Focus on These 3 Areas of Your Mindset to Take Charge of Your Life
How do we cut out all of the external anxiety and get our focus back to ourselves and our businesses?
By Daniel Mangena •
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For many, the world has never felt more uncertain.
With all of the tumult in our geopolitical situations and the threat of being restricted to our homes at the drop of a hat by our respective governments, it's okay to feel somewhat lost. Especially as an entrepreneur, it feels so hard to gauge what the right next move is for your business.
You've got not only the future of your market to predict, but also clients to serve and staff to keep paid.
No matter what's going on or what you've been through, the answers start with you.
Remember that your business was founded on your vision. Hopefully, it was a clear one (presumably so, otherwise you wouldn't have gotten far enough to be worrying about its survival.) Nevertheless, it is an extension of you and your goals.
So go back to that. What were your goals, why did you have them and what was the emotional pull behind each of them? Reconnect with that.
Take charge of your life by not losing sight of who you wanted to be.
Amazingly, there is still such a widespread misconception about what it means to be rich. We deify the lifestyles of "the rich". We thumb our way through mile after mile of Instagram clutter, claiming to want to live such a life, while simultaneously missing what "rich" really is.
We think that a million dollars in the bank is being rich. We also think that having a million dollars will solve all of our problems. What are we basing this on? Some braggart and self-proclaimed influencer, posting 10 seconds of them standing in front of someone else's Lamborghini?
Related: The Mindset That Sets Apart Great Leaders
Being rich is not about what is in your bank account.
Unless we do the work of shifting who we are to being an abundant person, we will simply play out the old patterns that have kept us in a state of lack.
What tends to happen to a lot of entrepreneurs is that they set unclear goals, attain some success and then meet some kind of "inciting incident" that causes them to precipitously give up.
Let's tackle each of the problems we have with our mindsets in more detail:
- Unclear goals - This is always the Achilles heel of most business ventures. Saying "I want to be a millionaire, and I don't care how I get there" isn't enough. You don't know what it's like to have a million dollars. That's not something you've experienced and therefore represents the unknown. The unknown is not something your subconscious is happy with, and without addressing that, you'll face backlash.
- The attainment of success - Without clarity on the goals you've set, success can appear to be vindicating your approach. You don't realize that all you've achieved is to reach the edge of who you are right now.
- An inciting incident - This can be as little as something that someone says to you that plants a seed of doubt, or a big life event. Nonetheless, without solid foundations and with an unhappy subconscious, your whole castle is built on sand.
We need to set clear goals if we want to take charge of our lives and businesses
You need to recognize the role of your subconscious in your mindset, and it's a massive one. Given that we use our conscious mind for only a little bit of time on an average day, it's no wonder that patterns of destructive behavior and unwanted situations keep showing up out of nowhere.
We are all just a product of who we are. Reality is filtered through our senses and processed by our minds. So much of the day-to-day thinking happens on autopilot. That's evolution in action — it's how you know to avoid danger, remember to breathe and don't fall over if you lose concentration.
What we need to remember is that our subconscious mind predates our conscious one by several millennia. We have to speak its language if we want to introduce new programs and operating procedures. Once we do though, we are tapping into the extra brainpower we had previously locked.
Related: How to Shift from a Businessman Mindset to That of an Entrepreneur
How can you access the power of your subconscious and take charge of your life?
The phrase "All you've achieved is to reach the edge of who you are right now" means that you probably haven't grown, but you think you have. You've run into the buffers — probably by accident — of what your subconscious mind is willing to tolerate. Beyond that imaginary boundary lies someone else. A life that just isn't yours and one that (as your subconscious sees it) is fraught with peril.
Your subconscious mind is prehistoric, don't forget. Our lives have evolved so much since then.
We live in plentiful societies. Our notion today of what constitutes scarcity is completely different from how it was when our subconscious systems were formed. That doesn't mean that they are incapable of change though.
By butting up against your edge, the default position of the subconscious is to start trying to bring you back to equilibrium again, in alignment with how it sees you. Your mind begins to perfectly execute its programming, but it's not executing a program that you have consciously chosen.
If, however, you find yourself up against your edge, bring your awareness to it and learn how you can start to push it out in small, manageable increments. Our subconscious can cope with a degree of the unknown and by pushing into it little by little, rebuild confidence and start the process of changing who we are.
Push the limits of who you are, what you are capable of and what you are resourced to deal with
Fundamentally, if you can understand the need to keep yourself from being overwhelmed and facing a shutdown, you will begin to make progress in any area, under any conditions.
Start looking for guidance in this manner. Seek out modalities for self-development that encourage you to find your edge, and don't just try to force a one-size-fits-all framework on yourself. That is why so many of these programs don't work for most people: They're not bespoke enough to your needs.
Get in touch with where you're at, where you want to be and what you need support with in order to get there.
