Mastering your Mindset

Feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or frustrated in your everyday life is not unusual. But did you know that this could be caused by your mindset?

Defined as a ‘set of attitudes or fixed ideas that somebody has and that are often difficult to change’, from our behaviours to our overall performance, our mindset influences how we operate as people, which in turn feeds into how we see the world. If you’re struggling with your mindset or have been looking for a way to improve it, we have a few tips and tricks to help you master your mindset:

Recognising negative thoughts

We all have those little voices in our minds that can be negative. These voices can judge us, criticize us, and generally just limit our mindset potential. This can prevent us from doing new things and progressing in our behaviours and attitudes.

A step towards improving your mindset includes learning how to identify these negative thoughts and bringing awareness to when they are beginning to take over. Mastering this skill will help you feel empowered and allow you to start new and exciting projects that you might not have considered before!

Positive Self-talk

If those little voices are becoming hard to silence, there is another way that you could make these more positive. Think of some negative self-talk that you may hear on a regular basis (for example, “You’re going to fail”), then write this in a more positive and expansive way (“Even if I do fail, I still tried and will learn how to get better”). Following this thought process will help to drown out your negative thoughts, and once again help you to progress and reach new levels in your personal and professional life.

Recognise what you can control and change

Situations can become overwhelming and out of control, and this can make us feel powerless. However, it’s very important to recognise these situations and determine which aspects you can take control of and pay these the most attention.

Our brains are used to familiarity and will become used to how things are and sometimes are not willing to change. Although it could take a while, just saying these things aloud and starting to take charge of certain things that may be overwhelming you is a key part of mastering your mindset. Recognise yourself as someone who can control and manage limits within your life, and this will open you to new, unfamiliar, and exploratory ideas.

Meditation & mindfulness

Meditating is a known and recognised practice to help observe your thoughts and shift your perspective. Some consider meditation to be practiced in a quiet room whilst sitting on the floor with lots of candles surrounding you, but in this context, it’s better to practice meditative skills in stressful situations.

Before or during a stressful situation, let’s take sitting in traffic for example, take the time to think, step away from negative or judgmental thoughts and bring yourself back to the present moment.

A good technique to try first is to rub your index finger against your thumb and start to feel the individual ridges of your fingerprint. Focusing on these sensations will help to ground your thoughts and break any negative cycles you are going through.

Appreciation

When considering mastering your mindset, you should always have the word ‘appreciate’ in your thoughts. This will help to bring the part of yourself that can appreciate the good in any situation, even in very negative circumstances.

If you don’t feel ready to start appreciating situations in the present moment, a good place to start is to think about things in the past that have brought you to where you are today. You may have been let go from a job, but then this could have led you to the job of your dreams! There will be situations that are easier to appreciate than others, but there will always be a silver lining, and even if this takes a while to find, it will be worthwhile.

We’re not your typical Virtual Assistant service; our team take a highly strategic and coaching approach which can help you to both master your workload and your mindset. Get in touch to find out more and arrange a discovery call today.