Do You Want to Know How to Upgrade Your Mindset For success?
Are you stuck with negative self-talk or lack of confidence? This behavior can be quite common and the question is why do we have this and what are the ways to upgrade our mindset and brain for success.
I’ve read many books, research countless articles, listen to countless podcasts and have come up with the following 10 effective was to upgrade your mindset. I will cover the psychological aspects, physical and neurological aspects and steps to making the upgrade
1. Change Your Fixed Mindset to a Growth Mindset.
Depending on whether you have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset you can be limit opportunities for growth and development. Author Carol Dweck, in the book Mindset, talks about a person having a fixed mindset as someone who believes your abilities a pre-determined. The way I interpret this is you are born with your intelligence and cannot develop them. How wrong is this, right? The people with a growth mindset believe you can increase your intelligence with hard work and effort. The key point is the people who have a growth mindset are not scared to make mistakes and are willing to learn from their mistakes and grow. This is a very important point. I’ve included a TED Talk by Carol Dwek about Developing a Growth Mindset.
2. Remove Your Limiting Beliefs will Help You Grow Your Mindset
Following on from a fixed and growth mindset, a lot of people have a limiting belief and have self-doubt. They believe the person next to them knows more for some strange reason and do not think they are good enough. This seems strange but it is very common and you and I may not even know it. The takeaway here is to remind yourself you are better than you think you are and believe your abilities.
3. Begin With the End in Mind
This is habit 2 of Stephen Covey’s 7 habits of highly effective people. My take on this is to work out your end goal first. Be clear on where you are going. When you are driving on the road you need an endpoint to set on your GPS. If you do not know where you want to you go will be wandering around aimless both while driving and in life. Set goals and focus on them.
4. Steve Jobs’ one simple fact that will change your life
In an old Steve Jobs interview he came up with a line of wisdom that is very inspiring and I thought I will share it here.
“Everything around you that your call life is made by people who were no smarter than you.” – Steve Jobs. I’ve attached the link here for you to view. Click here to view the entire video.
5. Did You Know That You Can Grow Your Brain?
Well, I don’t mean growing from the lab. Years ago many people believe that the brain cannot grow or develop. More recent research has disproven this “fact”. A lot of people still do not know this point.
The researcher took a brain scan of London Taxi Drivers and found the longer the taxi driver had experience driving in London, the larger the Hippocampus grew. Hippocampus is the region of the brain that is the source of spatial navigation ability. The more demands the taxi driver had on the brain to navigate the London streets the more the area of the brain that was responsible for that function grew. Amazing right?
6. You Can Speed Up Your Brain?
You can increase your brain’s speed using intense focus. This process is called Myelination.
When you focus on a subject intensely over time your brain develops myelin. Myelin can transmit information 10 times faster than normal. Once you increase your brain’s myelin the next thing you can do is to Rewire it. What does this mean? My interruption is if you can train the intensity of your focus you can increase the processing speed of your brain.
7. Can We Re-wire Our Brains?
Did you know you can re-wire neighboring brain sections by simulating the section next to it? One study showed when a person practices guitar for hundred of hours they were able to light up the region of their brain not only in control of the fingers but also their palms. While a person who occasionally plays guitar and conducted the same study only had the region of the brain activated responsible for the fingers. The takeaway is intense practice using one section of the brain and simulates a neighboring region of the brain. Well, how to does help me? I believe exercising our brains will help it develop. Imagine going to the gym and do a workout. What is the result?
8. Can Grit Determine Your Success?
Angela Ducksworth in her by Grit talks about how talent is developed. There are traditionally two schools of thought. One is talent is born and the other is talent can be developed. In her book, Angela researches a large number of successful people and came up with the following formula for success.
Talent x Effort = Skill
Skill x Effort = Achievement
Resistant to Grit is strong. Angela comes up with the following way to overcome this:
1. Develop a fascination with what you are trying to do.
Try to find something that fascinates you and keep thinking about questions about it
2. Daily Improvements
Compete with yourself. Improve yourself can compare with who you were yesterday. The goal is to beat yourself yesterday. Push your ability
3. Greater Purpose
Research shows having a higher level of purpose relates to the higher level of Grit.
My take is in order to be successful we need to remove the mindset where talent is born and acknowledge it can be developed. While talent plays apart effort is twice as more important. To overcome the resistant of grit we need to be fascinated by what we do, make daily incremental improvements and focus on the Why(our purpose)
9. What is Mental Contrasting?
While we have all heard of positive thinking is a way to lead us to a path of success, Gabriele Oettingen in the book The New Science of Motivation: Re-thinking Positive Thinking puts a new spin on this common wisdom. Gabriele argues focusing just on positive thinking alone doesn’t get you too far. In a study involving women, a box of doughnuts and terrible cravings came up with a surprising result. Gabriele concluded visualizing a positive outcome while simultaneously visualizing an internal struggle that might jeopardize your goal. People with mental contrasting they trigger subconscious motivating to achieve the goals. By having contrasting visions of both success and a vision of struggle, you are making your subconscious to admit you are struggling to make you more resilient, and more likely to achieve your goal.
10. Using Implementation Intentions to Power Your Grit
In addition to Mental Contrasting, a technique known as Implementation Intentions has been shown to improve your Grit. By having an explicit statement of when, where and how you will plan and take action towards your goal, you will have a higher chance to achieve it.
TIP: By combine mental contrasting and implementation intentions, studies have shown a 20% increase in the success of goals when applying both techniques
Conclusion
I believe it all begins with the mindset and how we think about our abilities. If our mindset is fixed, no matter what evidence or coaching you receive you will not push through outside the box. Once we have a fundamental shift in how we think our minds and brain works then the key is to use some of the useful tips in this article to move ahead. The content in this article is quite dense and requires some time to digest. I will include some of the books and resources mentioned in this article below. I recommend you read some of these books so you can get a deeper understanding of each of the areas.