What’s one thing that's more valuable than money?

All aspects of your health

And one aspect in particular, your mental health, can change your life dramatically. It's your capacity to control your mind.

As you think so shall you be

Why do so many athletes and successful people practice visualizations before important events?

It’s because the ability to win happens in the mind first before it can ever happen in real life.

I have included hours and hours of free resources in this article to help you move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset.

What is a fixed mindset?

A fixed mindset describes people who believe their intelligence, talents and personalities are fixed traits that cannot grow. People who are in a fixed mindset believe they are not able to improve beyond a certain point.

People in a fixed mindset:

• May not try new things because of fear of failure
• May not approach people because of fear of rejection
• May avoid difficult tasks because they don’t want to appear foolish if they fail
• May believe there is no use in continuous learning because they feel they will never improve (This is an example of a limiting belief)

What is a growth mindset?

The growth mindset is the belief that a person's capacities and talents can be improved over time through continuous learning, dedication and hard work.

People in a growth mindset

• May accept very difficult challenges more often for in order to learn
• May be able to take rejection in stride because they view it as a learning opportunity
• May be more prepared to accept criticism because they feel the lessons are helping them grow
• May feel more positive about expending effort because they feel the have the ability to improve

It is possible to change from the fixed mindset to a growth mindset.

Just as if you would exercise for your physical health, you need to exercise for your mental health with mental exercises. These are:

1. Gratitude practices
2. Consistency (Keeping promises to yourself)
3. Meditation and mIndfulness
4. Self compassion

Gratitude is a mental practice that can expand your capacity for positive thoughts. Positive thoughts train your mind to see opportunities. Negative thoughts close down this capacity. See my article about gratitude practices here: https://hackernoon.com/gratitude-practices-for-the-hacker-launch-the-growth-mindset

Consistency is a mental practice that helps you build confidence and faith in your abilities. If you have a goal or target that you consistently perform daily work on, you can develop mental stamina through the practice of showing up for yourself on that goal everyday. It could be extremely small, like committing to eat yogurt for probiotics daily. Even the act of eating healthy yogurt can show yourself you are committed to a healthy lifestyle and build resilience for yourself in that growth area. Over time, you might add more ambitious goals, like more strenuous exercise.

Meditation and mindfulness are ways to control your thoughts through mental exercise. The mind has constant chatter and may tend towards negativity. Through the practice of being present, you can calm the mind some and direct it more positively. An example of this might be listening to a guided meditation each night before bed.

Everything in life is on a continuum and instead of thinking of things as black and white, it might help your mindset to practice self compassion. Self compassion allows you to be wrong and make mistakes without hating yourself. One time, I met a man who felt he had made several mistakes. When I told him that it was normal and natural to make mistakes sometimes and that did not make him a bad person, it was amazing the weight of burden that was lifted from him and his mindset. Can you imagine how powerful it would have been if he had been able to say those same words to himself without my help? With self compassion, he could have and still can.

“Dear Me, I am only human and humans make mistakes, I can try again next time and do better.”

“Dear Me, I have done the very best I could do and that was good enough for today.”

“Dear Me, I attempted to meet that person and it did not work out. I learned a lot from that interaction even though it did not succeed.”

These mental exercises help retrain the mind with more a positive direction. Just as you might find it fascinating to train an AI model by feeding it information, train your own mind with mental exercises to strengthen and hone it for success.

Helpful resources: