9 Steps To Acquire And Maintain A Positive Mindset
Not everything in our life is our choice or falls under our control, but we do control how we react to life situations; we choose either to be happy or to live a miserable life, to be successful or to be a victim.
Your mind picks what supports your choices, when you seek success you will attract all the opportunities that lead to success and ignore the fear that stop you from doing the things that can move you forward to achieve success. When you, when you choose to be happy; you will see the opportunity in each difficulty, you will be grateful for the hard times as it gives you learned lessons, you will choose to be thankful for what you have instead of being indignant at what you are missing, you will focus on lovely moments instead of the disappointing ones.
Here are the nine steps to help you acquire and, most importantly, a positive mindset:
1. Believe in yourself, and explore your talents and abilities.
To be able to believe in yourself, especially if you have negative beliefs like not being good enough or you have nothing to offer, you need to shift your mindset and replace those negative thoughts with positive ones through affirmations. To get those affirmations, you need to:
- List your achievements and accomplishments, even the minor things, and if needed you may also ask the people who love you about the things they like about you.
- Identify the skills that helped you to achieve things. .
- Decide how you could use these skills and talents to reach your futue goals.
2. Visualize success in all aspects of life, and get a clear vision about your future.
Use your imagination to visualize yourself after a couple of years, what you want to achieve, where you want to be, and how you want to see yourself with as much details as possible, write it down and revisit it from time to time.
3. Surround yourself with the positive people who uplift you.
Stick to Positive people who always remind you about your uniqueness, challenge you to be better and inspire to go forward, and stay away from the negative people who drain your energy and cause you to feel trapped and overwhelmed.
4. Don’t compare yourself to others; compare yourself now to what you want to be.
When you compare yourself to others, you will never feel satisfied. There is always people who are smarter, better educated, nicer,….etc, and this comparison might lower yourself esteem. Everyone is gifted with a lot of talents and abilities, we just need to discover, develop and engage them in a worthy pursuit that enable us to reach the best version of ourselves.
Comparison is the thief of joy. Tweet This.
“The key to success is to focus our conscious mind on the things we desire not the things we fear.” –
Brian Tracy
5. Block your negative inner voice and replace it with a positive, supportive one.
- Challenge all the negative thoughts that label you negatively, like not being good enough), minimize your achievements, and blame you for the smaller mistakes.
- Counter the Negative thoughts by positive thoughts that tell you: you are good enough, you can do it, and you have what it
- Identify one of your strengths every day and write it down in your notebook or journal.
6.Get out of your comfort zone
When you go to your limits, your limits expand, Sometimes we think we can’t go for more challenging things or for things we are not familiar with, prove to yourself that you can go for challenges by stretching the boundaries of your comfort zone outwards.
7. Overcome the fear of failure.
Have you ever decided not to go for something, because you were afraid of failure?
In fact, most of us learn better from things that didn’t go well in our lives, because we either win or learn.
8. Don’t be hard on yourself.
Seeking perfection is not bad in itself, but we have to accept that we are human, we all make mistakes, and we usually learn from our mistakes. It’s always good to set high standards, but you shouldn’t be hard on yourself when you fail to meet them.
9. Positive language.
Use positive language even while talking to yourself, for example instead of saying “I am bad at public speaking”, you can say “I find the public speaking challenging”, instead of saying “I will try”, say “I will” or “I am doing”.