How to Build Your Mindset

Our mindset is the source of real change, but our brains’ constant mission to cut energy consumption means they are designed to lessen the very quality needed to shape our mindset: conscious awareness.

Building a mindset means coaching our body and mind to remain alert to how we feel, think, and see.

Imagine eating your favourite meal every day for a week. What starts out as a delight rapidly becomes boring or even tiresome. Pleasure and joy turn into the mundane. ?This is the power of habituation, where we notice or respond less to things that remain constant. We habituate at an alarming rate to the environment, people, and situations, good or bad. For example, researcher Tali Sharot found that people reach peak happiness on their holiday after just 43 hours, before the novelty starts to wane.

Habituation is one of several brain efficiency mechanisms that encourage a comfort-zone mindset, where we see less of what matters and struggle to focus on the tasks that will enable us to achieve our goals.

As in writing compelling literature, building your mindset is about making the implicit explicit: to notice more.? This is a key leadership responsibility.

In my last article , I described a new understanding of mindset and how it plays a central role in brokering our inner and outer worlds. Here, I want to explore how we can intentionally use this knowledge to build mindsets for our future.??

Our mindset is how we make sense of ourselves in the world. As such, it plays a central role in:

·????? How we understand situations

·????? How we solve problems

·????? How we make decisions

·????? How we form and build relationships

In other words, our mindset is central to creating value for ourselves and others, our well-being, and economic success. Our work researching the nature of mindset was born out of seeing the lack of replicable success in helping individuals, teams, and organisations adopt ideas and behaviours associated with high performance, innovation, and change—to put it another way, to better understand the knowing-doing gap.

The Delusion that Knowing Leads to Doing

One source of the knowing-doing gap is the recurring belief that an intellectual understanding of why something is important and specific knowledge of what to do will lead to change. Idea + behaviour = change. This enduring delusion undermines both personal and organisational adaption.

You can know why something is important and what to do about it for your entire life without implementing change. ?Studies show that the more intelligent you are, the more likely you are to confuse knowing and doing. Even when the stakes are incredibly high. For example, whilst 90% of heart disease is preventable through lifestyle choices, only a tiny fraction of those suffering a heart attack change their behaviours.

For those advising and leading change, the idea that we could improve well-being and performance by building good habits that became automated over time, requiring less willpower and discipline, was very alluring. ?Full disclosure: I was in the habits business for a long time. ?The problem was, it didn’t work. It’s another version of the ‘the idea plus behaviour equals change’ delusion because it doesn’t fully encompass how our mindset influences change. Over 15 years, we worked with thousands of individuals globally to test habit-forming strategies; less than 15% of people found that they could establish lasting change. Why?

One reason was that the habit-building technique popularised by Charles Duhigg and James Clear, which relies on the cue-routine-reward mechanism to automate behaviours, is typically overwhelmed by what we want and need from change. Most of what we want isn’t delivered by a single behaviour that can be automated in isolation, like brushing your teeth. Our goals are achieved by ‘compound routines’: multiple behaviours dependent on our physical state and emotions.

Think about going to the gym. It’s not a single act. You must pack your kit, plan when to go, and have a fallback if something comes up. You must know in detail what you’re doing when you get there. That’s a lot of highly specific things to automate. ?That’s before considering how your physical state and emotions influence your motivation and focus. You may have gotten all the practical habit-building approaches right when you’re halfway through your exercise and you start thinking about something your boss wants later in the day. Immediately, your attention shifts and your motivation to exercise evaporates, and you give up and leave.?

Change is more than ideas and behaviours.

The Big Wake-Up

To change more successfully, we need to disrupt habituation and the comfort zone it creates.? This is where our mindset becomes central because it comprises the layers of self-awareness that, if we can harness, we can change more readily. We build our mindset by tuning into these dimensions, which modifies, strengthens, and adapts our brains' physical structures and networks.?

Our mindset is the dishabituation countermove to the comfort zone.

See More, to Solve More?

Regularly tuning into your physical state strengthens the flow of information between the body and the insular cortex in the brain. Over time, this makes you more resilient and able to think clearly in times of stress.

Your judgement improves by becoming more aware of what you feel emotionally and using better words to describe those emotions more precisely.

By considering how you feel about your emotions (meta emotions), you will better understand how your feelings shape your reactions, choices, and behaviour. Over time, this will lead to decisions more aligned with your long-term goals, values, and purpose.

Becoming more aware of the frame you hold up to situations (perception) will help you understand where you may have become stuck. For example, you may have ignored or marginalised salient information and become unable to challenge your assumptions.

By intentionally thinking about your thoughts (metacognition), your ability to doubt your beliefs and actions in light of new information will help rid yourself of micro-delusions, beliefs that block you from getting what you need.

In an automated world, our principal challenge is to remain awake. Technology and overwhelm encourage us into a zone of constant attention that habituates us not to notice what matters most.

In future articles, I’ll explore specific strategies to help you build your mindset.?

To discover more about building your mindset, take a look at:

Leading in a Non-Linear World

Building Wellbeing, Strategic and Innovation Mindsets for the Future

Available at:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Non-Linear-Innovation-Leadership-Jean-Gomes/dp/1119672724/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.6M1QOEyRC6GEYoXnl0IT6ZR_2Ggm7LLlJwGaMLBrlMp_jHyUMk-Gcyn0gDJqM_4CwIzjjn6YyL8y-B7OCdVVk6nMjZ6FdACWabGnFrFSYzEzwNsrJVu50z4SpjC7mY_eWzNt4Kf2IADPBw4J8w6y9Q.6STKPv7E6qREd5GNdoCfixyBQo4pLHstbHfgEo4hp4o&qid=1711972991&sr=8-1

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