Here are 8 effective ways you can upgrade your mindset:
1. Change your Self-Talk
The conversations you have with yourself are a direct reflection of your mindset. If you are telling yourself “I am not good enough to achieve my dreams”, your thoughts will create your reality and your mindset will hold you back from having the life you want. To upgrade your mindset, change your negative self-talk to an empowerment speech. Sounds cliché, but telling yourself “I can do this” or “I got this”, really works.
2. Change your Language
After changing your inner thought dialogue and the story you are telling yourself, change the way you talk to other people. Avoid phrases like “I am always like this” or “I am always doing this” for encouraging a growth mindset. Furthermore, make it a habit to talk about the things that are going well in your life instead of complaining and talking about your problems. This will encourage a mindset of abundance instead of fear and lack.
3. Determine the mindset you need and act as if
Pick a goal you want to achieve and ask yourself: “Which mindset do I need to achieve this goal?” and “Which mindset do people have that were successful at this goal?”.
For example, healthy & fit people might share the mindset “I love taking care of my body, nourishing it with whole foods and exercising every day.”. If it’s your goal to be healthy & fit, act as if you already HAVE the mindset of a healthy & fit person. This way, you are basically tricking your brain to adapt a new mindset and reenforcing it with action.
4. Identify & Overcome your Personal Mental Blocks
We all have certain limiting beliefs that hold us back from realizing our full potential. Most of these mental blocks are created in our childhood when we learn to see the world in a certain, sometimes limiting way. What we see, hear and experience (e.g. financial scarcity) becomes our default and our filter for reality. We then go through life creating more of the same experiences that match our view of the world.
Identifying and overcoming your own specific mindset blocks is one of the most effective ways to completely transform your mindset. If you are interested in learning more about the 6 most common mental blocks that hold you back from success, you can download my free ebook here.
5. Learn & Apply
Read books from great minds to understand and adapt their thinking. Read books about how the mind and brain works. Learn from mindset experts through online courses, events and coaching.
Here are some of my favourite mindset resources:
- Mindset by Carol Dweck to learn about the growth mindset
- Everything from Gabrielle Bernstein to adopt a mindset of abundance and align with the flow of life
- The Online Courses from Denise DT for upgrading your money mindset
- My Free Ebook “6 Mental Blocks That Keep You Stuck in Life”
6. Surround yourself with people that match your desired mindset
Want to upgrade your money & success mindset? Start hanging out with people that are very successful and seem to have an abundance of money flowing their way at any time. It is easier to adapt a new mindset when you see that it is already working for other people. Learn how they think and adapt their daily habits to match their mindset.
7. Create new habits to support your mindset change
Integrate powerful habits into your day that help your mindset change and reenforce your thinking with action. For example, if you are upgrading from a “fixed” to a “growth” mindset, schedule time for learning and note down your learnings and achievements every day. Also, actively seek out challenges so you can prove to your mind that you can grow and learn to overcome whatever life throws at you. Upgrading from a fixed to a growth mindset is one of the 7 mindset shifts you need to create the life of your dreams. I wrote more about them here.
The easiest way to act yourself into thinking differently is to ask yourself: “What would I do if I had ______ mindset?” and then go and do that! When I started my own business, I needed to upgraded from a “I am not good enough to do this”-mindset to believing “I have all the tools, skills and resources I need to start a successful company”. And when I asked myself this question, I realized I literally just needed to start doing something. So I scheduled time to write an article for my blog every morning before I went to the office for my day job.
8. Jump out of your comfort zone
If you put yourself in situations that challenge you, you have no other choice than to rise to the occasion and upgrade your mindset. It becomes a necessity to survive.
So ask yourself “What situations can I put myself in that will require me to operate on a higher mindset?”. Basically, the idea is to engineer your environment to upgrade your brain!