Change Your Mindset To Achieve Your Goals

Change Your Mindset To Achieve Your Goals

By Mark Wager

"If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right." - Henry Ford

We are surrounded by images of winners. You can't turn on the television or go onto the Internet without hearing stories of success either on the sports field or in the board room. We know winners exist and how we react to them tells us a lot about our own mentality. When a winner reaches their goal of winning, you see different reactions in people. Firstly, you see the winner praised and placed on a pedestal. They are referred to as special and a unique individual who was destined for success for a long time and then there's the other reaction when people try to pull down the winner by diminishing their success by putting it down to luck or suggesting that the success wasn't that difficult and anyone could do it if they had the same luck and resources. Yet there is a third reaction. A reaction that helps us follow in the winners footsteps and that is to allow the winner's success to inspire us to reach our own goals. Success leaves clues and by studying those people and how they reached their goal we can find lessons which help us reach our own personal goals.

I'm honoured to be in the position of a Leadership Coach and I've helped many people reach their goals. After all these years of working with people and studying winners, a clear pattern of behaviour that is consistent in all circumstances has emerged. If we implement this pattern of behaviour into own lives then we too can achieve success and I know this to be true because I'm proof that it does work. While I currently have a new set of goals that I'm working hard to achieve I have already used the lessons of success left behind by winners who have gone before me to reach goals that I previously could only dream of. Within the past few years I've gone from working in a windowless office for an organisation that didn't value me to becoming a self-made millionaire with my own business. Not content with just that I decided to challenge myself to decreasing my weight and improving my health and lifestyle. I designed for myself a programme with a timescale involved and decided to stick to it to see if it worked and it did. I've lost 50 lbs in weight this year and I feel healthier and happier than I've ever been, yet I don't consider myself more special than anyone else or even luckier than the average person but like other winners I'm an ordinary person who has decided to adopt a special mindset.

Overcome your instinct

The biggest obstacle between the person you are now and the person you want to become is yourself. Self-sabotage is the most common reason for people not reaching their goals and its natural. The most powerful instinct that every human being shares is self-preservation. It's so powerful that people will act in a way that doesn't benefit them long term. If it improves even the chances of short-term preservation even the improvement is minuscule. Whenever people are faced with the choice between the known and unknown the typical instinctive reaction is to assume the unknown has danger and this instinct has ensured the survival of humans through the ages. If our ancestors heard a rustling in the trees it was either the wind or a potential predator. One option gets them killed while the other doesn't so it's not a surprise they assumed the worst case scenario. While this instinct has guaranteed our survival it doesn't guarantee our success. We are genetically designed to gravitate towards the path that has less of the unknown because the unknown contains risk and risk equals danger and if our goals lie down a different path our mind will do whatever it can to avoid danger, even to the extent of creating self-destructive behaviours.

Chose your mindset

We can override this self-preservation instinct and we see extreme examples of this in members of the armed forces or the fire services who are willing to put the life of others ahead of their own. In less dramatic scenarios people can override their instinct in order to reach their goals because each of us can decide what mindset we want. This reminds me of an interview I heard with former UFC champion and olympic bronze medalist Ronda Rousey, when asked about mindset she give an example that went something like this. - Imagine you are working in a terrible job in a miserable office with a horrible boss. Your don't like your colleagues and the work is boring, it's the worst job in the world, yet in ten minutes time you are about to go on your dream holiday. How do you feel? You feel great right despite being in miserable scenario you are feeling happy. Now a few weeks later you are on your dream holiday with wonderful friends and loving family members, you are having the best time of your life but as you enjoy this moment you realise that in ten minutes you need to leave this holiday and head back to work, the worst job in the world and you won't be able to go on holiday again for another ten years. How do you feel? You feel horrible, so process this, in the miserable environment you felt happy and in the happy environment you felt miserable because despite of what ever may happen around you it's you and no one else who decides what your mentality is, whether its positive, miserable, angry, calm happy or sad the choice is yours.

Everyone is born somewhere along the scale from being a loser to a winner but how far people progress on that scale is down entirely to what mindset they chose. They chose to adapt so when people ask themselves the question "am I a winner" it's the wrong question. The question people should ask themselves is "do I want to be a winner?" Your goals are within your reach, you just need to decide to adopt a winning mentality to reach them.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net