Discover how your mindset is directly influencing your life!

Discover how your mindset is directly influencing your life!

I am a huge fan of finding ways to improve and create a fulfilling lifestyle, delving into book after book for many years. I wasn’t only interested in new things that you could do, but also curious why some individuals seem to effortlessly have what they want while others struggle day in and out. What keeps coming up, in many different ways, is how our external world is actually a reflection of our internal world. What does your world look like? 

After studying the characteristics of successful people, I found that the one commonality is not education or where they came from but rather that they all shared a similar mindset. Remember that success means something different to everyone, it is not only about wealth, but includes health, relationships, spirituality, your work, etc. If you are not seeing the success that you desire in your life, you might want to look at your mindset. 

What does this mean? Your mindset is your perspective, your assumptions, beliefs, the way that you think. This simple act, the way that you think creates your life. You might find that you do everything you think you need to; you are putting in a lot of effort but just not seeing any results. Studies have shown that 80% of the reasons we don’t achieve what we desire is internal, meaning your mindset and only dependant on external factors to a certain extent.

How did you develop the mindset that you have now? It began the moment you were born, everything that you experienced, felt, saw, heard, etc, growing up. Your family, friends, those who were close to you also played a huge part in how you see the world you live in. You developed beliefs as you grew which shaped your reality, we all live in the same world but in our own realities of this world.
The beliefs that you hold about this world, lead to the thoughts you have, the way you think about everything. Depending on what you think, you will feel good or bad and this will lead to the actions that you decide to take. The actions that you take, lead to your results you have and experience in life. If you are not happy with your results, you might want to look at the beliefs that lead to those results. 
Once you have identified your limiting beliefs, you can start to work on building a mindset geared for success. Here are four examples to get you going…
1. Be on the ‘Cause’ side of the equation and not on the ‘effect’ side. 

Being on the cause side means that you take responsibility for your results and what happens in life. You have a huge amount of influence and when you take responsibility for your results, you also become more empowered to create better results. When you find yourself playing the victim role, you are on the effect side, blaming everyone else and the world around you for how unfair life is. Decide to be in charge of your life and not at the mercy of what happens. 

2. What you focus on expands

It is easy to find that your thoughts tend to go towards the things that are not going well in life, the things that you wish were different or the things you wish you had. We give more focus to the lack, to the problems, to the issues, and what happens is that we only create more of that. If you focus on what is going well, what you are grateful for, what you are happy about, you will find that you experience more of that too. Being aware of what we are focusing on is not easy, but it is a skill that is definitely worth building. You will also feel much better on a consistent basis because your thoughts give you your feelings, so when you focus a lot on the bad things…you get the idea?

3. Challenge the way you think

We have around 70 000 thoughts a day, how many of those thoughts are limiting? When you find yourself facing a new challenge, what is your immediate thought?
Does it empower you or make you want to back down and run away? Not everything you think is a fact, in other words, not everything you think is right. Earlier, I told you that your beliefs were formed from your surroundings as you grew older, unfortunately, as well as developing good beliefs, you also developed limiting beliefs. A clear example of two different beliefs: Money is easy to make or money is difficult to make. Can you imagine how different those two lives are already just with these two different beliefs? 

4. Failure is simply feedback

The fear of failure and the consequences of a perceived failure are debilitating for many and it is the one thing that holds us back in life, even if the desire is so strong. Most of us believe failure is bad, it must be avoided at all costs and it is the worst thing that can happen, but I think we got it wrong. Failure is simply a feedback system to tell you that what you did or you are doing is not going to get you the results you want, so you must adjust your course of action until you reach success. Failure doesn’t mean you must give up; it is the outside world responding to your efforts and giving you feedback. Use failure as feedback and find the best way to achieve the success you desire. 

There are many different ways you can start to create a different mindset, and this is such great news. It was once believed that when your brain had developed, it stayed that way, it was not changeable, but neuro-plasticity has changed that all. We now know that through repetition, we can change the way we think and behave, therefore, changing our life. Can you see how your mindset is influencing your life?

What do you believe that is limiting you? What would your life be like if you didn’t believe that anymore? Working towards changing a limiting mindset now is much easier than living with the consequences of a limiting mindset later on.