Are you living with victim mindset?
Sanjay Goel
Soft Skills, Behavioural and Leadership trainer, Outbound training, DiSC trainer, Coach, Author, NLP and Hypnosis Practitioner, Customised Content Design and Delivery, Learning Consultancy
Victim mindset is playing a victim card. Blamers love to play the victim most of their lives. They blame others for their condition. They would blame parents, genes, environment, boss, company, situations etc. They fail to take ownership of their lives. When they blame others, they free themselves from any responsibility to improve their lives. This eliminates any chances of correction.?People with victim mindset feel helpless. Helplessness can be learnt. Probably they tried to free themselves before and they failed so they stopped trying. They have stopped attempting to correct their lives.
How does victim mindset affect our lives? When we feel we are in control, we will give our maximum potential. When we feel out of control, we will give up even if we have skills and abilities
There was an interesting experiment conducted on rats. Behavioural scientists took one rat and put it in a pond of water. Rats are good swimmers. This rat swam for some 10 minutes and started drowning. Behavioural scientists pulled the rat out of the pond, dried it up and gave food to it. Once the rat regained its energy, they put the rat again in the pond. Can you guess how long the rat swam? Let me tell you. It swam for 44 hours before giving up because it believed some power will come again for its rescue. It believed it still had in control.
Belief is a state of the mind in which we consider something true even though we are not completely sure about it. Every human being has certain belief system (set of beliefs) about life and the world they live in and experience. This belief system plays an important role as it helps humans deal with ambiguity and unknown. Human knowledge is extremely limited in comparison to the knowledge available in the universe creating a huge ambiguity and unknown area.?
Conclusion from the above experiment is, when there is hope, there is a feeling of situation being under control, rat would give its 100% to survive. However, when the rat feels situation is out of control, i would give up rather easily even when it had skills.
This tells us a lot about human behaviour. People with learned helplessness would blame other factors for their situation. They would fail to take owner of their lives. This reduces their chances of correction and improvement in their lives.
Opposite to helplessness or victim mindset is learned optimism. You always have a hope. You always feel you can do something even when the situation seems impossible. You will give more than 100% to bring about the change instead of blaming people and circumstances.
Steps to learn optimism,
First, stop being a victim. Stop blaming people and circumstances for your condition.
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Second, take ownership. Only you can bring about change in your life and no one else. Move forward. Take actions to bring about the change.
Third, consciously challenge any negative self-talk (we discussed it in our previous article, (please read newsletter 44, Law of Affirmations - Communicating with self). Discard your negative self-talk with the past successes however small they may be. Change the way you talk to yourself.
Whenever we see people succeeding around us, we mostly feel he was lucky, favoured or success came to him by chance. We don’t see the passion, hard work, disciple and sacrifice he has made for success. Start acknowledging and appreciating their efforts.
Build your confidence by focusing on all the success you had in the past; however small they may be. Think about the people who trust you and believe in your abilities and skills. Build a set of positive self-belief by focusing on your success instead of failures.
Look at yourself in the mirror and appreciate yourself for all that you did or the value you can add in future. Celebrate your successes, however small they may be. This will improve self-confidence.
Learn from kids. They are ready to take more risks and worry less about what others would think. They worry little about others’ perceptions about self.
Thank you for reading.