Like many, you aspire to success in your projects and in your personal life. Your personal fulfillment is within reach, but between you and the best version of yourself, there is a major obstacle: your state of mind. The mindset is both the best weapon and the biggest obstacle to success. Fear, negativity, keep you from fully expressing yourself! The most classic option is to stay that way and wait for things to change, taking no risks, without trying to get out of your comfort zone. If The most logical option, change, seems so difficult to you, it is because you have created limits for yourself over time; or we made them for you! This article discusses the mechanics of changing your mindset in order to reveal your true abilities. The process takes time, willpower, discipline like all things of value. I advise you to read the whole thing to understand the deep substance, but if you are in a hurry, I have prepared a top 15 useful practices to change your mindset into a positive one.
Learned Incapacity/Learned Helplessness
“I could never do this…”, “you are worth nothing…”, “You will achieve nothing in life”, “this job is not for someone like you.. ., “How can you expect to succeed in this…?” These expressions are learned incapacity. Learned helplessness is a feeling of permanent and general helplessness that results from experience. This feeling is caused by being immersed, permanently or repeatedly, in situations in which you cannot act and from which you cannot escape.
It is a brainwashing; it is a state of resignation where the loss of esteem rubs shoulders with paralysis of decision and depression. Learned incapacity is a cancer of the mind, an anesthetic of action, a gangrene of the will. Knowing and understanding this notion is the first step to opposing it; Knowing yourself and identifying your “limiting” thoughts is an even more powerful tool. In this, self-awareness is a very useful weapon: it is the awareness of being, of thinking, of feeling. This mindfulness of reality allows you to identify and objectively critique negative and limiting thoughts in order to come up with a more favorable and far more positive alternative!
Impose the positive!!
The good news is that if the mechanic works toward negativity, it also works toward positivity. And here we are going to address the “brain hack”.
The brain is a formidable and extraordinary entity in many respects. The complexity of the prefrontal cortex is incredible, but this exceptional calculator, capable of generating over 35,000 thoughts a day, also has big “loopholes” that you can exploit. The one that interests us today is the brain’s inability to differentiate between real and fake! So if you behave as if everything is fine, the brain will end up creating positive thoughts, synthesizing neurotransmitters of well-being, etc. to sum up, if you have a positive attitude, then you will end up really becoming positive.
Power postures are open positions of power to increase your confidence, your charisma, your influence. They reflect on your subject the image of someone sure of himself, even if you have legitimate fears. These positions also lower the level of cortisol, the stress hormone. Here are three simple and effective positions:
- V 4 Victory: Stand with your legs hip-width apart and your arms in the air to form the letter V for “victory”. winning position, it brings strength and energy.
- Super Man: Standing, torso straight, legs apart, hands on hips, chin slightly up: This pose brings confidence before the action.
- Dominant: Standing slightly bent over a table or desk with arms outstretched. Used to dominate your audience and provide a persuasive effect.
So when the situation requires it, take positive attitudes.
Another positive behavior is smiling. By dint of smiling, your brain will end up synthesizing more serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins: these are “happiness” neurotransmitters.
The morning mantra on waking is a positive formula that guides you. Repeat it every morning for it to become your reality! Ali the boxer repeated to himself every day: “I am the best”! Take inspiration from someone you admire for their willpower, selflessness, resilience etc. Find a mantra that resonates within you like a deep aspiration!
Half full glass mindset
The way of perceiving reality matters a lot in terms of positive mindset. Most often negativity arises from a certain view of things. Seeing the negative is easy when you have too high expectations. Planning is necessary, but thinking that you deserve a positive outcome because you put in the effort is a misperception of reality. In fact, merit is a human design. The universe will not turn in the direction you want, because you made an effort or made a decision that you considered legitimate. Thus, by putting your expectations into perspective, you allow yourself to shift your paradigm and perceive things differently, through the prism of what you have and not by thinking about what you could have got! Let’s take the example of failure: You think you’re going to fail, you suffer from it; you lock yourself into the negative and you end up failing! By continuing to call “failure” a test of life, you stay in the negative! By calling it “opportunity” you turn that experience into something rewarding! Failure is the best of masters! Real failure is when you don’t learn something of value!
Also tell yourself that things could have been worse. In fact, find a balance and accept reality!
Stoic acceptance of reality
Accepting reality and focusing on what is within your control is a simple expression of positivism. Negativity arises from your own unrealistic expectations! Wanting what is beyond your control is pain and it reinforces the negative. Not fighting against reality and accepting what happens is a strength. Based on the truth of the moment, you live in the present’s reality. Optimism is not just about thinking it will be better afterwards but also about knowing that it’s okay because that’s the way it should be!
There is, however, a profound difference between stoic acceptance and resignation!
Resignation is the abandonment of the will to move forward, it is a confinement on yourself and on your situation; it is a passive attitude.
Conversely, stoic acceptance of reality is an active process of doing the best you can with what is available to you. It is not giving up, but of adapting to the situation. It’s about focusing on what’s in your power, valuing it and making it positive.
Reserve clause and negative visualization
Negativity comes from unrealistic expectations! So, preparing for the possibility of failure is one way to stay positive! The visualization of negative events allows you to be acutely aware of things and offers you the possibility of finding countermeasures if possible.
The reserve clause is the awareness of having control only over the process, not over the result: thus you have the obligation to do your best, again and again, but you must know this does not guarantee the future success you believe you deserve!
Understanding the mechanics of this world on the scale of passing time is important, we think of the world on our scale: we count in ten years in a world that preceded us by millions of years and which should survive us a few million more!
On the time scale, we are nothing and we want everything.
A realistic view of your place in this world is a way to ground yourself positively in reality by visualizing the negative and having realistic expectations! It shouldn’t stop you from taking action, but it should stop you from thinking you deserve something in return!
Find your happiness in the perfect execution of the process, not in the result that is out of your control!
Get used to and love hard way
Anything of value takes effort and work! Even if you won a million by chance at the casino or by a donation from Uncle André of which you would be the sole heir, it would take an effort not to lose this money and to value it! Thus the hard way is misnamed: it is only “hard” because in the collective imagination, it would be possible to achieve easily! In reality, you need a continuum of effort, learning, work, failures, successive refinements to achieve your goals! It’s the only truly safe path because you can’t control the results, only the process as we discussed in the previous point!
You must be grateful for the chance to improve yourself through the obstacles you encounter, they allow you to become better: Remember that Hercules would not be Hercules without the twelve labors!
Hormesis
Stoic philosophers believed that a valuable practice was to voluntarily experience some discomfort in order to ground oneself in reality and not lose sight of the essentials of life. In ancient times, people went further and ingested low doses of poison in order to guard against poisoning (this was common practice). Today we have vaccines! By refocusing the subject on positivity, I would say that putting yourself in difficulty voluntarily allows you to remember the fleetingness of things, the consistency of reality and thus to objectively criticize the negativity that can invade you.
The law of hormesis states that a living body subjected to non-lethal doses of stress or toxins, stimulates its defenses and strengthens: Thus what does not kill strengthens. It values the idea that the obstacle (the hard way) is the path to success because it allows you to improve as you overcome the obstacles. Ultimately, the difficulty is overwhelmingly positive!
Fight and reframe your fears
Fear is the biggest obstacle to the positive, it locks you into a vicious circle of negativity. Yet the fact is that you suffer more from your imagination than from reality! You imagine things that may never happen, but your irrational fears have real consequences in your life: negativity, decision paralysis, stress, depression.
Fear is the consequence of your lack of control over the future in particular: by grounding yourself in the reality of the present and not desiring things beyond your control, you inhibit the source of your fear. Eckhart Tolle wrote an entire book on the subject “the power of now”. You must give up your will to control things beyond your control! You want to keep a job, a way of life, your spouse, etc: This is not in your power and it creates situations of irrational fears because you cannot fight reality, only accept it and adapt to the truth of the moment!
The power of passions
Having a passion is something positive that translates positively into your mindset! Whatever the passion, it can be athletics, chess, fishing, dancing, music, monopoly, whatever in the end. The point is to have a way to discharge your negativity and fill you with positive energy! A passion can be time-consuming and all-consuming, find a balance. Some say they have no passions, this can be understood but most often it results from comparison to others. Some spend hours training and in fact, you tell yourself that taking a few photos of birds on the weekend is not the same intensity of passion… Let’s call it an occupation if you prefer: the aim n It’s not to spend whole hours but to derive a benefit from it, a well-being, a positive impact on your state of mind: If that’s the case then that’s good. An occupation can also be emptiness: The absence of activity in order to provide you with a reflective space to probe the depths of your mind and thoughts. Meditation is a tool for this exploration!
Kindness and empathy for others
We are emotional beings, in fact many of our behaviors are dictated by the emotions that drive us (and direct us more often than we think). As we have established, there is behavioral feedback on feeling and thinking. So behaving and acting with benevolence and empathy has superpositive effects on the mindset!
It’s not about turning yourself into a love bear, but about taking beneficial actions without expecting a return at all: smiling at a stranger and being pleasant, giving up your seat on the bus, helping a beautiful young woman not for her beauty and having her number but because it was the right thing to do in the moment, to donate blood because it will be useful to someone somewhere… This type of action builds an aura around you and if you behave positively, you will feel more positive!
Create Meaning
How lost in the frantic pursuit of happiness, of that happiness to which they were entitled! The right to happiness is such a human view of reality! So utopian! As if we had the power to control this! Instead of having the right to be happy, we have been inculcated with the duty and the obligation to be! And what happens when we consider being happy? We are afraid of losing this state or we want even more.
It’s hedonic adaptation, the process by which you fantasize about buying a tesla X and you don’t feel happy to have it after a few weeks… So goes happiness, fluctuating because of our fickleness to be satisfied!
Unlike happiness, creating a strong meaning is a way to anchor yourself in reality for a long time. Understand their “why”, know what you are here for or convince yourself to be here for something that you will have defined according to your core values. Knowing the core values that define you as a human being is a great way to understand your path in this changing world!
Being part of something bigger and stronger than you is one way to create incredible meaning, driving change and positivity! No more room for a negative and distorted view of reality because you know what kind of person you are, why you do what you do and what expectations you may have. The correct answer to the last point is: no expectation. Just the absolute, positive enjoyment of doing what needs to be done!
