Success is a difficult thing to measure, perhaps because it means something slightly different for everybody. For some, success is all about financial security while for others it could be about climbing to the top of your game in your chosen career. For others, success might be defined by work/life balance.
Once you know what success looks like for you, the next hurdle is making success happen for yourself. One important step in that process is to cultivate your own success mindset. This mindset can help you visualize a life where you have achieved the goals that will make you successful and follow a path to make that happen. After all, once you figure out how to change your mindset, you can accomplish just about anything.
What Is a Success Mindset?
A success mindset is one that helps people achieve, personally or professionally. It can include many facets, including positivity, goal-setting, self-discipline and resilience. Developing a success mindset involves retraining your brain to approach life in a way that will help you realize your full potential.
This type of mindset can help you develop habits and attitudes to help you stay focused, resilient and motivated as you work towards your goals, especially when it comes to facing setbacks and roadblocks. With a success mindset, people are able to believe in their own potential for growth. They also strive for genuine clarity of goals, as well as consistent positive self-talk. It also involves holding yourself accountable when it comes to the decisions you make along the way.
A success mindset can help you foster a clear vision of what you want, stay open to continuous learning along the road and see failures as teachable moments. Ultimately, a success mindset can help you see yourself growing and set goals for how you are going to become successful.
Why Mindset Matters for Success
You set a firm foundation for your future when you take steps to develop a success mindset. This success mindset will help you reframe your failures as opportunities to change and grow, and it can help you build confidence in yourself and your goals. This can help you stay motivated on the journey toward your desired results. If you train your brain to believe in yourself and your own future success, you are also combating one of the greatest threats to success: comparison.
You can learn to celebrate your own progress rather than following someone else’s journey. Comparison can sometimes lead to beliefs that you are simply not as good, not as successful or not as worthy. Putting your energy into changing your mindset can help you be successful not just in business but in relationships and other areas of life as well. You can learn to communicate effectively and with emotional intelligence, build strong teams and work well with others to achieve goals.
Despite concerns about issues like inflation and rising fuel costs, many entrepreneurs feel optimistic about the future, according to the JPMorganChase Business Leaders Outlook Survey. John Simmons, JPMorganChase Head of Commercial Banking, asserts that business leaders have focused on turning “obstacles into opportunities.” In other words, their ability to succeed can be at least partially attributed to their adoption of a success mindset.
Stress can have negative impacts on our health. Negative self-talk can be damaging to creativity and productivity. Life is going to get in your way, and there’s not much you can do to stop that. However, you can change your mindset to set yourself up to be resilient in an unpredictable world.
How to Change Your Mindset to be Successful
There are several different practices you can implement into your life to foster a success mindset.
1. Visualization
Being able to see yourself as a success is the first step. You might want to consider creating a vision board with a collage of quotes, images, dreams and symbols to remind you of the future you are working toward when times get difficult. If vision boards aren’t your thing, you can get a bit of daily inspiration through daily affirmations or mantras. You can buy affirmation cards if you struggle to come up with some yourself and place them on your mirror to repeat at will. You might also benefit from repeating mantras like “I grow through every challenge,” or even simply “This day is my day” when you are having a difficult time.
Keeping a daily journal is an excellent practice both to monitor your progress and sort out your thoughts, and it should help you map out a visual timeline of milestones you hope to meet.
2. Self-Reflection
Being honest with yourself is all about asking “why” you are doing something to find the real motivation. Why are you growing your business, for example? To take care of your family, financial freedom, creative outlet… whatever the answer might be, you are the one who needs to ask it.
You should never underestimate the importance of self-reflection, according to the Harvard Business Review. It also needs to be a daily practice. Check in with yourself in the morning to see what sort of mindset you need for the day. Consider keeping a weekly win and lessons learned log to document both successes and setbacks.
3. Goal-Setting
Set yourself clear, actionable goals, like reframing negative self-talk by committing to positive affirmations for 30 days to help your success mindset. You can also set financial goals, like saving $5,000 over a period of time by tracking weekly expenses and getting rid of unwanted subscriptions to see results. If you’re hoping to benefit from a new learned experience, try setting a goal, like joining a networking organization or improving your public speaking by taking part in a Toastmasters club for a short period of time.
The key ingredient here is being realistic about your goals. Setting an unattainable goal for yourself will only harm you in the long run.
4. Cognitive Reframing
Learning how to reframe the way you interpret events is no easy feat. We all have lifelong training from the people in our lives and our own histories, but sometimes seeing the world through that old framework holds us back from a more positive future. Cognitive reframing is all about changing the way you look at the facts in front of you rather than changing them.
Certainly therapy can help you with cognitive reframing, but there are other useful daily tools you can implement as well. If, for example, you find yourself thinking, “I’m never going to be successful,” you can catch that thought as it happens by asking, “Why am I thinking like this?” Then you can challenge that thought by asking, “Is this true? Will I never be successful?” before reframing the answer. “This isn’t true. I’m just suffering from a setback. I have the tools to build a successful life.” Repeat as needed.
5. Lean on the Experts
We are fortunate to live in a time when we have so much access to research, and there are some incredible tools that have been created by experts along the way. If you want to dig deeper into the timeless philosophies of success and mindset mastery, check out the master himself at JimRohn.com. Rohn shares tips on how to cultivate an environment for success by surrounding yourself with positive influences, shares great tips on how to set goals that work and more. If you’re a podcast person, consider listening to this episode of Unscripted to hear how mindset plays out in real life.
The Power of a Success Mindset in Everyday Life
There are so many factors to finding success in your everyday life, and some factors are simply beyond our control. Which is why it is so important to develop a success mindset over time even if it doesn’t come naturally to you. Using tools like visualization, achievable goal-setting, positive self-talk and cognitive reframing can help you stay on track with your business and your life. Remember that a success mindset is a practice. It’s something you can come back to every day as you work towards your dreams.
Photo from PeopleImages.com – Yuri A/Shutterstock.com
