Three Ways to Improve Your Mindset
We don’t realize how much our mindset affects our day-to-day activities until we become in tune with our bodies. Through practices like self-talk, mindfulness, and optimism, we can vastly improve our mental and physical health.
If your personality traits are the hardware on your computer and values are the coding, your mindset skills are the software that holds your values in place. Mindset skills, for example mindfulness (the ability to maintain attention), self-talk and optimism, are trainable, unlike personality traits. When you upgrade your mental performance skillset, it allows you to direct your actions and behaviours more effectively towards your values and, ultimately, your goals. You don’t have to listen to your inner monologue berating you for not waking up early to run, snacking too frequently, or generally not living up to your expectations; you have the power to code new, positive thought patterns. Developing mindset skills orients you towards your values, empowering you to navigate challenging situations (where coming up against roadblocks is inevitable). Invest the time in developing them, to rewrite your mindset software, and you’ll amplify your odds of success. Building these skills are a good starting point:
Why do you remember the bad things that happen in your day more clearly than the good? Why do you remember the negative comment from a friend or colleague weeks, months, even years later, but the positive ones seem to slip past? Because you’re human. In evolutionary terms, we’re hard-wired to default to negative, cautious or fearful thoughts, in order to survive. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, if you heard a snarl in the night, it was far more advantageous to err on the side of caution, than it was to put yourself in harm’s way. If you got it wrong, you were dead. Today, this evolutionary hangover is still within us.
