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Change your mindset and achieve anything – Is it really that easy?
The crux of the „mindset“: Change your mindset and your life takes the corresponding new direction
The dominant concept and credo in the coaching market sounds more or less like this.
What is mindset? Let us first have a look at how „mindset“ mostly is defined.
Very often it is defined as dogmas or fixed beliefs, which have to be changed or eliminated to accomplish personal growth and development or a certain goal.
Based on my experience I would say mindset contains all our thinking, feeling and acting engraved and filtered by our lifelong experiences.
Sustainable mindset development
Our mindset is created and developed by the processes of life in systemic interaction (as we are a social species). It could be described as our attitude how we perceive ourselves and the world around us and the patterns created by our experiences we made in our life. All patterns contain a cognitive and an emotional aspect (that means thinking and feeling, right and left hemisphere of the brain).
Those experience based patterns work like our filters, which determine how we perceive us and our world around us and how we act in it. They were stored as a neural network in the frontal lobe of our brain. If we want to modify those filters it is not enough to only overwrite or delete them.
It is very helpful to take the viewpoint of an observer to discern those patterns and filters. By cultivating and strengthening those metacognitive qualities or the so-called metamemory of our brain (this describes higher knowledge of our memory and how it works) it is possible to know who we
are. From bird’s eye view, we can perceive how we think, feel and act and further we can act on how we do so and create our life more consciously.
What does this mean in contrary to mere changing dogmas as fixed beliefs?
First, it is a complex process which contains a few more steps. The first one is discerning by taking bird’s eye view, then to describe exactly what your aim/goal is corresponding with the knowledge of your personality and your skills together with the necessary inspiration.
Therefore the chosen goal should be emotionally supported by being imagined as already real, at best it should get under your skin which helps to stay motivated until it is realized.
But the crucial aspect of this process is the following:
You should know about the process that is necessary and which steps need to be taken to sustainably fulfill what you started. With some discipline, you’ll need to confirm all that by applying your new chosen patterns in your daily life.
You need to experience a positive feedback loop and therefore you have to possibly adapt those patterns, you may have to overcome some hurdles which require a portion of resilience. You may also have to interpret negative experiences correctly so that you don’t lose your track.
Change your mindset – Achieve your goals, personal growth and development
Therefore it is important to accept life in its entirety and not to favor the heart or other emotions over the intellect.
This entirety includes every possible stimulus (positive or negative) because they all are somatic markers, which have an influence on the processes of learning, assimilating, storing and remembering in mind. All stimuli are important to make the development of our brain possible.
This is why a baby is blocked in its development when growing up in an environment with only a few stimuli. Also, young people who are told all the time how intelligent they are cannot really develop this quality in their lives. Our personality is created in a self-reflecting interaction with the systemic sphere we live in. One crucial aspect of our development is to experience the effectiveness of our actions (proof by practice).
Mindset development – What does all that mean for coaching and counseling?
Many coaches only concentrate on the first steps of this complex process: The inspiration and working out a new pattern by offering a different viewpoint. They help to take the first steps but then leave the clients alone as it is part of their self-responsibility (and it truly is!…but).
They rarely communicate what is needed after the sessions and why (possibly they don’t know what
brain research and neuroscience found out). So they don’t provide help for self-help to keep on track in day to day life after the sessions.
On the other hand, they offer inspiring shortcuts to produce euphoria to go the first steps. But sustainable success (for sure there are few exceptions) cannot be accomplished.
The reason for that is interpreted in the lack of client’s discipline in following up and missing maturity. Another reason may be unconscious patterns underneath the surface.
But to be honest, the client asks us for support because they can’t do that on their own, so it is more than fair to do the minimum what research found out and provide that knowledge. This means to provide support in our settings. But it also means to provide that knowledge that is required to stay on track on their own and to implement the required changes sustainably in their lives.
We from CleverMemo created a tool for coaches and counselors to effectively offer this kind of self-help, to stay on track after the sessions and to implement the new steps more easily.
It is Coaching 2.0 – For successful clients, a successful coaching business and a plus in revenue.
