Keys to Success - Part IV
Over the past month, I’ve shared with you the first three keys to success: Faith, Purpose, and Discipline. Today, we are going to tackle the final and most critical key…Mindset. More specifically, a success mindset.
Mindset can be thought of as your outlook, your perspective, how you respond and react to what’s happening around you. The critical element is to be aware of your natural mindset shifts as you encounter both the good and the bad and to choose to focus on how you can look at the situation as one that will provide you with a learning opportunity and using that to make forward progress towards your goals. It’s true that you can’t control everything that happens to or around you, but you can control how you react and how you let it affect you.
As my career was taking off, I remember being so focused on keeping the momentum going that it rarely occurred to me to stop and consider my mindset. In hindsight, I think that was what let imposter syndrome take over. For most of us, the responsibilities that come with “adulting” are so numerous that it seems inevitable to get sucked into the vortex of the day-to-day with little to no time left for focusing on our own self-care, let alone doing the thought work necessary to pay attention to and adjust our mindset.
If we don’t take the time to recognize our mindset when we’re in this “adulting vortex”, we leave ourselves open for things like fear, imposter syndrome, and a whole host of other things to creep in and take over our mindset. So it’s imperative that we do this work. To start, simply observe your thoughts and responses to the situations you encounter. Maybe start with the most recent stressful or frustrating situation you experienced. How did you respond? What were your thoughts? Did it drag the rest of your day down and seep into other areas of your life?
It’s okay to acknowledge that a negative situation resulted in a negative response or mindset. The key is being able to recognize it. Next is where the tougher work comes into play. Instead of letting that situation pull you down, start asking yourself these questions:
What can I learn from this situation?
How could I have handled that better? Even if you weren’t the cause of the situation and there is every reason to want to place the blame on someone else, remember, you are in control of your reactions so identifying how you could have handled it in a better way for yourself regardless of any other party involved is important.
How can I leverage what I learned to avoid the same negative spiral the next time I experience a similar situation?
The goal isn’t to blame yourself or be hard on yourself, but rather to flip your mindset from one of having something happen to you to being in control of how it will affect you and what will happen next. When we slip into a negative mindset, we can’t capitalize on the growth and progress we’ve made when it comes to our faith in ourselves, the ultimate purpose and fulfillment that we have for our lives, and can even become resentful of the discipline we’ve been developing because some one or thing got in the way.
Does it make sense to hand over control of your future success to someone else? No, not at all. That is yours. So don’t let any one or thing come between you and what you are hoping to achieve. And that means not allowing those outside influences to derail your success mindset. When you feel a negative mindset shift taking place, think about the work you’ve done to build your faith and self-confidence. Think about the ultimate purpose you are pursuing. Think about the discipline you’ve worked so hard to build to get you to your end goal. And then take back control by adjusting your mindset to be more in line with all of the above so that you can make your success inevitable. You got this!