Change Your Mindset, Change Your Life

By Kate Powers

Your thoughts are everything. They form your mindset, moods, attitudes and habits. This is why when you lead change, your success is directly dependent on each team member changing his or her mindset. If a leader spends thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on a reorganization or the latest and greatest technology, and people don't change their habitual mindset, guess what? It's money down the drain, lower morale, and change that’s unsuccessful. One of the greatest skills needed today by all leaders and employees, is the ability to change and manage one's mindset. The first thing to understand is how your mindset forms in the first place.

How Your Mindset Forms
Research across disciplines including physics, neurology, psychology and education, show that your mindset is formed by the combined interaction of habitual thoughts and their corresponding images and emotions. Candace Pert, PhD, former head of Brain Biochemistry at NIH for 13 years, pioneered the studies that examined the link between our body and our mind.

Pert mapped how positive thoughts and emotions like love and appreciation trigger one set of biochemical reactions in the body; and negative thoughts and emotions like criticism and anger trigger a different set of reactions. After decades of research, Pert finally made clear how biochemicals were the physical manifestation of thoughts and emotion.

Once your thoughts and emotions become habitual, they form a neural network that keeps the mindset habitually in place. It keeps you, literally, on automatic. That’s why when you master a habit, like riding a bicycle or operating the software on your computer, you don’t have to think about it much anymore. You’ve mastered the habit. The neural network is in place, like a groove in a record.

The mindset and its neural network continues developing and becoming stronger with REPETITION and PRACTICE. The more habitual your thoughts, the stronger the neural network. The stronger the neural network, the stronger the mindset regardless of whether your thoughts are positive OR negative.

The Glue That Holds the Mindset in Place
These neural networks hold the mindset together and have unique characteristics. One characteristic is that they literally grow larger and stronger the more repetitive your thoughts and emotions. For example, if you are in the habit of believing you are a victim of your work schedule, you are likely to feel resentful and critical, that you are trapped, and there is nothing you can do. You’re likely to complain to your friends about it, using it as justification why you can’t change. It becomes your “story” that you repeat to yourself over and over. You believe it. The more you habitually do this, the stronger and larger the neural network becomes, and the weaker the mindset that you can do anything about it.

When you feel resistance to change, it’s not that you're not good enough, it's the strength of the neural network that has you feel like you are up against a wall.

Pert also found a second characteristic of neural networks and that is they remember every time they are reinforced, AND preferentially select for those same thoughts and emotions. This is how beliefs and memory form, and how our stories about who we are and our life develop.

And a third characteristic is that neural networks come to serve as a mental lens, filtering how we see and interpret what happens to us, and around us. You now see what you want to see. Whatever you believe, you prove yourself right over and over based on your filter. Change your mindset, and you will change your life.

How Do You Change Your Mindset?

1) BE WILLING
Since these are your thoughts, you can change them. You may have formed your beliefs when you were a child under the influence of a less skillful parent or teacher, but you are an adult today and you have the power to change it now. This is the essence of personal power: choice and responsibility. As Victor Frankl wrote in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, “Everything can be taken away from a person but one thing – the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances; to choose one's own way.” Be willing to change. Be bold. Be willing to be the chooser.

2) FEED THE MINDSET YOU WANT
The fastest way to change your mindset is to feed the one you want to create. Pert and scientists find that every time you feed a positive mindset, it weakens the negative ones. How? Dare to dream. Dare to imagine a new possibility and you will be instantly creating new neurons that form the new neural network. Keep doing this, and your new neural network will become stronger than the older one. Feeding the positive weakens the negative.

This is not a new age fad, but a formula that has been proven by scientists across disciplines. Athletes have known this for years.

Marilyn King is an Olympic athlete and was a member of the 1980 U.S. team competing in the Pentathlon. Just before the Olympics, she was in a serious accident and suffered a back injury that resulted in her being bed-ridden for four months and missing the Olympic workouts. She spent most of that time watching films of successful pentathletes, visualizing and feeling herself going through the same events. Despite her lack of physical preparation, she placed second in the trials –  thanks, she feels, to her psychological state and her ability to visualize her goal and mentally rehearse using affirmations and clear, vivid imagery.

Scientists and perennial wisdom agree with what Marilyn discovered, that neurons don’t know the difference whether you are actually doing something different or visualizing it. Either way, the neural network grows stronger.

3) LOVE IT!
You have to have passion for the new mindset you want to create. This creates endorphins in your body that are essential for change. In her landmark research on endorphins, Pert found that endorphins are largely responsible for how you learn, change and retain memory. The best way to make endorphins is through real, honest connections with people. It used to be thought that the runner’s high or sex produced the most endorphins in the body. What scientists now find is that intimacy, genuine communication and inspiration produce far greater amounts of endorphins. They give a person heart and meaning and the enthusiasm for change.

Dr. James Zull, Director of Innovation in Teaching and Education at Case Western Reserve University, and Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, found that the more you are inspired and emotionally engaged, and have fun in your life, the larger and stronger the neural network. This process happens regardless of age and happens throughout the body including the brain. You learn faster and change habits easier.

Pick one thing you want to change: one attitude, one belief, or one perspective. Imagine what you want instead. I mean really get wild in your imagination. Give yourself permission to play in your wildest imagination. Remember, any resistance you feel is just the neural network. It has nothing to do with your worth or your abilities. Go into the future; stay out of the past. Dare to dream. Use the power of your imagination to vividly picture what you really want. Now strengthen it by adding enthusiasm, inspiration, and fun. Mentally rehearse this for just 10 minutes a day, along with taking three small actions a day that reinforce that mindset. Do this at work and in your personal life. Change your mindset, and you will change your life.