Most of us are held back not by our lack of abilities, skills or talents, rather, by our mindset.
Are you shocked by that comment, because a lot of people don´t realise it?
I would have been many years ago but no, not anymore.
Many of us grew up in an environment of lack and scarcity rather than one of abundance and plentifulness. We grew up with others feeding us their opinions and their beliefs surrounding food, money and material possessions in general. Part of the reason I think was to do with WWII and the lack they must have had to endure at the time.
People must have had to go without the basics for days or weeks on end or they had to make what food they had stretch round the family for the whole week. I´m so grateful that I wasn´t born back then in some ways.
We grow up with either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset, or possibly a mixture of both depending on what we picked up as children.
We adopted those thoughts, beliefs and opinions to a certain degree because we assumed that they were right, and of course, they had to be right because our main carers, parents or other, said they were.
There ́s no excuse to have a scarcity mindset but still we think that way and make the appropriate comments because it ́s become a habit for us which has been passed down the generations.
I ́ve always been the type of person to question the status quo and to question anything which remotely smacks of conservatism. Maybe it ́s because I want to rock the boat or maybe it ́s because I simply want to play Devils Advocate to get people thinking.
My question is, “What is right?”
There is no right, there is no wrong and there are many shades of grey in between which we learn as we get older and hopefully wiser.
We are able to grow our brain because it is like a muscle which like any muscle, if not used enough, it will degenerate after long enough of not being used. Our mindset is in turn held back by the good old primal fear of change, fear of something outside of us which will sabotage us.
The only thing that will sabotage us is us, and yet the brain loves novelty!
First, we need to become aware that our mindset needs to be changed. So how do we change it?
The way I changed my mindset after many years of believing that everyone else was right and I was wrong, was to write those beliefs down and examine them in the cold harsh light of day, under my Charmaine microscope!
My beliefs around myself were:
I was no good.
I don´t value myself.
I am not as good as others.
I am not worthy.
I am stupid, dumb, ignorant.
I am not intelligent enough to live the life I want.
I will always be stupid, unintelligent, have nothing of value to say to people.
I ́m a failure.
I am not good at earning money.
Life sucks and I am a victim.
Many of these beliefs stuck with me for years, like Velcro and I couldn’t shake them off because I wasn’t ready to and didn’t want to. Once I realised I could, I took responsibility for myself and my life.
These were by far, not the only beliefs I had about myself, but this would take too long to list.
It was all about judging myself at the time and comparing myself to others who I thought rightly or wrongly, were “better” than me.
Let me get one thing straight. No-one is better than anyone else however much they think and believe that they are. We are all equal, we just may not have been given the same opportunities when we started out in our lives, so will be starting at different points, but we are definitely equal. We were all born and we all go through various problems in life, some more than others and we all die.
Just because someone has more money than you or I, doesn ́t mean that they are better than us.
Just because they have a better place to live in, doesn ́t mean that they are better than us. All it means is that we ́ve made certain choices in life which led us down a particular path which got us the results we ́re now living with.
The good news is that we all have the ability to learn and to change our mindset.
We can develop and grow our intelligence, we can shift our mindset, so let ́s embrace who we are and do it with joy because we are unique and don´t let anyone tell you you aren´t.
I slowly but surely have been changing my mindset over the years and get better the more I question whether or not a particular belief is serving me in my life at this present moment.
So in answer to my question at the top of this post, “Can Mindset Be Learnt?” — I can happily answer with a resounding YES, it can!
Which mindset do you employ in your daily life?
What are you doing about your mindset today?
Do you have a fixed mindset about certain things and a growth mindset about others?
Keep growing your growth mindset and rewiring that malleable brain of yours!
By the way.
Those with a growth mindset outperform those with a fixed one.
Repeat to yourself every day, several times a day:
I have a growth mindset.
I embrace my new mindset with love, I am getting better and better at doing this every day.
If you forget to do this, just do it the next day or when you next remember, no worries and no stressing about it. It takes around 90 days to form the new neural pathways for a new habit.
No shame, no blame and no judgement.
No worries be happy and Live Life Freel