10 Jun Become Your Personal Positive Mindset Manager
A positive mindset in your professional and personal life is integral to your success. When you are positive, your brain becomes more engaged, creative, motivated, resilient, and productive.
Your experience of your external reality is always malleable. How you perceive your external situation is always dependent on your internal focus – your beliefs and attitude that form your mindset which in turn is reflected through your behaviour, communication and habits.
When you are dealing with deadlines, challenging projects, difficult clients, and trying to juggle many responsibilities it can sometimes be harder to maintain a positive mood. Looking back to the Peak Performance Toolkit, we have some excellent strategies to improve your mood to support your positive mindset in the short and long term.
Map Your Dendrites – The brain is constantly creating and revising mental maps by building and strengthening your dendrites. The connections in your brain are strengthened by the anticipation and by visualising an event, just as they are by actually experiencing the event in real time. You can actively create the mind map of positive dendrites through visualisation so that you are fully prepared for the positive outcome.
- Before a presentation or difficult meeting, write down your SMART goals as visual affirmations you can see clearly in your mind.
- Practise the presentation in your mind and visualise your body language. performance, how you could change tactics to engage your audience.
- Visualise a smile and you’ll naturally smile!
Focus on the small manageable goals to enable you to achieve the Big Hairy Audacious Goals! Running a whole marathon is a fantastic goal, but when you start to plan training you may feel out of your depth. Break down your goal so that you can celebrate success from smaller achievable ones that will motivate you to achieve the bigger more challenging goal. Step out of your comfort zone by taking smaller risks to give you confidence for the big risk.
Move Your Attitude Towards the Positive – your experience of the world is based on your own attitude. By consciously looking towards the positive in any situation this will enable you to profit from three important tools for a positive mindset – happiness, gratitude and optimism. Richard Wiseman’s research on positive mindset to recognise luck opportunities found that by being positive you will train your brain to notice positive opportunities.
- Make a daily list of three good things in your job and personal life which happen to you each day – and remember to do this every day, not just at the end of the week!
Change your Language to be Positive in Communication – if you consider your written and verbal communication to be your behaviour as a result of your thinking, beliefs and conditioning, the language you use reflects your whole mindset. You can consciously choose every word you vocalise and produce as you think before you speak, write or type.
- Omit negative language such as the word “deadline” from your vocabulary, and replace it with a positive phrase such as “Achievement or goal”.
- Remember to compliment your peers and family, and provide positive criticism that they can work towards achieving, rather than looking at what they did wrong.
Believe and Trust in Your Peers and Team – having a positive mindset towards your own behaviour will have little effect if you do not extend this to your team, peers and family. Actively adopt the Pygmalion Effect – by believing in another’s potential this will bring that potential to life. By motivating your team to achieve with their “Why”, they will believe and achieve, and therefore, increase their success, job satisfaction, engage more positively with clients, and increase their productivity.
- Encourage your team with genuine compliments on their actions and ideas, and encourage each individual to step out of their comfort zone to take on new responsibilities.
- In your personal life, you can delegate roles to enable family members to discover new strengths and enable them to succeed.
Each of these five strategies enables you to take control of your thoughts and attitudes resulting in a positive mindset. In turn, this will lead to a more positive successful behaviour. You can be one of the successful people enjoying success and happiness as you pursue life’s bigger goals, capitalise on the positive and reap the rewards each day through your positive mental attitude.