The Power of the Mind

Your mindset is your interface with reality. Everything you experience, do and achieve is done through, with or in some cases in spite of your mindset. It is the lens through which you view the world, it directly affects how you perceive people, actions and events, and also how you choose to act and respond.?

When you have the mental resolve to succeed, you will

Cultivate a confident and empowering mindset, and there are few limits to what you can achieve. Neglect and allow your mindset to hamper and control you, and you can find every twist and turn in life to be difficult and painful.

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't? - you're right.” ― Henry Ford?

Looking out from the 34th floor vantage point across the London skyline, Josh should have been relishing the view and the opportunities that this new role could provide him, but all he could think about were the ways this could go wrong. On paper his experience over the last decade was a clear path to this significant step up in responsibilities, but standing there at that moment, all he could remember were the mistakes and failures. He turned away from the windows, searching the office for security and familiarity; fearing himself an impostor, due to be found out. This organisation was a direct competitor to the two that had shaped his career to date. It was a product that he was incredibly familiar with, and he had several insights and ideas that he felt could really shape the future and create significant success. None of that could stay in his mind; all that kept returning was this feeling of being a fish out of water, that he was not ready for this, and he was going to goof it up royally and be out by the end of the week.

Hindrances and limiting beliefs

Like most things, our mindset is governed by the second law of thermodynamics - as we use it, entropy and disorder increases. As we experience situations, events and experiences, these then can have an effect on our mindset. We can become dispirited or disillusioned when we encounter setbacks, develop beliefs that will limit and hold us back, and generate patterns of thinking that are unhelpful and reduce our ability and motivation to progress and succeed.?

In a 2020 TED talk, Shi Heng Yi describes the five hindrances of the mind that can weaken the mindset and hold us back from success.

1. You can be hindered by becoming repeatedly distracted by positive emotions and sensual desires.
2. You can pollute your mindset with negative thoughts and ill will, aversion or dislike.
3. Your mindset can develop a dullness; with progressively less and less motivation and a lack of energy.
4. Your mindset can become restless; with an unsettled mind frequently escaping to the past or worrying about the future.
5. These four hindrances also all feed the fifth - where you can wallow in self-doubt, with indecisiveness and getting lost in thought.

This insightful model can help us to understand how our mindset can become weakened, and identify what might be holding us back.

A slippery slope, with plenty of baggage

Over time, these hindrances can create powerfully disempowering beliefs that are hard to shift, unconscious to us, and can act against us making progress or addressing and crafting a more progressive and supportive mindset. The subconscious mind discerns much less between different areas of life than you do consciously. You may be surprised how much your thinking and actions in your business career are influenced by hindrances and beliefs created in early childhood, and life events and experiences you have had in completely different contexts.

As weeks passed, Josh further developed his sense of overwhelm and self-doubt. He had expected the language and style of work and conversation to be very similar to the previous companies and to get up to speed quickly, but every meeting and encounter seemed to widen the cultural gap and make him feel more and more disjointed with the people around him.?The first few senior leadership meetings had made him feel more distanced and alone, with a clear clique and familiarity across his peer group that he didn’t ever see himself becoming part of. Some of these peers seemed remarkably inept and yet much more confident and successful than him. Others clearly did deserve their seats, but were making little effort to collaborate. Most were acting like their core role was political animal rather than senior manager, and it felt more like a lynch mob than a supportive team.?His own teams were ok - they seemed to know what they were doing - but it was clear that they did not respect him, still saw him as the competition, and several of his direct reports clearly resented the fact that he had been brought in over them into a role they felt they could do better themselves.

Feeling lost, he busied himself with things that brought him comfort. The overnight revaluation routines were slow and error prone so he spent time working on these himself, identifying changes needed to improve them using his experience doing this at the previous place. This only seemed to make relations more strained with the team that ran the overnight processes though, and meant that his budgeting and strategic planning actions slipped back and had to be rushed through at the last minute. This was further compounded by the amount of time he seemed to be just sitting at his desk, knowing he needed to be working on a long list of tasks, but lacking the motivation and drive to move any of them forwards.?

He knew he should be out there building relationships with his teams and peers, but instead kept replaying the conversations from the last strategy meeting over in his head, searching for signs that his boss had already lost confidence in him, and further evidence that his peers had already drawn targets on his back. Unsure where this had gone so wrong, he started doubting his abilities to even do the job he had moved from, and speculating on the best way out of this mess. Does he go back, cap in hand, to his old role? Or find something completely different and start again?

Creating a powerful mindset

In the Leadership Layers Model, Mindset (1-2) is the first part of the personal journey of self-mastery. This creates the foundation of a healthy, progressive and enabling mindset, a basis of confidence, and the emotional awareness and management needed to survive difficult situations and thrive when the going is good. Use these three simple steps iteratively as a virtuous circle to develop and refine a mindset that supports you and helps you move forwards.

1. Reflect and explore

The first step is to reflect, and the observation effect is an ally here. By becoming aware of and developing an awareness of our mindset and how it affects us, we can naturally and unconsciously start to shift it towards how we want to think. Over time this can become a regular habit, and as your self awareness expands the reflection and insights will become increasingly nuanced and diverse. This also expands across a number of dimensions, as you can reflect on your mindset, your emotions and feelings, the events, actions and triggers that affect you and the meaning you ascribe to them.?

2. Design your mindset

Once you are regularly reflecting and taking time to understand and interpret your mindset and emotions related to it, you can then start to design how you would like it to be.?

This will differ for everyone, although it is likely that the mindset dish you create has many of the same ingredients as other mindset chefs use. Confidence and self-belief, curiosity and openness, optimism and positivity, perseverance and resilience. Another key ingredient to consider is balance. We see from the five hindrances that we can be distracted by positive feelings as well as limited by negativity. Having a consistently even and balanced mindset is a very useful attribute for long term success. This doesn’t mean we never feel intensely positive or negative emotions, but we look to maintain balance so the highs aren’t too high and the lows aren’t too low.??

Be realistic that you won’t just install this new mindset and never experience the old; it will take time to steadily transition from the current mindset you experience towards the mindset you intend to be nurtured by. Make a start, learn and adapt as you go, and find rituals and activities that reinforce the new mindset and help to erase the old habits and thinking patterns.

Inspiration often comes from the most unlikely of sources, and for Josh it was from his youngest daughter. The uncertainty at work was having an effect on how present he felt he was at home, and he doubled his efforts to stay connected with his young family. They were sitting on Friday evening reading Danny the Champion of the World, and as they finished the chapter he asked her about how Danny could have done what he did. "Confidence isn't something you have; it's something you build," she replied sincerely. This realisation was the wake up call Josh needed.

He took several opportunities to spend time thinking and reflecting over that weekend. He explored why his confidence had taken such a knock, what past experiences from his career and life in general might have seeded it, and what other factors were contributing to him allowing it to atrophy in the new role. He was surprised how tenuous some of the links were, and how much his viewpoint on the role and the people involved changed as soon as he started to see things differently. He planned how he would like his mindset to be, in general and also specifically in relation to the role and situations that were likely to arise the following week, and realised that for the first time in months he was looking forward to Monday again.

3. Refine your mindset

The most important thing is to start; the next most important thing is to keep going.

Starting is definitely the hardest part, but it is also easy to falter along the way, and be distracted by these hindrances that will continue to surface. The further along the path you take, the easier it becomes. The challenges and barriers tend to get bigger, but so too does your ability to deal with them, thanks to the mindset you are creating. Continue to reflect, develop your self awareness to new levels, develop your emotional literacy and understanding. Keep a track of how your mindset has evolved, and plan how you want it to evolve as your journey continues. This will help you to maintain your awareness of the progress you have made which will help you with future challenges and situations.?

Over the next two months his confidence, mindset and performance went from strength to strength. It was like he had unlocked his old self and he stepped positively into meetings, sought out people he wanted to deepen relationships with, and became actively engrossed in the work he was finding it hard to engage with previously. He realised that the way he had been acting had alienated some of his peers.? It was now going to take some time to build trust, particularly with a couple of them, but he was surprised at the progress he made in just a few days, and after only a few weeks his teams were much more actively supportive and engaged with his ideas, and now they were working cohesively to create plans to evolve their products and platform forward together towards a shared vision based on his insights. His relationship with his boss had become much stronger, and she actively supported him in meetings and championed his ideas.

As he stood at the same window in his office, Josh was amazed at the change in perspective he had from his first day there just three months prior. The sun was shining, there were no clouds in the sky, and everywhere he looked there was possibility.

Questions to reflect on and explore your current mindset

• How would you describe your mindset?
• What aspects of your mindset support you, and what aspects can limit you or hold you back?
• How well do you currently read your own emotions, recognise their impact and listen to your intuition?
• How often do you feel grounded, relaxed, successful and credible??
• In what situations would you like to feel more confident?

Summary

Mindset and self-confidence have a significant impact on performance and results.

You can design, create and transform your mindset, and therefore your results.

This is one of the most critical aspects of yourself to regularly invest time in reviewing, developing and refining.

This content by James Carter is licensed under CC BY 4.0