomes.
Think about your strengths or talents. Are you musically inclined? Are you wise or intuitive? Are you creative? How you answer these questions defines your mindset and provides clues as to how you view the world and yourself. Your mindset shapes your reality and your perception of what you can do and what’s out of reach for you.
Your mindset can be optimistic, negative or a mixture of both. It can be that of a person with a sunny outlook on life, an athlete’s focus on success, or a business owner’s methodical way of thinking.
Why Mindset Matters
The mindset plays a significant role in how you cope with challenges. When you were in school, if you had an open or growth mindset helped you achieve more and learn by putting in more effort. Your mindset can determine how resilient or persistent you are.
Your mindset determines how successful you will be in every area of your life. For example, someone with a growth mindset is much more likely to succeed because they are driven and believe in always aiming for bigger and better things. Those with a closed or fixed mindset become stagnant, lacking the motivation to achieve more than they already have.
Your mindset is the force behind whether you thrive or avoid challenges, how you view failures and setbacks and how you persevere toward your goals. You can change your mindset when you realize it’s keeping you stuck and unhappy.
But let’s clear up one important thing. A positive mindset, growth mindset, having the right thoughts or even an optimistic mindset does not mean, being always happy, cheerful and ignoring every negative thing that happens in your life. It’s just impossible to do, and we are not perfect.
We are just humans who at times succumb to sadness and disappointment. And we actually need those moments.
Developing the right mindset actually means knowing how to balance out the negative and positive aspects of your day-to-day routine.
Even knowing that mindset is everything, sometimes, I have a difficult time balancing my thoughts.
Starting and setting up your own business is hard and a lengthy process. Inevitably there will be days when general optimism is just impossible to keep up and it doesn’t really help much. Your level of awareness and your capacity to assess, adapt and deal with the situations, feelings, and blocks is what will define your success.
It is fine to feel, accept that what happened, happened, embrace the moment, be sad if you need to, and then go back to your awareness, learn from it and make a better decision.
1. The right mindset will set you for success and happiness.
Because instead of only seeing obstacles, problems and life’s challenges, you will see opportunities and possibilities. You won’t feel like life is happening TO you but FOR you. You won’t feel like everything and everyone is against you because you start assuming responsibility for your own actions and decisions. And most importantly you will appreciate more everything around you and you get this tendency to surround yourself with successful and positive people.
2. The right mindset will increase your Resilience and Self-confidence.
Changes are inevitable whether you like it or not. But with the right mindset, you’ll be more likely to embrace, adapt and evolve as they happen because you trust you can do it. You will be more likely to acknowledge your weaknesses and work on them, admit what’s isn’t working, and fix it and you will more likely to persist and course-correct as needed without getting stuck or quitting altogether.
3. A Positive mindset helps you overcome blocks, resistance, and challenges.
This is a lot related to the previous one. Being positive doesn’t prevent non-wanted situations, but it does change the way you deal with them. A positive mindset will help you see the blocks as opportunities to learn something from, be aware of your resistance to something and work on it and take on challenges as a way to grow and improve.
4. A growth mindset will help you make better decisions
Because you see the blocks and challenges as opportunities, you put the effort into learning and improving so you can overcome them. You start turning failure and even your fears into fuel which leads you to take courageous action. You learn from each decision and that my friend, makes you make better decisions for your business and your life.
5. The right mindset puts you in control of your thoughts, emotions, and actions.
Adopting or shifting your mindset requires a great deal of awareness of your whole self. This inevitably leads you to be able to gain control of your thoughts, emotional responses, and actions because now, you are the boss. Now you make the decisions, you decide, what to think, how to feel, and how and when to act. In my opinion, is one of the best parts of having a growth mindset.
Types of Mindsets
There are different types of mindsets. The fixed mindset and the growth mindset are the two main ones that determine how you see things.
You might have a social mindset, a fear mindset, or a lazy or envy mindset. Maybe you have a business mindset, a follower mindset, or a dreamer mindset. You can possess a creative mindset, a confident mindset, or a gratitude mindset.
Your mindset might be one of greed or anger. You can have different mindsets about different areas of your life as well.
Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset
“Remember, no more effort is required to aim high in life, to demand abundance and prosperity than is required to accept misery and poverty.” ~ Napoleon Hill
Stanford psychologist, Carol Dweck, relates in her insightful book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (not an affiliate), that there are two types of mindsets: a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. These mindsets are what we consider our personality.
Fixed Mindset
A fixed mindset is one where it’s assumed our character, creative ability and intelligence are fixed traits that cannot be changed. In other words, people with fixed mindsets believe that their basic talents, skills, and intelligence are nothing but some personality traits. These people believe their basic abilities are what you are born with and they will only ever have a certain amount.
People with a fixed mindset always want to appear intelligent since they don’t believe intelligence can be modified. They fear appearing dumb to others believing they will always look that way once others see them as being unintelligent.
Some common fixed mindset thoughts include:
- Either I’m good at something, or I’m not.
- I can’t learn now; it’s too late.
- There’s no point in trying if I’m going to fail.
- I always struggle with…
- I’m a procrastinator.
- I’m not creative.
- It’s hard for me to lose weight.
Growth Mindset
A growth mindset, on the other hand, is the belief that their abilities and intelligence is and can grow with time and experience. They believe they can become smarter, that their efforts affect their success, and with persistence, they can learn.
Those with a growth mindset believe their basic ability is only the starting point for their true potential. The growth mindset creates a passion for learning rather than a constant need for approval.
Some common growth mindset thoughts include:
- I can always become better at something through practice.
- I can learn whatever I want or need to, exactly when I need to learn it.
- I see failures as opportunities to learn, reassess, and to do better next time.
- I can always do better at something if I want to, but it will take effort.
- Determination and effort are the measures of my outcomes
- I enjoy learning and growing, and learning is a lifetime pursuit for me.
There are key differences between a fixed and a growth mindset. Challenge is one of them. A person with a fixed mindset will shy away from a challenge, often from fear of failure. They may go into hiding to avoid responsibilities. The growth mindset person is excited by challenges. They find them engaging and a key to learning something valuable from the experiences. They master the challenge and move to greater accomplishments.
Another key difference is in how each faces mistakes and feedback. A person with a fixed mindset is embarrassed by making mistakes. They blame others or become defensive when criticized. The growth mindset person sees mistakes as a learning lesson. They are less likely to take criticism personally. They are open to criticism believing it helps improve their ability to do better next time.
If you find you have a fixed mindset and you genuinely want to change, you can. It will take practice, determination, being more aware of your thoughts, and anticipating what reactions you’re likely to have to situations. With these efforts, you benefit by having a more open, growth mindset that can lead to success in every area of your life, blogging included.
What Kind of Mindset Do You Have?
“If you look at what you have in your life, you’ll always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you’ll never have enough.”- Oprah Winfrey
Your mindset is what compels you to take a certain action or leads you to refrain from acting on something. Your mindset influences how you see yourself and those around you. The various types of mindsets can mean different things to each individual, regarding how and why you think like you do. Each mindset has benefits and drawbacks.
The number of mindsets that exist is dependent on how much you generalize mindset. Finding your type of mindset is key to understanding the mindset that factors into how you operate in every single area of your life. The two main types of mindsets are Fixed mindsets and Growth mindsets. Each has benefits and downsides.
As we mentioned before, if you have a fixed mindset, you tend to believe your skills or qualities are set and cannot be changed. You have a set belief about many things including your intelligence level, and your personality or character. These people tend to limit themselves and focus on proving themselves to others.
Some of the sub-mindsets of a fixed mindset include:
- Fear mindset
- Lazy mindset
- Envy mindset
- Greed mindset
- Short-term mindset
- Angry mindset
- Follower mindset
Characteristics include:
- Blaming others for things that are wrong
- Lazy habits
- Relying on addictions
- Insatiable and always want more
- Self-absorbed, with little thought of others
- Limited initiative to achieve
- Obsessed with what others are, do or say
- Waste time
- Come across in a negative way
If you have a growth mindset you are apt to believe you have a basic set of qualities that can be cultivated and developed through your efforts, strategies and help from others.
Some of the sub-mindsets of a growth mindset include:
- Social mindset
- Business mindset
- Dreamer mindset
- Gratitude mindset
- Confident mindset
- Creative mindset
Characteristics include:
- Willing to help others
- Solve problems
- Think big and know what you want
- Feel gratitude for what you have
- Eager to learn
- Dedication to achieving and grow
- Able to change and develop skills
- Embrace challenges
- Learn from failures
Now, ask yourself the following questions to get an idea of what type of mindset you have:
- What type of mindset is the basis of your thoughts and actions?
- Do you believe that you are just this way and cannot change?
- Do you believe you can change, and things can be different for you?
The good news is you can change your mindset to one of growth and abundance.
How Changing Your Mindset Can Improve Your Life and your Business
“See yourself living in abundance and you will attract it. It always works, it works every time, with every person.” – Bob Proctor
You probably don’t constantly think about how your mindset affects your life. After all, you have always thought this way, either as a result of how you were raised or through other circumstances.
Your mindset in fact does affect your life. By changing how you think you can improve your life.
You probably already heard of all the other ways to call fixed mindset and growth mindset. Abundance mindset, scarcity mindset, fear mindset, confident mindset and many others are all different types of mindsets we have. Each unconscious and conscious belief affects our lives every moment.
According to the research of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, the power of our beliefs, both conscious and unconscious, and how changing even the simplest of them can have a profound impact on nearly every aspect of our lives.
I have experienced this myself and it’s SO true. It’s so true that trust me, I wouldn’t be sharing this with you if I hadn’t seen working on my own life and business.
It wasn’t until I understood that what was holding my business back was myself, my lack of confidence, my fear of risking, my habit of listening to other’s opinions, and thinking that I had to DIY it all; that everything started to change.
I made the decision that I could do it, that I could learn more about it, that it would require hard work but was willing to put it in, that I said no to other’s people opinions and things started to change for the better. I started seeing good things start happening, more opportunities showing up and the fear of failure started to lose strength.
When you change your mindset you become more creative, self-confident, more self-aware, more artistic, more intelligent, more successful, more athletic, and more fulfilled…
Changing your life is changing your business
Here are some ways changing your mindset to an abundance or growth mindset can improve your life.1. You aren’t afraid to step out of your comfort zone.
- Changing your mindset to one of growth allows you to see the many different paths available to you in whatever you are seeking-job advancement, creative outlets, or something more personal. This allows you to move forward rather than being stuck in the same place year after year.
- When you change your mindset, you see there is plenty of resources to go around. Even though there will be competition, you will see opportunities in every aspect of your life.
- You become comfortable sharing ideas without feeling threatened or intimidated, which leads to better choices, environments, and relationships. You aren’t afraid of being a part of a team and participating in group situations.
- Changing your mindset to one of growth helps you build better personal and romantic relationships. You realize people will always have differences. You learn that a relationship involves learning about and from each other, you grow together and develop skills to work well together.
- You’ll begin to judge yourself and others less. You won’t have time to waste judging what others are saying or doing. Instead, you’ll be focusing on making progress in your life.
- The shift to a growth mindset has you accepting constructive criticism for what it is and using it to grow. The growth mindset helps you be more confident because you won’t need validation to reassure you that you’re doing it right.
You can change your mindset.
And it will improve your life. Your skills can be cultivated, learned, practiced, and grown. You no longer worry about what will happen. Instead, you will commit to the process of doing, finishing, and learning along the way.
Changing your mindset helps you become a better person, improves your skills and helps you build relationships. You will step out of your comfort zone to go after what you want and believe you will get it.
Signs It’s Time to Change Your Mindset
“The key to abundance is to stop needing more, and to start appreciating what you already have.” – Anonymous
Everyone is talking about changing your mindset to manifest what you desire.
But how do you know when it’s time to change your mindset?
After all, you’ve been thinking the same way for as long as you can remember. Or maybe you’ve had a rough patch and your attitude has gotten out of whack.
When you start having more negative days than good ones, when you see yourself complaining all the time for every little thing, when you feel like nothing is right in your life and the whole world is wrong, then it’s time to change your mindset. These are some of the reasons you may want to change your mindset.
Our mindset is what produces the thoughts we have. That is the attitude that shapes our thinking which controls our actions and how we feel about things. If you have a negative attitude, then your thoughts start blaming and thinking the worst. When you have positive or healthy thoughts, you create a better environment for yourself and those around you.
Six Signs it’s Time to Change Your Mindset
1. You’re always focused on failure instead of succeeding.
You feel angry and disappointed over every failure without celebrating your success. You constantly see yourself as a failure, unconsciously sending negative messages to your mind that you will fail at whatever you try to accomplish.
Instead: Keep a success diary acknowledging every success each day, no matter how small.
2. You have a victim mentality.
You’ve been a victim of bad experiences or been hurt by others you love. Or you were traumatized by some events or situations in your life. You’re still holding onto those moments even though they happened many years ago.
Instead: Forgive and let go of the past.
3. You obsess about things you can’t control or change.
You complain about what you can’t control like the weather, government, traffic and other people. Your mind is filled with everything you don’t like, rather than what you can control which is yourself.
Instead: Identify how you can change and control your own actions and thoughts to make the experience more positive. Stop complaining and start taking actions that will bring you a greater sense of accomplishment and abundance.
4. You lack gratitude for what you have.
You focus on what is wrong with things or the world, or the inadequacies in yourself and others. Instead, acknowledge that no one is perfect, and everyone learns lessons as they go. Focus on identifying the positive things you are grateful for every day.
5. You have social media envy.
You see the unnatural glamorous lifestyles of other people online, and it makes you feel worse about yourself. You devalue what you have. You focus on what you don’t have or aren’t doing.
Instead: Think about what you do have and be show gratitude for it. There are billions of people on this planet and at least a billion would love to have your life.
6. You see work as a chore.
You dread going to work, complain about doing the work, or feel like it’s a burden.
Instead: view your job as a means of providing value to others and as having an impact on you and others around you. Being able to work gives you the opportunity to contribute to society.
When you realize that the reason you rarely feel happy and content is because of a negative mindset, you know it’s time to change your mindset to feel better about yourself and attract more abundance into your life.
With the right state of mind, everything is achievable. When you have a clear image in mind of what you are trying to achieve and stay positive throughout the journey, nothing can stop you. If you want different results, you have to change your mindset.
Mindset is Everything!
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