Mindset is Everything
Mindset is everything. This is the one belief I hold that has moved me away from feeling constantly offended and scared to brave, courageous, at peace, and empowered.
Because of this belief, I feel free to use my gifts, time, and energy to build a life for my family, for myself, and for my community.
Today we’re going to talk about this mindset that I have, what it is, and why I believe that it is the key to health, happiness, success, and joy on this planet.
Mindset is Everything Video by The Parenting Junkie
Here’s why I think mindset is everything.
Alchemize is my new course and coaching experience that helps you take your thoughts, fears, frustrations, and anxieties and transform them into mindsets that can actually move you forward in life, solve problems, become the person you want to be, and create the life that you want to create.
Mindset Matters!
We have about 80,000 thoughts running through our heads every day, and those thoughts are often repetitive and negative.
When you hear voices in your head that tell you you’re not enough, that you’re messing up, that you’re a failure…
When you constantly feel offended, like a victim, upset, worried, anxious, scared, fearful, and doubtful…
Your thoughts begin to shape your reality.
Changing Your Mindset is Deeply Personal For Me
Helping you work on changing your mindset, and the way we shape our reality is a deeply personal process for me.
For most of my childhood, I heard that I was overly sensitive and became offended easily. I have lived through terrible tragedies and losses, and as a result, developed severe PTSD.
Through cognitive behavioral therapy, I came to realize this core belief that I now hold:
I Believe Our Mindset Frames Our Life Experience
To illustrate how our mindset creates our life experience, I’m going to talk about the concept of framing and reframing things.
The truth is that there can be an objective reality, but how we interpret that reality is going to change the way we feel about it.
Mindset Definition – First Things First
The definition of mindset is:
If mindset is basically just our attitude, our interpretation, or our approach to any piece of information or data, let’s start by looking at how our mindset works from a visual perspective.
Our Mindset & How We Frame Things
If you aren’t familiar with the work of Jackson Pollock, he went down in history as one of the great action artists that would flick paint all over the canvas, and his paintings would sell for millions of dollars.
Whether you view his paintings framed up in the context of important 20th-century art hanging in the Met, or you view it crumpled in a pile of garbage in a really crummy part of town, you would think of it completely different.
Although the imagery remains the same, your frame of mind informs how you feel about it to a large degree.
The way in which you come across his art will frame up how you experience his art.
Curating a Positive Mindset Can Be Challenging, However
Developing a positive mindset can be tough because many of us feel our thoughts are automatic and uncontrollable.
However, I believe that one of the cool processes of maturing is the process of taking ownership of our mindsets. It’s the process of:
- exercising that right to our own choice
- how we interpret the situation
- what we choose to focus on
- what we choose to emphasize
- what we choose to believe,
- what we choose to underscore
Framing Our Parenting Experience
As parents, it’s very easy for us to feel like we’re victims. Parenting is inherently challenging and overwhelming and even though we all know we’re so blessed to have children and we’re grateful to be able to provide for them, it still can be easy to fall down in that mindset minefield where we feel like, “Why is it always me? Why is it so hard? Why does no one take care of my needs?”
Sometimes we feel trapped in our stressful, overwhelming, never-ending, relentless, and exhausting parenting experience. But the truth is no matter how blessed someone is, no matter how lucky they are, no matter how amazing their life might seem, they might still feel like a victim to their circumstances.
External Circumstances Don’t Always Link to Internal Experiences
Imagine one person who from the outside has it all. They have the fancy house with the fancy car, the amazing career, the bodily health, a beautiful partner, healthy children, but maybe they feel terribly victimized, disenfranchised, and have a hard time internally.
Then imagine a person who has everything to complain about. Life has not gone their way, they’ve been handed the worst deck of cards, and yet they seem like incredibly grateful, happy, strong-minded individuals who are not victims.
So, if there’s this asymmetry between the external reality as we perceive it, and people’s internal reality, what is the key? What differentiates them?
Changing Your Mindset for Success
The key to turning things around when we feel stuck is changing your mindset for success.
Mindset shifts can actually unlock a positive, strong, resilient, gritty, capable, overcoming attitude from the person who feels helpless.
You Have the Capacity to Change
Listen, mindset is not an easy thing to master. We have to ask ourselves what the mindsets are that are going to set us up to not feel paralyzed, anxious, stuck, etc.
I am one of those believers in people’s capacity to change when they want to. I very, very much believe in a growth mindset vs fixed mindset. We all come into the world with certain genetics and certain preloaded temperaments, but I also believe that there is endless room for switching those things on and off, or amplifying parts of us and minimizing other parts of us.
How I Changed My Own Mindset
With my own sensitivity, through deliberate thought and effort, I have managed to shape it and use it so it’s a tool that serves me, but it no longer overrides and overwhelms me.
Mindset work can help you think about how you think about things.
Through mindset work, we start to think about how we interpret things. We start to put clear order and boundaries over the chaos of our mind and we start to reign that in and actually say, “I want to be the type of person who thinks in an optimistic way. Or a realistic way. Or be the type of person who has a mindset of an overcomer. Or the type of person who has a mindset of someone who is not easily offended.”
Then we can begin to ask ourselves:
- What does that mindset look like?
- How does this person behave?
- How do I now have to start interpreting world events, relationships, my children, or myself?
That is exactly the type of work that we do inside of Alchemize.
If you feel like you don’t want to stay in a mindset of someone who is constantly feeling at the mercy of what’s going on, if you don’t want to continue feeling like a victim and feel offended and shaken no matter the reality, Alchemize is for you.
Mindset is a Choice
Wayne Dyer said, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
I want you to remember that in any given situation, you have a choice about your mindset around it. You have a choice about how you want to think about it.
And that is the ultimate choice of growing up. That’s the ultimate choice of being an adult.
It’s the Difference Between Reaction and Response
It’s tough because this is all in our heads – it’s old, personal, internal work! It’s so much easier to say, “it’s my kid, it’s my husband, it’s my wife. It’s the media..” But even if it’s true, it is disempowering to think that we can’t fix the problem so therefore we’re stuck.
When I was living in Jerusalem, I couldn’t fix the terror, but I could work on my own mindset around it, and learn to develop a strong mindset, and learn to handle fears, and learn to handle anxieties, and learn to dismantle hallucinations, and learn to dismantle and end nightmares…
That’s what I could do. I could not change the reality on the outside, but I could bolster up my mindset, get the tools that were necessary, and fill up my backpack with things that could help me navigate that journey.
We Can’t Control the World, but we Can Control Ourselves
That’s where I’m at with my personal work, with my work in parenting, with my work in marriage, and so on. There’s still a lot of work to be done. However, I don’t feel at all helpless.
I feel very empowered in my ability to work on myself, my own approach, my own mindset, my own way of thinking about things, my own interpretations, and attitudes.
Mindset work has transformed my day to day life.
I have moved away from feeling constantly offended and scared into a place where I feel courageous, at peace, and empowered to go out and use my gifts, time, and energy to create a life that I would like to see for my family, for myself, for my community, and hopefully one day for the world at large.
THAT is Why I Say Mindset is Everything!
If you are convinced that mindset is everything too, and it’s a tool that you really want to master and begin to grasp and understand, I welcome you to Alchemize.
Do you believe that mindset is everything? Why or why not?
Let’s discuss in the comments below!
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