Day 24: Mindset & Thought Control

Today you will learn what an empowering mindset is, why it relates to pursuing your purpose, and how to control your thoughts and create an empowering mindset for pursuing your purpose.

Summary

What is an empowering Mindset?

The state of your mind, body and spirit is the direct result of all the decisions you've made in your life up till this point, driven almost entirely by our beliefs and behavior.

• If you're interested in being the best person that you can be, following this path to purpose, your inner monologue needs to support the best you want to be.

An empowering mindset has two beliefs:

• Your situation, no matter what it is, no matter where you're start, is changeable for the better.
• You are capable of making that change happen.

Why is an empowering Mindset important to purpose?

We need to control our thoughts in order to stay on the path to purpose long enough that we succeed in fulfilling that purpose.

• A large portion of your path will be filled with the repetition of a daily checklist, which can lead to boredom in routine and petty frustration.
• So taking control of your mindset, taking control of your thoughts, is about enhancing your optimism and your own self-confidence.
• The majority of people that have been successful just put in hard work every single day towards what they wanted to succeed. And the only reason that they were able to show up and do this every day is because they changed their mindset about what they were doing.

How to create a Daily Practice

There's four things that we can do in order to create this empowering mindset.

Part One: Growth Mindset

• Growth mindset is the belief that our abilities and intelligence can be developed through effort and deliberate practice, as opposed to a fixed mindset, which assumes that everything is already set in stone, that we're not capable of change
• You're always looking towards ways that you can grow, rather than saying you will be this same way forever.

Part Two: Learn to Control Your Thoughts

• You can use a three-pronged approach to controlling your thoughts using self-talk, mindfulness, and gratitude.
• Self talk: Focus on positive self talk like "I choose to be here. I've got a handle on this and I can definitely rise to the occasion," which will lead to positive emotions, expand your perspective, giving us the ability to create action plans beyond our normal routines.
• Gratitude: focusing on and being thankful for what we already have in our life changes your amygdala filter, essentially training it to take in more positive information and enjoy our life in the present.
• Mindfulness: strengthens the ability to recognize and control the gap, the moment a thought arises and the moment our brain attaches an emotion to that thought, replacing a bad thought with a better one, neutralizing that stress response in the short term and reprogramming the brain in the long term.

Part Three: Working with Grit and Managing Willpower.

• Grit not just the energy it takes to push through a difficult task, but the energy needed to push through years of difficult tasks because that's what we're going to face on our path to purpose. Without the ability to tough out the hard times, you're rarely going to get anywhere worth going.
• Willpower is self control, the ability to resist distraction, stay focused and delay gratification. And unfortunately it's a finite resource. However, we're going to need that willpower in order to have the grit to persevere. We need the willpower to do the hard thing and to embrace the suck.
• Start your day with the hardest task and work backward in descending order of importance and difficulty to the easiest.  This way you have the most willpower and grit to get over that hard task. And the more hard tasks you do, the faster you make it towards achieving your goals.

Part Four: Overcoming Fear

• You may be fearful of the ambition of the purpose that you're trying to achieve.
• If you don't learn to work with this emotion, it's certainly going to learn how to work with you, seeping in and keeping you from doing the things you want to accomplish.
• Overcoming fear is a practice of learning to be comfortable with the uncomfortable, using fear as a compass to drive focus and concentration in the short term, and as a directional arrow in the long term.
• Often the people that succeed head in the direction that scares them the most because this is going to amplify your attention and your brain's capabilities to come up with novel solutions for overcoming that fear.
• By confronting your fears, you're expanding your capacity and teaching yourself to remain psychologically stable and in control, even in situations that feel unstable and uncontrollable.

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Activity

Begin examining your thoughts around your purpose: When you think about taking action on this every day, what are the thoughts that start to come up?

Then use the resources below, or find your own, to start mastering the four parts of an empowering mindset:

Growth Mindset

• Growth Mindset research by Carol Dweck
• The Pillars of A GROWTH Mindset by Tom Bilyeu

Controlling Thoughts

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
• 21 Mindfulness Exercises & Activities
• The Science of Gratitude & How to Build a Gratitude Practice by Andrew Huberman

Grit & Willpower

• How to Grow Your Grit: 5 Secrets From Research by Patrik Edblad

Overcoming Fear

• Fear Setting by Tim Ferriss

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.