The #1 Thing to Master

The #1 Thing to Master

Before the pandemic, having a strong mindset might have seemed like a "nice to have" or a "soft skill," but if we learned nothing else during the bleak months we are all eager to put behind us, it’s that mindset is the #1 thing we need to master.?Having a resilient mindset is the difference between taking to bed or taking a risk, between building new ventures or bemoaning lost opportunities.

We know it's important to boost our physical core strength with regular exercise and intentional practices like yoga, sit ups or weights. So why don’t we also build mindset core strength intentionally? We can do this by adopting mindset practices that make us more resilient, positive, and proactive. Practices like gratitude, meditation, replacing limiting beliefs with empowering ones, and visualizing success are just a few of the ways millions of people are doing just that.

When the coronavirus raged in the spring of 2020 and lockdown toppled states like a twisted game of dominos, people who had established mindset practices were able to stay focused, hold space for their families and team, find solutions, and keep moving forward. Some of the business owners in the Million Dollar Women community, like Kelly who has a healthcare-focused marketing firm in Florida, and Brit who has a gym in Texas that went virtual, led their companies to have their highest revenues ever. Other business owners like Aliya, a stylist in New York, and Patricia, who has a boutique publishing company in Washington State, used the downtime to restructure their companies for faster growth, boost their social media presence and create new virtual products and services they can sell in 2021 and beyond.

Success in business is 80% mindset and 20% skillset.

In other words, who makes it is often a question of confidence, not competence. It’s not that we?can’t?overcome mindset challenges, but we don’t always know?how. I have been studying mindset for the past 15 years and using mindset shifting techniques with my coaching clients and the Million Dollar Women community.

I define the Go Big Mindset as:

A set of beliefs that allow you to stay positive, overcome any obstacle and reach your goals.

If you have heard of the “growth mindset”, this picks up where that leaves off. It’s a very practical and tactical method of building mindset core strength.

Here’s a mindset practice you can try right away called Be-Do Have:

Most people operate from the mindset of?Have-Do-Be, which sounds something like this: “If I only HAD more [money, time, love, formal education], then I could DO [go on vacation, find a partner, make more money, run a more successful business], and then I could BE [happy, successful, feel loved].”

But when you want to quickly reach your goals, the fastest way to accelerate change is to embrace the exact opposite of that. It’s called?Be-Do-Have (one of the eight practices I teach in my new book, Go Big Now ), which sounds like this: “If I want to BE [happy, successful, loved] then I need to DO [create more joy, behave like a successful person would, generate love] and then I will HAVE [happiness, success, love].”

When I had the idea to write a book five years ago about what it would take for more women to get to $1M in revenues, I immediately ran into limiting beliefs like, “I am not an author. I am not famous. I am not a public figure.” and that led to, “Who am I to write a book?” The entire project could have ended there. But instead, I challenged myself to ask who would I need to BE in order to make an impact on helping more women reach $1M?

I wondered what someone who was BE-ing a change agent would be DO-ing? Perhaps she would be writing articles about the topic, teaching workshops, and learning all the stats so she could share them? I started DO-ing all three of these things, which led to creating a fundraising workshop I taught in my conference room on weekends that graduated 75+ women over three years and they raised a collective $15M for their businesses. That felt great - and having that impact gave me the courage to write a proposal for the book. When I made my way into the office of an editor at a top publishing company in New York, my limiting beliefs kicked back up again and I fully anticipated she would turn me down. But here is what she said: “I have a stack of proposals on my desk on this same topic. But I want to work with you because you are clearly an expert in this space. I read your blog posts and see you have been teaching the last three years.”

I Be-Do-Have’d my way into writing Million Dollar Women and having the very thing I thought I couldn’t have. And then the editor offered me a seven-figure advance! I nearly fell out of my chair and it was the perfect illustration of the power of this mindset practice. If I had waited until I had all the things I thought I needed, I never would have started DO-ing (teaching, learning, and writing). Because I did start with the DE and the DO, I wound up getting the HAVE that I set out to achieve in the first place.

You can start practicing this mindset right now. Take a moment and identify a Have-Do-Be statement you have said or thought about recently (I don’t have the right education or I don’t have enough family support or I don’t have the right skills to _______), and reframe it into a Be-Do-Have statement (Who do I need to be if i want to have those things? What would someone who has them already be Do-ing?). Then start doing that!). It’s a much more empowering way of pursuing your goals when you start Be-ing the person you want to become, Do-ing the things that person would do, and soon enough you will find you Have the things that person would have.

When you adopt mindset best practices like this one and the others I share in?Go Big Now: Eight Essential Mindset Practices to Overcome Any Obstacle and Reach Your Goals ,? you can benefit from the practices that leaders, successful entrepreneurs, and high achievers use to overcome big hurdles and reach their goals. Go Big Now is for people interested in the best mindset tools and resources—and who want to access them without signing up for a ten-day silent retreat, dropping out of society to join an ashram, spending thousands of dollars on workshops, or high-fiving strangers in a sports arena (though that can be fun, too).

Ready to learn more mindset practices?

Here are three things you can do right now to boost your mindset core strength:

1. Adopt a gratitude practice that you can do every day. This one of the top things you can do to promote mental resilience. Popular ones are tracking three things to be grateful for each day in your phone or a journal; picking something you do every day and using that time to say things you are grateful for, whether at the dinner table, in an elevator, or waiting for a Zoom to start. Read this article in?Healthline?for more ideas .
2. Read a book about how to boost your mindset. In addition to my book, Go Big Now, you can check some of my other favorites: You Are a Badass (Jen Sincero), The Big Leap (Gay Hendricks), Leveraging the Universe (Mike Dooley), The Desire Map (Danielle LaPorte). Keep one by your bed and read (or listen to) a few pages each night as a way to end your day with positive thoughts and give your unconscious something good to process as you sleep.
3. Talk about mindset with friends and family and share your best practices. Just as you might ask someone “Are you going running these days, or how are you staying fit?” you can ask “What mindset practices are keeping you on track these days? Meditating? Affirmations? Reading uplifting books?” and then share your own too.

I wrote Go Big Now to engage in the growing conversation about the intersection of business, mindset, and wellness — when more of us share our mindset practices, we can help each other adopt empowering beliefs, overcome setbacks more easily, and as we do, increase our impact, amplify the joy in our lives and reach our go big dreams.

What is one thing you might try today to build your mindset core strength?

Stay brave and healthy,

Julia

P.S. You can listen to a sneak peek of another mindset practice discussed in Go Big Now, T-BEAR , on my podcast, and learn from leaders and entrepreneurs who reveal the mindset shifts they made to become who they are today.

P.P.S. Grab your copy of the book here and then download the free companion workbook from that same page.