The magical power of mindset
I’m writing about mindset, how important it is for growth and how to build your mindset muscles.
“Make sure your worst enemy doesn’t live between your two ears”
- Laird Hamilton
Ever stepped into a situation where you feel you need to be on the defensive? You just know that this is going to go wrong. You are sure the whole thing is going to end in disaster. You are physically bracing yourself, head down, shoulders hunched, face tensed… ready for the worst. Your imagination is doing a wonderful job of writing in all the possible bad endings to this story… You are in a state of negative mindset and catastrophising the outcomes.
Or, as an alternative approach, perhaps you enter situations looking for the best in them? You think they are going to be fun or interesting. You are open to what they will bring. You think they are going to turn out well and that you might learn something. You quite relish a challenge. You are looking forward to getting involved. You are feeling a positive sense of excitement, putting your best foot forward, shoulders back, head up and a warm smile on your face... You are in a positive mindset and are ready to see the good in the outcomes.
How often does something go wrong when someone has presupposed that it will go wrong or vice versa? A self fulfilling prophecy seems to occur. An individual declares ‘I can’t do that (insert challenging task)!’ and they then don’t do it.
...if I knew how to change, I would!
This can often happen despite a self-awareness that a better attitude would positively affect the outcome. I’m thinking about a conversation I was having with a client last week about confidence to go after what she really wanted. She was starting with… a mindset of ‘I’m not good enough, there will be better candidates...’ and knew it was holding her back; she wanted it to change, but she was wrestling with how. She genuinely was good enough; she was accomplished and experienced in her field, so the mindset or belief wasn’t true. She was up for the challenge of shifting her mindset, but when we were discussing how, she was stumped and exclaimed, ‘That’s the million dollar question, if I knew how to change, I would!’ So how do we go about changing it?
Energy follows intention
In NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) there is a saying that, ‘Energy follows intention’. This comes from the knowledge that the unconscious mind is very literal… I say “don’t think of the pink elephant” you immediately bring to mind the pink elephant! The subconscious is trying to help, it gives you that picture so you can dutifully not think of it. So part of the answer to my client’s question is around how to stop pink elephants from showing up where you don’t want them.
Do you believe in talent?
There is more to mindset than the simplification of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’. Glass half empty and glass half full. Your mindset can be looked at through a different lens of having a ‘growth mindset’ or a ‘fixed mindset’.
Do you believe in talent? Do you believe we are all born predetermined to be good or not good at certain things? Are we set by a very early age to be great leaders, entrepreneurs, business people, educators, artists, thinkers, actors, sportspeople, etc?
Do you believe we have potential to change and grow? Those that have what is known as a ‘growth mindset’, they know that you get to be good through practice, reflection, learning, resilience, some more practice and making plenty of mistakes along the way. They know that the human brain has neuroplasticity and can change.
Or, do you believe we are on a fixed path? That you don’t have control and that you can’t change stuff that is fundamental to you, such as whether or not you are talented, or whether you can change beliefs that you got as you grew up. If so, then you believe that things are basically fixed, and change is not possible. You’ve been dealt your cards and there is no magical solution to switch them now.
A pack of fully-fledged werewolf-like creatures
My early understanding of the importance of mindset started as a junior designer working in film and TV in London. My bosses would send me in to work with our most challenging clients. There were much more senior designers in our company with lots of experience and amazing portfolios, but they’d figured out I seemed to get the results in terms of customer satisfaction with these challenging jobs. What was it that I did differently to the much more experienced designers? Was it that I had better creative skills? No, it had nothing to do with this and everything to do with attitude. I was simply, quietly thrilled to be working, I didn’t care who it was with!
I really listened to the clients (ignoring their reputations); I listened deeply, openly and non-judgmentally, with the mindset that I was going to do the best job I could for them and that it was going to be fun. So I did and it was. The more senior designers saw the clients as wrong in their ideas and requests and hard work to work with and so they were. So, as little 24 year old white girl me sat in rooms with half the male executives of an Arab TV station working on the creative for their idents… a scenario that a casual observer might suggest really shouldn’t work, I was learning about the power of mindset.
Fast forward to later in my life, when I was a fresh, shiny, newly qualified teacher working in a not-so-posh part of South London, I was timetabled to teach year 9, last thing on a Friday afternoon. Now, to many of you this may not mean much, so let me put it into context; year 9 are at the peak of teenage hormonal insanity. They are 13 or 14 years old, trapped in an educational programme they don’t have any choice over.
By Friday afternoon they are ready to blow, they’ve had a whole week of compulsory education and even those students who are studious and serious about their future have given up. At best they are quietly watching the clock, or perhaps catching up on sleep… at worst they are a pack of fully-fledged, werewolf-like creatures after some blood. They may have already eaten a teacher or two for sport earlier in the day and now they are coming for you…
From the first week of the new term I was ready for the worst with this particular lesson. I was aiming high with the real lesson objectives (in my head, not neatly listed on the board) for basic survival of all in the room. If we could do it without any of us crying, that would be great. But here’s the issue… they can smell the fear. Think sharks when a drop of blood enters the water.
You step into the classroom looking like you’d seriously rather be somewhere else and you look at them assuming the worst is about to happen, and, surprise, surprise, you have created that self fulfilling prophecy. It’s ok, in this story, no one died, we just had some crap lessons for a while. I found myself backed into a defensive corner for a few weeks, shouting, issuing detentions, hating every minute, doing all the things I didn’t want to do as a teacher…
...something had to change and that was going to have to be me
So I had a firm word with myself. I decided something had to change and that was going to have to be me. I needed a serious mindset change. It had to stop being me vs year 9 Friday afternoon. I had to find a way to connect with them and learn to love the little sharp-toothed deadly creatures.
I made a few changes; we connected over music, we shared our captivity on a Friday afternoon, we sparked off each other, we acknowledged we were all subjected to a curriculum we all found questionable and concluded we’d be better off working together to make the most of the situation, I let go, trusted them and remembered how important and connecting laughter was.
Put simply, I decided I really liked them. I decided they were going to be great and we were going to have some fun, I decided we were all going to treat each other with respect, honesty and understanding. I returned to my values and breathed a bit easier. I didn’t tell them my new opinion of them, I just acted as if I believed in them.
I made this switch in my head, before they had done anything to earn my new found affection for and belief in them. I stepped into the classroom smiling and relaxed, with a few jokes and an attitude that I was looking for the good in them and certain I would find it. And here’s the thing… they rose to that belief. We had a lot of fun in that lesson.
J. M. Barrie writes in Peter Pan;
“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.”
‘Simply change your mindset’ I hear you muttering with scepticism… sure I’ll go have a word with my magical unicorn out back and we’ll get right on it just now. Simply wave that magic wand and believe in the magic of year 9… what a lot of old woowoo.
But hold on... what year 9 taught me was not just the power of believing in something, there was more to it. I didn’t really know my emergency plan to show up differently in the classroom was going to work with them. But, I acted as if I did. I went through the motions of belief and that seemed to be good enough to get things moving. As soon as I started to seek the good and then saw the good in them, it snowballed. If you’d have asked me at the time what I really, really believed… there was a part of me that was very unsure this would work.
Acting as if…
Back in the 1920s a Doctor and Psychotherapist called Alfred Alder developed a therapeutic technique that he called "acting as if". He used this strategy with his clients to give them an opportunity to practice alternatives to their dysfunctional behaviors. I was acting as if my Friday afternoon class were all the good things that I wanted them to be, whatever more complex and duplicitous situation was going on inside my head. The philosopher and psychologist William James says,
“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.”
Grow your mindset muscles
‘Acting as if’ is basically a form of make believe.. You’ve probably heard the well used adage ‘fake it until you can make it’. Behave as if you had the mindset you wanted. I’m going to suggest some exercises to try to grow your mindset muscles. Simple things to try in terms of ‘acting as if’, that if repeated will have a positive impact on your own mindset and those who encounter you:
Smile. There's a stack of research around this, but just try it for a day and see. It can be catching.
Strike a pose! Stand in the way you want to feel. Stand tall, force those shoulders back, step forward as if confidently, look up, present an open body posture.
Look the part. Dress up. Play act. Put on the clothes, style your hair and face in a way that someone who had the qualities you seek would do.
Slow down, breath deeply. Force yourself to slow your words down, your audience will not only understand you better, but they will be assuming some amazing deep thoughts are happening in those spaces, if you go slowly. Breath deeply as if you were super calm, breathing from the bottom of your lungs, right down by your belly.
Put yourself in a positive state - this might be playing music that helps set the mood you are seeking. Or it might be visualising a time or place or situation where you had the resources that you needed. As an example I like to travel to memories of specific locations and times, usually by the sea, if I want calm and if I want energy and confidence I’ll use music.
Be a copycat - mimicking someone who has the qualities you are looking for. We called it ‘modeling’ in NLP. Figuring out what they do and copy it to get the same effect yourself (but best not to do this if they are in the room with you).
As you grow those mindset muscles you are going to need to be prepared to be resilient and keep at it. You are not going to become Mr or Ms confidence by playing at being them on one occasion.
Some of us have already grown the resource of good resilience or grit; a refusal to quit. Some think themselves lucky to have perseverance and tenacity, and the ability to not give up. However, if you don’t have these skills, they are another part of the mindset puzzle that can be practiced or faked until they start to become embedded and you learn it as a behaviour which eventually becomes yours. To play act as someone who does not accept failure and picks themselves up each time something goes ‘wrong’ to try again - I think Napoleon Hill has a perceptive comment to make on this topic;
“One of the most common causes of failure is quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat.”
I’m not talking about destructive and obstinate pigheadedness. I’m talking about the resilience that leads to growth. You are going to have to embrace mistakes (I’ve got another piece on exactly this topic), they are part of growth. I’m talking about being prepared to be vulnerable. Being prepared to fail as part of getting better. Acknowledging that ‘failure’ is a vital part of learning and growth. As the famous Baseball player Babe Ruth says;
“Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.”
So I took what year 9 on Friday afternoon taught me about ‘acting as if’ and the magic of mindset and held it tight. I took it on into leadership roles. Managing challenging teams through difficult change situations. I took it into creative collaborations and working in diverse groups. Every time I felt something was going wrong I did a little check of my own situation, my own mindset and physical language, my expression... Had I decided this was going to be ‘a nightmare’, was I frowning? Had I gone into a defensive mode? Were my shoulders hunched, was I bracing myself for the worst… I would then make some physical and mental adjustments and each time I did, I saw the situation shift back to something much, much more constructive.
I’m going to sign off with a quote by Walt Disney that I see as a bit of a call to action… get out there and grow your mindset muscles and experience the magic they can bring!
"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."
- Walt Disney