How to Master Your Mind, achieve a winning mindset, and your goals in 2023

January often is the month we focus on making changes, following a period of self-reflection of the year just gone. Whether this is pursuing a weight loss goal, a fitness goal, a desire to learn a new skill or sport, entering your studies, or pursuing a career change or self-employment. No doubt you may be reading this already in the process of putting together a plan of action to help keep you focused and committed to support you to continue to work towards your goals. Have you ever wondered why, even with a plan of action which can appear bullet proof, 43% of us give up on our goals by the end of January, and a staggering 95% of us give up on working towards our goals after three months? Do you want to know why? It is because you are trying to change your behaviour, habits, and routine but not working with the most important tool you have, your mind.

No doubt, when you start to think about working towards a goal, you start by asking yourself the following questions; what is the problem preventing me from achieving my goal? What do I need to change to overcome this barrier? What am I going to do to support myself? For example, a common January goal is weight loss. No doubt you have identified the problem as not exercising frequently and eating high-fat and processed foods as part of the problem. So you put a plan in place to walk more, do some exercise classes, go to the gym, join a weight loss club for support, and eat more fruit and vegetables. What you probably haven’t considered is; your routine/habits and how these impact your stress/hormones and weight management, your relationship with food, your confidence and view of yourself, any self-limiting beliefs holding you back, and how these impact your motivation, attention, focus, and commitment to your goals. Am I right?

When working towards a goal you don’t just need to change your habits and behaviour but focus on changing or maintaining your mindset.

What mindset do I need to achieve my goals or desired change?

To support yourself in achieving, and most importantly, maintaining a long-term goal, you need to work with your mind, creating a growth mindset. So what is a growth mindset? A growth mindset is where we hold the belief that our skills and abilities can be developed over time, a mind which sees challenges as opportunities for learning and growth, whereby we see comfort zones as areas to be broken and is open to change and self-discovery. Unfortunately, for most of us, we can be quickly pulled back into a fixed mindset. Where we hold the belief our skills and abilities are fixed at birth and predetermined, we associate challenge with a fear of failure and fear any form of critique or judgement, and feel threatened by the success of others causing us to become trapped in our self-defined comfort zone. In reality, this alone shows the term ‘comfort zone’ is anything far from comfort. The key characteristics, I tend to find, in those in a fixed mindset are; self-limiting beliefs, low self-esteem, procrastination, anxiety, high-stress levels, and an overall negative mindset, which let’s face it is the most explosive remedy for not being able to achieve our goals.

This is why it is important to work on your mindset. Everything starts with a thought, and here is an analogy I recently used on an Instagram post which explains this perfectly. As a child, when we are learning to ride a bike, it’s very rare a child will get onto a bike and ride it perfectly straight away without falling off. When you fell off the bike as a child or your children have, what did you say to them? No doubt phrases like, ‘you can do it, you just need to keep trying, and you’ll find your way, and practice makes perfect’. This teaches our mind and way of thinking that failure is normal, and a part of the learning process until we find the way that works best for us. In turn, boosting and instilling us to think positively, confidently, and rationally about our opportunity for growth. If we however were told as children or tell our child, ‘arh well, you gave it a go, it’s not for you, maybe you should just give up and move on to something else’, we are teaching our mind to fear challenge, creating self-limiting beliefs, and fixing our perception of our strengths and capabilities. Let’s face it, you wouldn’t talk to your younger self or own children this way, so why would you allow yourself now to think in such a way when working towards your own goals.

How can I start to create a winning and growth mindset?

Did you know creating the foundations of a growth mindset and continuing to prioritise time to work on your mind can improve your chance of success by almost three times? More importantly, a growth mindset will support you to; be open to change, feel happier and more content, be prepared to manage stress and challenges better, and be receptive to change. No doubt you are thinking, 'well where do I start', and here is how.

Change your thoughts and perceptions, conquer self-limiting beliefs

Everything starts with how we think. How we think influences how we feel, influencing how we behave, react, and respond. All of these actions, in turn, influence our perception of our internal skills, strengths, and capabilities and guide our future habits of thinking and behaviour. For example, if you go to a new activity group, running shall we say, and you keep up with the pace of everyone else, receive positive feedback from others, and are interactive with other group members, no doubt you will go away feeling confident. You will leave with an “I can and will” thought pattern, proud of your success, happy, and want to go back again. Whereas if you go to the group struggling to keep up or fall behind, and no one really talks to you, you’ll quickly fall into a negative mindset of “I can’t do this, this isn’t for me, no one likes me” causing you to probably give up at the first hurdle based on the perception and associated thought pattern you have created.

The most important thing we have to do is start understanding our mind and allowing time to work with our thoughts. There are many great and simple ways we can do this. To work directly with those presenting negative thoughts and self-limiting beliefs, we can become the detective of our own thoughts and start analysing them. A great way to do this is to start listing the negative thoughts or self-limiting beliefs you have been experiencing and start by selecting the most prominent one holding you back. Write this at the top of a piece of paper and then have two columns. One titled 'evidence which supports this way of thinking'. What this means is what factual evidence is there of what is happening around me in the here and now which supports this way of thinking. The other titled, evidence which does not support this thought. Again this being evidence of what is happening around you. Sometimes it can be helpful to include the opinion of others in this. No doubt your evidence against will be longer than your evidence for, and then you can use one of these examples as a thought you can use to reframe your thinking.

Lets put this into practice.

I previously did this with a client struggling with low confidence and anxiety around school. Their self-limiting belief was “I am going to fail” which created more anxiety, held them back from pursuing new interests, and created social anxiety. Their evidence to support the thought was, when they were in class, they were getting signs of anxiety, such as a fast heart rate, racing thoughts, and found it hard to focus and also felt that no one really spoke to them in class. Their evidence against this was; they are still retaining what the teacher had said so it shows they are still able to focus, they were doing their homework, and getting good grades. This then supported the client to think that maybe other students are not talking to them because they to are focusing on the teacher. They then utilised the evidence of ‘I am still retaining what the teacher has said so it shows I can still focus’, to reframe their thinking. In turn, helping them to create an ‘I can’ way of thinking which helped to over-ride negative thoughts and self-beliefs, manage and settle the physical signs of anxiety, improve their focus, and start to work on challenging and conquering their anxiety.

Find the solutions to develop your own personalised goal plan

A main factor in creating a growth mindset is learning about how your mind works, which I covered in my last blog post, ‘A Growth Mindset: how to help your mind change and grow’. In this blog post, I discussed our intellectual mind, the part which supports rationale and solution-focused thinking, and our primitive emotional mind, which causes spiralling negative thoughts, rumination, hyper-vigilance and can create negative habits of thinking and behaviour, which will hold us back. A big part of creating a growth mindset is harnessing maintained access to your intellectual mind.

How do we do this?

Firstly we need to focus on the solutions over the problems. Let’s face it, when we focus on the problems we focus on our past self, and we cannot change the past. What we need to be doing is focusing on the solutions, asking ourselves this is where I am today? If I was to be one step closer towards my goal or change I desire tomorrow, what one small thing would show I am working towards this amazing goal? If I was, what would I be doing more of? In turn, finding your SMART goal and action to incorporate into your routine. When our actions and thoughts mirror our future success, this will help our mind to internalise and create this way of thinking and behaving to support us.

If you’ve viewed my social media accounts, you will know well enough by now how much I love the 5 P’s, positive thoughts, interactions, activities/actions, purpose, and pleasure. When we focus on the positives; reframing our thinking, engaging in activities we enjoy, focusing on interacting with those who support and nurture us, engaging in roles which give us purpose, and prioritise leisure time and self-care, we give our mind a higher focus on the positives over the negatives. In turn helping you to manage your stress bucket, minimise the risk of accessing your emotional/primitive mind, and encourage a nice flow of serotonin and endorphins, maintaining access to your intellectual mind. A great way of reviewing this is by writing down your weekly plan and categorising your activities into one of these 5 domains. This will help you to visually identify things you can be doing more of to strike a balance.

Embrace Failure

When we have started to change the way we think, this should allow our mind to be more receptive to our perception of challenge and perceived failure. Today I saw a quote someone had mentioned on social media, “it is not that we have failed, it is that we have tried 1000 things which have not worked for us.” Hence why it is important to not copy someone else's plan and expect the same success. We may all have the same set-up, i.e. a brain, heart, and functioning limbs, but what we enjoy, what motivates us, how we think, our beliefs, our strengths, are individualised and differ from person to person. We, therefore, need to work on finding individualised solutions to help us create an action plan of goals we can work towards and habits of thinking and behaving we can embed into our day-to-day lives. A big part of this, is having the ability to not see failure as a sign of it never working or giving up, but as a part of our journey which helps us to learn and take one step closer towards finding the solution. We can achieve this by continually asking ourselves, what can I be doing more of to help me work towards my goals? To identify the changes or things I need to be doing to support in adapting my way of thinking, behaviour, and ultimately my habits.

Work with your subconscious

Did you know the conscious plans you make, utilising your intellectual mind, equate only to 4%-6% of your daily thinking and behaviour. The remaining 94%-96% of your thinking and behaviour, is driven by your subconscious mind. As I have mentioned in previous blog posts, the subconscious mind is the blue print and engine of your mind. It guides all of your learnt self-beliefs, morals, and habits of thinking and behaviour and utilises this information throughout the day to help your mind automatically think and respond in situations. We can therefore see if you learn and embed negative thoughts and habits, you are encouraging your mind to utilise this information to guide you. For example, if you are trapped in a fixed mindset you will programme your subconscious with self-limiting beliefs such as ‘I can’t, ‘it’s not possible’, and ‘if I do this people will laugh at me or judge me’. In turn, impacting on your motivation, focus, and commitment to a goal. No doubt creating fear and anxiety resulting in you giving up. It is so important to train your subconscious mind right.

One way of achieving this is through replicating the brain wave pattern of REM (rapid eye movement). When we go to sleep at night and enter REM sleep cycles, they firstly help us process our emotional experiences, but secondly process new learning by increasing our alpha wave production for relaxation and theta wave production for creative thinking. This explains why hypnotherapy is fast and effective. Hypnosis is the best-proven way to support in accessing your subconscious to help your mind be receptive to the solutions you create and boost your mind with positivity. There are also other ways including, meditation, traditional relaxation, or doing a mindless activity such as sitting down with a cup of tea or going for a walk. To start working at a deeper level with our subconscious, we need to start adding mindless activity (an activity which requires little thinking or mental activity) into your day-to-day return, and I guarantee you will start to see a benefit in feeling calm and having more clarity in your thought.

If you would like to give relaxation hypnosis a try, feel free to contact me to find out more about my free monthly relaxation online sessions you can access. Another way to strengthen your focus, commitment, and drive towards your goals is also by utilising visualisation in a relaxed state. During a relaxation visualisation, when you draw your focus on your mind and body to focus on what you would like be thinking if you were achieving a goal, how you would be feeling, what you would be doing, what you would hear, and how others would respond, helps to magnify the mental image. In turn, supporting your subconscious mind to learn what you need to do, in terms of your thinking and behaviour, to think, act and achieve your goal in reality.

Create a mindset toolkit

As you start; finding the solutions, focusing on what you can be doing more of, reframing your thinking, and engaging in visualisation, you will create a mindset toolkit. A range of strategies and things you can do each day to help you maintain access to your intellectual mind, overcome challenges, and maintain a growth mindset. All of which will support you on your ongoing journey of self-discovery, learning, and growth. It is this knowledge which will help you to continue to grow, thrive, and prosper.

Keep Going

Most importantly, you probably have learnt by now to continue to steer your mind in the right direction and to ensure we properly educate our mind to think and behave in a way that keeps us on the correct path. We must continue acting in line with our habits of thinking and behaving to strengthen these as blueprint habits in our subconscious mind and maintain access to our intellectual mind to challenge any thoughts or behaviours which do not serve us.

Your mind is your key to success

Finally, here are two great phrases to help you reflect on the importance of creating a growth mindset.

“Everything starts with a thought. If you nurture your mind, it will help you to grow and prosper. If you neglect your mind, the weeds will grow and poison and block your mind from success.”

“Your mind can either be your best friend or your worst enemy. How you train it to act is the result of how you think or behave.”

My mission this year, and every year, is to help others take back control of their mind, know how their mind works to empower them to take control, and help them to develop the solutions, tools, and strategies they need to help them stay in control and live in harmony. This is why this year I have released my Master Your Mind individual and group workshops and programmes to offer the support you need to achieve and create a growth and winning mindset. To find out more feel free to look under my therapy section on my website or follow my social media accounts, Facebook: Live Harmony Hypnotherapy or Instagram: @live_harmony_hypnotherapy.

15th January 2023