How to Create a Mindset for Success. (or how to achieve the success you want).

Successful people are no different to you or I, they just have an understanding of what will get them to where they want to be, and their mindset directs them towards habits and actions that produce their desired results. It’s that simple, and anyone can do it.

Your definition of success is unique to you. You may define your success as your career advancement, improving a specific relationship, achieving your key financial goals, athletic or health development, weight loss, developing a new skill (public speaking, guitar, art, etc), achieving a lifelong goal, or just feeling confident in major areas of your life. Top performers have learned and developed the core elements and perspective it takes to actually achieve the success they want, and live their life taking daily action towards them.

As a mindset Coach, here are the key areas and habits I have determined over many years you must develop that will help you achieve your major life goals.

 1.     Believe in Yourself.

We think as we believe. If you actually believe that you will succeed, you will take the action needed to move yourself towards your goal. Your daily thoughts and actions will be about “how” you are going to succeed, vs the doubt created by being unsure, and you will choose options on your journey that will offer the fastest path to reaching your goal. Additionally, you will likely be more confident and determined to work through the inevitable adversity and roadblocks you will encounter to achieving the success you want. The Universal Law of Attraction states that you will attract into your life those things, circumstances, success, and conditions that correspond with the nature of your dominant, habitual thoughts and beliefs, both conscious and subconscious.

 2.     “Think” Like a Successful Person.

It is About “How” You Think. Successful people think at a higher level because higher level thinking leads to higher level success. (The 7 Levels of Conscious Thinking). (Conscious vs Subconscious) Successful people believe in daily personal development and a growth mindset. They commit to developing themselves for at least 30 minutes a day (Books, Ted Talks, Mentors, Coaches, YouTube Videos, Online Articles) and they believe self-improvement is a powerful tool to achieve the success they want. The new science of neuroplasticity is where the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural pathways (connections) throughout our lives, allows each of us to change our brain’s architecture (physiology) and ability to think, in response to new situations, needs, goals, or challenges, to grow our brain's capacity to learn and to solve problems. Neuroplasticity can also lead to you higher IQ.

The more you “think” you can achieve something, the more likely you are to achieving it. “Success Thinking” is something you can continue to develop each and every day, like any other skill, but it should be a journey towards thinking big.  If you develop the mindset that you “will” be successful you will overcome your challenges, continue to develop personal confidence by taking small achievable steps that work, learn from them and keep trying until you find a successful course of action. When you choose a growth mindset over a fixed mindset, where you are in life today becomes irrelevant. The only thing that matters is where you are going.

 It’s possible for you to do work you love, be very successful, find your passion, and build a life you love, and it starts with being able to think big. For some thought-provoking questions to help you think big and discover your passion

 3.     Live Within Your Personal Values

Your values are the ideals that you personally believe are important in the way you live, think, act and work. They are the core basis for your major decision-making and determine your priorities, and directions you want to take your life. Whenever we feel highly stressed, unhappy, confused, lost or frustrated in our lives, we are likely living outside our personal values. Values exist, whether you recognize them or not. Success is much easier if you recognize and understand your core values, and when your life’s thinking, plans and decision-making honor them – we typically achieve the mindset for success.

 4.     Be Specific on Your Goals.

Successful people have a clear vision of what success (goals) they want to achieve, and have clarity on what path they will need to go down to achieve them. Define what a successful life means to you. We each have unique and different goals. “Visioning” is the process that successful people use to crystallize exactly what it is they want to achieve. You can do this through meditation, by defining the tiniest detail of what achieving their goal will feel like, small like, sound like, imagining the awe of their friends upon achievement, and actually experiencing the “feelings” that eventual achievement will bring.

 If you are not clear on your goals, you have a much lower likelihood of achieving them. Lewis Carroll said “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” Additionally, you will waste a lot of time and energy going down the wrong roads, looking for success, which unfortunately, is what the majority of people do.

 Developing a mindset for success is not an overnight process, but it can be done. Continue to work on your mindset and your life will change in amazing ways!

5.     Take Massive Action (“Schedule” Time Each Day)

Hustle. Get ‘er done. The reason most people do not realize the success they want in life is because they don’t make constant “daily” progress towards achieving their goals. They make incremental progress on many projects without finishing most of them, and lose their way. There are many reasons for this. A lack of clarity and confusion on what you really want to achieve, procrastination and time wasting on tasks and activities that are not moving you towards your goals, poor time management, attempting to achieve too much at once, a lack of energy, or conflicting priorities. But small and tiny steps each day, continues to move you towards the things you really want from life. Progress, creates confidence. Confidence creates passion. Passion creates Energy. Energy creates progress. Let’s face it, we are each “not” highly motivated every day, due to multiple factors we face daily. Lack of sleep, health, conflicting tasks and priorities, relationship challenges, stress, travel and many more. Just commit to doing something towards every day, before you go to sleep.

 Successful people “schedule” time without distraction in their calendar each day, to work on their life’s major goals. This eliminates the issue most if us have that there is no time. I suggest that in your calendar, you schedule (as a meeting), time each day to work on your goals, and that you do not budge from this appointment.

 6.     Narrow Your Focus to What is “Most” Important to You.

Overcome one obstacle at a time. A wall is built with a thousand bricks, but bricklayers must focus on placing one brick at a time without distraction, to ensure the wall is completed according to spec. embrace incremental progress and growth. In our modern, stress-filled, multi-tasking life today, we want to fast track as rapidly as possible to achieve the rewards of success. We can’t effectively handle ten major goals or obstacles at once. The human brain can multi-task to an extent, but our mind does not give deep thought and focus when it is overworked and doesn’t know where to direct its attention. Our attention scatters and our productive energy dissipates.

 A wise man/woman once said, “The wolf that chases two foxes, often ends up hungry.”

Learn to say “no.” Prioritize the tasks it will take to achieve your goals. Any successful person will tell you that as they become more successful they create more opportunities and requests. By saying yes to everything, we will quickly feel stressed and overwhelmed by the volume of work and commitments. By saying no to options and distractions that don’t align with our most important goals, we give ourselves the freedom and time to fully commit to the outcome we truly want.

 7.     Eliminate Doubts and Negativity. Take Control of Your Subconscious. Reframe Your Self-Talk.

Doubts, negativity and a lack of drive are typically a result of your self-talk, your inner narrative, the subconscious telling you, you are not good enough. From the moment we are born, we are taking in experiences, understandings, and information that our brain processes, layer on layer, to become how we see ourselves, and how we see the world. Our parents, families, teachers, coaches, the media we watch, and our interactions and experiences all combine in our conscious and subconscious brains to determine how we interpret the world and think. Our GAILs (Gremlins, Assumptions, Interpretations and Limiting Beliefs), control us, mostly from our subconscious brain. We each have an inner villain, who desperately tries to limit us and keep us safe (reptilian brain), forged over a million years of evolution. Much of what we learn to believe about the world and ourselves from an early age (especially the formative years up to age 7), stays with us our entire life, and limits our ability to achieve the success we truly want. We often lose our confidence that we stay right where we are, and eventually our subconscious brain runs us.

 We must reframe our self-talk. Successful people have done the hard work of redefining their core self-defeating beliefs, and have learned new understandings of what is limiting them, and what kind of thinking and understanding they need to achieve the success they want. Become a self-help junkie. Read, study, observe, subscribe, take the time to develop the thinking that will get you where you want to go. Negativity will not get you anywhere. Only positive people achieve success “and” happiness. Reduce your negative self-talk by working on rephrasing your thinking and your vocabulary when speaking. Instead of saying, “I can’t,” reword it to, “I don’t know how — yet — but I will learn and find a way.”

8.     Accept and Embrace Adversity

Embrace adversity. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but adversity is the “only” way most of us move forward in life. Without adversity, (life’s challenges, trials, tests, roadblocks, problems, difficulties, pitfalls, complexities, complications and impossibilities), we would just stay in the same place. This is how our prehistoric brains are wired, to avoid the challenges, the fight or flight, and to remain and survive in peaceful safety every moment. Our human prefrontal cortex is the modern logic center of our thinking, so we must engage it to create perseverance, new ideas, work-arounds, innovation and new paths to achieve the success we want. Adversity is great, it is the beginning of a new path to success.

 9.     Develop Daily Success Habits.

“Successful people are simply those with successful habits.” – Brian Tracy.

The number one way to waste your talents and to miss the success you want and deserve is to allow bad daily habits to take over. Treading water is not a success mindset or a growth strategy, but champions can be made when they embrace and commit to life-changing positive daily habits. The challenging thing about poor daily habits is that individually they matter little, but when you take them in combination or as a whole, they become incredibly powerful and self-limiting. The biggest moments each day are early. Take time to make your bed, to spend a minimum of 10 minutes early each day in quiet reflection or meditation, to shut the world out, to think about your day, visioning what you are going to achieve, in positive terms, and especially how you are going to move your big goals and dreams forward, even if just a little. At first this will feel awkward, and you will need to rethink your routine. Just get in the habit of creating success habits early, then extend these throughout your day.

 Build a habit of being happy and positive. Choose not to engage in negative thinking. Smile more. Practice success habits daily – until they become authentic to who you are.

10. Be Authentic to Who You Are, but be a Student of Success.

Be Confident in You. Don’t compete with others, only with you.  Successful people have curious minds and are great observers of others, but they are confident in who they are. Primarily, they have confidence in themselves, that even through the challenges and adversity, they will be able to work it out. But they observe, study and model the mindsets, strategies, and actions of those who are already successful, and determine those people must have the formula for success to emulate. Through modeling and imitating other people’s thinking and habits, we can avoid some of the pitfalls and mistakes others have made on the road to success. Through studying the shortcuts to success of others, and applying it to your own life, you will discover a proven blueprint that shortens the time it takes you to reach your goals.

 But be authentic to you. You are one-of-a-kind, and you need to create or follow your own path. While learning from others accelerates our growth, competing with them produces detrimental consequences. When we measure ourselves against others, we are measuring on their terms, not ours. Your life and scenario is different. If you look to mirror them you will find disappointment and frustration. Leading to feeling inadequate and doubting your ability. Embrace your uniqueness, accept your own value, and refrain from comparing yourself to others.

 “We will act consistently with our view of who we truly are, whether that view is accurate or not.” – Tony Robbins

 11. Choose “Who” You Hang Out With.

Look at who you are modeling. Look at your friends, your colleagues, your family, your role models, and your social circle. Are those people excelling in life? Do they reflect the success and values you are looking for yourself? Do they lift you up, or put you down? Are they excited to see your success, or do they belittle or mock your efforts to move yourself forward. Are they positive, or negative thinkers? Do they give you energy (wings), or do they suck the life-force out of you when you are with them? Do they inspire you, or disappoint you?

 We are all an average of the people we hang out with. If you do not have a group of people you spend time with who lift you up, you need to find those people, even if it takes years. Negativity crushes dreams like nothing else. Inspired, passionate people can achieve the impossible, and you need (and deserve) to hang out with winners who are achieving success. It will rub off on you, and you will rise to achieve the potential you were born to. Coach John Wooden said, “You will never outperform your inner circle.” If you want to achieve success, improve your inner circle.

 Find mentors. Find a great Coach (I am one!), surround yourself with positive people, feed off their ideas, positive energy and can-do perspectives. You owe it to yourself.

#success #mindset #mindsetcoach #createsuccess

Peter Ashworth is a Mindset Coach and public speaker, who works with both business and non-business people in the US and Internationally, who want to be extraordinary. He can be reached at [email protected] or www.peter.bright.coach.