Driver or Drawback? Your Mindset Matters

What you think matters. Your mindset becomes a driver or drawback to everything in your life, career, and business.

Your mindset impacts:

• The life you lead – short- and long-term
• Career and business satisfaction and success level
• The obstacles you encounter
• The goals achieved, or missed
• The people who are drawn to you
• The career and business you have

When your mindset is strong it becomes a DRIVER that allows you to move forward, rebound, and enjoy the ride and results.

When your mindset isn’t strong it becomes a DRAWBACK that makes everything more challenging, can negatively affect your relationships, and causes stress, self-doubt, and sometimes resentments! It also keeps you from seeing new possibilities or options!

How does your mindset show up for you? Ask yourself these questions:

• Do I find myself procrastinating to avoid actions that I’m not confident in taking? How does that affect me?
• Who is affected by my mindset? How does it affect them?
• In what areas of my professional and personal life does my mindset drive good things? What’s the impact of those results?
• In what areas of my professional and personal life is my mindset a drawback to what I really want or need? What’s the impact of these?

Mindset Impact

The impact of your mindset is a powerful way to look at the consequences of your self-talk.

Is it stinking-thinking or a power anthem?

The good news is that we have a choice. Our mindset is not a genetic affect and can be edited.

For any situation, YOU can choose your mindset. It takes awareness and work.

Here’s an example. For 5 years I have planned a 6-week Italian semi-sabbatical. An opportunity to honor the women in the generations before me who died young and never got to live to their full potential.

It’s also a time for my children and I to visit the homesteads of maternal and paternal ancestors. An exciting possibility!

So, how challenging it was when 3 days before departure, two things challenged my mindset:

1. My final flight was cancelled due to an airport strike on the date of arrival.
2. My work computer, a necessary tool for these weeks remote was returned from repair, not repaired! After a lot of late-night scrambling, there was no solution. The manufacturer, LG, would not expedite another repair or replace my computer that wasn’t working properly since purchase last fall. A new computer with the RAM and storage needed was NO where to be found. It was a ridiculous solution to even think about when my non-working laptop was just months old, but I was desperate!

My mind was taxed. Were these obstacles a sign for me to throw in the proverbial towel? It felt like it for a short time. Then I made a conscious decision to NOT let this deter the “mission.” And set my mind to make lemonade out of these lemons!

Like most challenges, the changes led to a better plan! The changes allowed me to:

1. Edit the first days of my trip and visit a family in Pozzuoli, Italy for a couple of days. It was a beautiful experience and I so enjoyed their two daughters who are priceless!
2. I reworked my tech needs and am writing from the nonrepaired computer with adjustments to how I’m running video meetings.?

Shift Your Mindset

To get to the solution, I applied several mindset shift activities I’ve learned over the years. Hopefully you’ll also find them helpful.

1. When an unexpected challenge arises, don’t immediately assume the worst.
2. Pause to think through options. Take some time to let it ‘sit” so options can surface.
3. Involve stakeholders or helpful collaborators to look at the situation from a new lens.
4. Self-check your mindset: Is it a DRIVER in the situation or a DRAWBACK? What needs to be adjusted? My mom called these “attitude adjustments” and said that was the first action whenever you faced an obstacle.
5. Review the reality of stories you are telling yourself. What evidence supports this belief?? The stories may be true…but often aren’t. They most likely aren’t based on evidence – they’re based on mindset, fear, or anecdotal situations.
6. Identify the FIRST action you will take to change your mindset. Then the rest.
7. Take action! Tackle the first action to advance either driver or address the drawback.

They worked! And if you need more, here are additional mindset shift strategies you can apply:

1. Self-reflection.
2. Self-affirmations – teach your brain a new script! Repeat daily. Write them, say them, and share them.
3. Support through evidence. Make or review notes that relate to the situation and look for evidence of options that worked.
4. Set a goal or if not tangible, an intention with a plan to make the change.
5. Take care of YOU. Sleep, eat well, make time for fun.

Mindset Drawback

Your mindset is the drawback that creates many of the obstacles you’ll encounter, the goals you won’t achieve, and the level of happiness and personal fulfillment.

The good news is that… while it may not seem like it, YOU have control over your mindset to a situation.

Mindset Driver

There are choices you can make to:

• Identify how your current mindset around specific activities, events, behaviors, and beliefs helps or hurts. What needs to change and start the process?
• Elevate the same thinking to perpetrate more of the same.
• Reset and recharge daily to bring more energy and commitment to all you do.
• Prioritize and continue to recalibrate all your actions and how you allocate your time.

If you want a better business and life, more fulfillment, and to align what you do each day with your values, choose whether your mindset will Drive or Drawback.