How to Change Your Mindset and Achieve Success
You can change your mindset. Doing so will open up pathways to professional success and personal fulfillment that you may have never thought possible.
It starts with claiming your power to choose how you see the world—and how you respond to it.
Is your mindset holding you back?
To begin with, what exactly is a “mindset?”
Let the great English poet John Milton explain: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven.”
Experts agree that your mindset consists of the beliefs you’ve collected over time that shape how you view the world and your place in it. Your mindset is one of the primary drivers of your behavior and attitude in any specific situation.
Depending on your mindset, you might experience the world as a place of wonder, filled with limitless potential for yourself and others. Or you might see it as a place of limitation, conflict, and endless competition for scarce resources—with yourself trapped in an existence where no matter what you do, you just can’t get ahead.
Fixed and growth mindsets
People who study mindset distinguish between a “fixed” mindset, which focuses on the belief that your abilities are innate and pre-set, and a “growth” mindset, which concentrates on the belief that you can learn to develop your intelligence, empathy, and talent beyond perceived limitations.
Authority figures may have put fixed labels on you in the past, and you may continue to fixate on those labels. Without even realizing it, you may have built your whole personality around this negative self-talk as you allowed circumstances to dictate the course of your life. Your goal now is to develop a growth mindset that allows you to shed these unproductive views of the world and embrace your innate curiosity, courage, and self-confidence.
Mindset helps to shape reality
Interdisciplinary researchers at Stanford University and other renowned institutions continue to expand our knowledge of the critical role that mindset plays in determining the course of our health, happiness, and long-term success.
Scientists have noted that the human mind is far from a passive machine, watching the world go by. They have learned that our minds can actually help to shape reality. Physicians have long understood the placebo effect, wherein patients feel better after being given a neutral substance due to the belief that it is a powerful treatment. People can also be taught to change their mindset in order to relieve physical pain.
And educators and social scientists offer numerous examples of how a more positive mindset can help children learn, boost motivation in the workplace, and even ease conflicts among people who view one another as bitter enemies.
The journey forward
So how do you break free of a fixed, limiting, fear-based mindset and learn to tap into the abundance around you to achieve your personal vision of success?
Listen to your inner voice. Is it supportive of the person you want to be, or does it uselessly chide you about the ways you fall short? Rather than ruminating on your shortcomings, name and confront these negative thoughts for what they are: vestiges of the past that are only holding you back.
Allow yourself to face up to areas where you genuinely need to develop, while keeping the focus on your journey toward success and fulfillment. Journaling may be helpful here, as you record your thoughts and make a conscious effort to reshape them.
Learn how to better manage situations where you face criticism. Keep your sights set on the actions you take to accept responsibility and solve problems, rather than on any negative “fixed” traits you supposedly possess. Allow yourself to trade your go-to behaviors for more productive ones that can help you turn any instance of criticism into a prompt toward life-changing growth.
Practice mindfulness
Build a daily practice of mindfulness and attention in which you rein in your automatic emotional reactions and replace them with thoughtful analysis. Yes, this happened. Now it’s time to look at why it happened and what tools you have to do better the next time.
Focus on what you are learning from experiences that may seem negative. Instead of diving back into a self-protective shell, push yourself to own up to these experiences and find ways of gaining strength and insight from them. Learning to live this way involves risk, but know that taking the risk will pay off. You’ll gain the respect and trust of the people who are important in your life—including yourself.
Develop your capacity to experience challenges as opportunities. Even when you’d rather avoid a challenge, make yourself step up. Learn everything you can from it. And understand that each time you accept a challenge, you become more capable of outperforming the next one.
Be patient and understanding of yourself. Nothing worthwhile—least of all developing a new mindset—happens in an instant. Learn to love the journey of learning and growing that you are on, setbacks and all.
Through its Heart of the Samurai course and other workshops and retreats, the Klemmer team offers training designed to help you change your mindset and bring out your dormant leadership qualities.
In conclusion
You’ll learn to confront mindset limitations that have solidified through force of habit. You’ll see new ways to embrace a world of abundance and possibility in both your personal and your professional lives. The experiences you’ll take part in will lead you to establish positive new habits, anchored in a new mindset that best reflects who you want to be going forward.
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