Why Your Mindset Matters
Your mindset can challenge you everyday.
Your mindset affects what you do, how you think, how you feel and what you actually do and so it can have a massive effect on your life.
So, if you’re thinking about making a change in your life in some way and they’re struggling with it or you’ve tried something in the past and it just hasn’t worked, there’s a good chance that your mindset could be holding you back.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
There are a number of things you can do to build the mindset you need to help you change and to attempt new challenges.
These include learning from your mistakes, developing a healthy routine, setting achievable goals and surrounding yourself with like-minded people.
“Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny”
Mahatma Gandhi
Your thoughts or beliefs shape your habits and become your future. This is something that’s interested me for a very long time and has had an impact on me.
Generally there’s eight principles that describe different features of our mindset.
Our mindset comes from habits and these come from our life experiences, different beliefs, attitudes, assumptions that we’ve formed about ourselves and the world in which we live.
Your mindset makes you see the world through a filter, your own filter, which can be different to way things really are and so can be difficult to change and often you may work hard to justify your own beliefs that may have been with you for most of your life.
Your mindset is you and influences what you say, what you do, what you think and can be developed and you can become wiser and change from a simple approach to a far more complex approach.
Your mindset, or your brain can be shaped and molded and so can go much further than you think and move past your own filter and barriers
“Once you reach a point in your life in your mind to change and you commit to it and stick with it you can start in a new direction”.
Tony Robbins
This has happened in my life which I’ll share with you shortly and has had a massive impact on myself.
When you decide to make a change, look at the mindset that you need, you can start asking yourself questions. Things like –
How are you seeing your world?
What is your filter telling you about what you are doing?
Where are you going?
Is that helping you move yourself in the direction you want to go?
Things that we do or say can become ingrained or hardwired into our minds but we can train our brain with a new skill and a new approach.
Sometimes it’s hard to make a change. We get used to doing the same thing over and over again particularly as we get older, we get a little more set in our ways.
If you can let yourself be open, change your mind and change your views, there’s a world of adventure out there.
I’ve always had a number of things that I’ve wanted to do.
One of these is CrossFit. I’ve read about it, I’ve got friends that do it. But it wasn’t until I met a local CrossFit gym owner Nathan Green from CrossFit Hijacked. He showed me what CrossFit was really about and that completly changed the story in my mind about what it was and now I’m hooked.
It fits perfectly to the type of functional strength exercise that I coach. But as I’m starting from the very beginning and learning a swag of new things every week. I’m putting myself out there, challenging myself and changing my mindset.
It’s also important to learn from your mistakes. Take the information, learn from it and make a change for the next time, to keep developing and keep growing and develop a healthy routine. While being mindful of the voices in your head that you are saying to yourself.
Are these helping you?
These words whether they are good or not so good can have a massive influence on your mind. Listen to yourself. Listen to the words that you say.
Do you find yourself saying things like “can’t” or “won’t” or “shouldn’t” or something similar, these can hold you back and keep you from moving ahead.
If you want to change and turn this around, here are a few tips –
Set goals that are achievable and realistic,
Look where you’re at and where you’re going, where do you want to go in the short, medium or long term
Small wins every now and then are far better than those huge outrageous goals that you may never quite get to and end up throwing in the towel and giving up. And this also shows that change is possible and helps to change your own self-talk, that voice in the back of your mind.
Fuel yourself with real food daily,
Move your body, get up and move around at a slow pace,
Manage your stress
Get plenty of sleep and
Be kind to yourself, as my wife always says.
“If you think differently you act differently“
See what others are doing and what they have done, talk to others helps to speed up the process and this can also help keep you accountable if you run off track every now and then. This helps change the way you think and how you approach your life.
I’ve been pretty positive for most in my life, my glass is usually half-full. But there was a time when my life was very different to this.
When I was ill, I was being tested and treated for a range of possible illnesses for many months.
I thought that western medicine could solve most of our health problems. We do some tests, we start treatment, we recover and get on with life.
But this wasn’t the case for me. I spent a lot of time on my own and the story I was telling myself changed as I became sicker and sicker.
Over the weeks and months that followed, I don’t ever remember being so low in my life and feeling so down. It wasn’t until one doctor with a different approach and treatment started to make a change.
The years that followed and the progress that I made off the back of that changed the story in my mind
Then I realized there maybe a light at the end of the tunnel and that I wasn’t actually going to die. This was a massive turnaround in my mind and also for my body.
So in order to help make a change start with your mindset first, listen to the story in your mind and question this story, is it helping or holding you back, set realistic goals and move to a healthy lifestyle.