Word count: 1660
Read time: 8 minutes and so worth it!
What is mindset and how do I use it?
What is mindset? We hear that word alot but what does it mean? Your mindset is an established set of attitudes and beliefs that lead your choices in life as a human being.
What does it mean to be a human being and how to be successful as a human being?
It means knowing how to deal with adversity, how to be resilient, how to be loving, authentically communicate, live by your values, how to give up what you are holding onto that holds you back and how to accomplish great things in your life. It includes all of that. If you don't like the direction some of your experiences in life are going, creating success in those areas often means changing your mindset which means changing how you interact with yourself and how you interact with life itself. This is called growing your mindset or growth mindset.
When you know how to grow your mindset you can jolt yourself free of many things you have come to believe that in truth are holding you back. People often don’t relate to their beliefs as a belief, they often relate to their beliefs as if they are a true reality. So when you start to question your belief, you start to question your reality, what you know to be real. Take a moment and think about this.
These firmly held beliefs of yours, if you look at them, you might notice they are much more malleable than you once thought which means You can change your opinion or belief about them.
As a human being, you are constantly evolving into a new version of yourself. But often you think you are just interacting with life when in actuality you are not. With every interaction, you have you are evolving. When you look at your interactions this way and question your opinions and beliefs about them you begin to consciously evolve.
Often you hear that mindset is everything. You may disagree and say food, water and shelter are everything. Well yes, that’s true. However, it is your mindset that determines how you will go about getting that food, shelter, and water.
Your mindset is the way your mind is focused. Human beings often think they are working on achieving something but are actually achieving something else. This is why you get the results of something else. The results you don't want.
So if you want to know what you are up to in life, pick an area of your life that is not going in the direction you want it to be going. What is the “as lived “ experience you are in? You can pick one now. Get in touch with what it is like for you?
Get in touch with what is happening when you are reacting in that area of your life when you are reminded of that area of your life when you are relating in that area of your life. What is that like for you, really?
It is important to know you are constantly being guided by what is in the background of your mind. This is why mindset is so important. You often don’t succeed when you are acting from the attitudes and beliefs you hold in the background of your mind that has never been questioned.
In order to know what is happening in areas of your life you are not happy with asking yourself these questions:
What are your thoughts, the predictable thoughts you have when you are dealing with that area of your life?
What is your Emotional state? Are you depressed, angry, resentful, deflated, suppressed, depleted, afraid, or overwhelmed?
What is your physiological experience? Do you have knots in your stomach, thoughts racing., rage, constriction in your throat, pain in your body, or heaviness in your chest? Whatever you are feeling ...look at that.
Then, put all of the answers to these questions together. All of that is your experience of life in that area of your life. When you learn to process information in this way you are creating a growing awareness most of us need to have.
Ultimately you have to get in touch with yourself in this way.
What is your emotional state? physiological state and thoughts about that state?
The big mistake people make is thinking they have to get out of this “ as lived” experience of life. Which can be true but often isn't. The vast majority of people are trying to change how they feel, so they can feel better. And they think the answer is to change the relationship, the situation, the job, the other person ...to change the “as lived” experience itself.
What I am saying is the thing to change is the way you think, feel and act in that “as lived” experience.
And if you can get this, your life becomes your magic carpet where you can change your life into a higher “as lived” experience.
It’s not the experience itself that is always at fault, often, it is how you relate in thought, feeling, and action to the experience that can be at fault.
You have to be able to see things not in terms of what about the experience needs to change, or the other people that need to change but what is unique to you experience you are having and how can you change you? How can you change your thoughts, emotions, actions and physical responses to create a better experience for yourself? If you get in touch with that, you will notice your experience will be more fruitful.
You can use a relationship or marriage as an example. If you think of it as negative you might think you need to get out of it. It’s possible you do but there are other possibilities too. You may have a unique way of seeing yourself in that relationship or marriage that is making it unlikable or unbearable. This could be that you feel disrespected, unheard, unsafe, like a servant, are not important enough or you could do better. This could be anything.
You are bringing something to the party. You have the emotional state, thoughts, and physiological reactions that you are bringing to the party. The illusion is you think the problem is the party.
So let's use the party as an example. In one corner someone is alone crying, in another corner people are laughing, some have drunk too much, some are making out on the couch, some are watching everybody else. But we often don’t live like the party is what we make of it. This is all happening at the party. So what is your relationship to that party?
I am offering you a fundamental way of changing how you interact with yourself and how you interact with life itself. Which can be challenging. You can change your opinion of something and change your entire life!
Most of the life you have now is the life you built over time. Many of you think this is just the way it turned out. I want you to get you built your life brick by brick. Most likely what you have built is a set of reactions to your past; the frustrating times, the troubling times, the traumatic times. Some big problems and some small ones. What you may be living is a series of trying to solve the consequences of what you have created.
Often your behaviors go against what you say you really want. You to get triggered and reactivity takes over erasing all of the evidence you have that tells you what you really want so you can get the opposite result.
Shielding yourself from what you don't want to happen is no way to live. That is merely surviving. To truly live you must thrive.
I invite you to get present with your life right now.
What are you doing? How do you react to the experiences you have? Think of one of them right now that triggers you? What happens? Are you connecting to it from past experiences?
I want you to get the only person who can fundamentally change your life is you. The only real and meaningful way to do that is to question yourself. When you question yourself you equip yourself to be a powerful human being.
Our world however has a way of questioning and blaming everything and everyone else without ever looking at themselves. Our world has a way of believing as if it is true, that people don’t change so the experiences of the past you have had with them will also be the experiences you will have with them in your future. Many important and loving relationships have been destroyed, between husbands and wives, parents and children, relatives and friends over this complete falsity.
The most powerful way to change your life is to confront what YOU have done to it.
You can use your own life as a new template to find freedom in yourself. Whenever you are locked into a particular belief, there is no freedom to be yourself. You can only be the person who can cope with the belief you have about yourself.
The greatest work you will ever do is the work you do on yourself. The biggest casualty of your mindset is your freedom to be yourself.
If your mindset is,....this is hard, then the version of yourself that has learned how to cope with what you think is hard is the way you will deal with what's hard.
Some people give up…. It's too hard. Others say this is hard and ask the question... How can I overcome the difficulty to find my way back to ease, back to love, back to connection, back to safety, back to true happiness and belonging, back to the life I always imagined I would have?
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Warmly wishing you abundance health, happiness, and love
May you be happy
May you be healthy
May you be free from fear
May you experience love love and peace
Xoxo,
Leslie
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