What is mindset?
The super short answer is that mindset is how we think. The super long answer would take books and years, and we would delve deep into many various theories and concepts (if you want this kind of deep dive, I recommend Mindset by Carol Dweck as a good place to start).
In this article, I am going to attempt to deliver the medium answer, which is that mindset is a collection of thoughts, yes, and even more than that, it’s a group of observations, assumptions, conclusions, attitudes, and beliefs that keep getting edited, added to, and played on repeat. For the purposes of coaching, we would simply call all of these “thoughts.” But for the purposes of understanding mindset - what it is and where it comes from - it can be helpful to drill down into the various kinds of thoughts we have that are coming into play when we consider how we tend to look at (and understand) the world.
All day long, we have thoughts in our heads. The statistic is something like 60,000-90,000 thoughts a day. All day long, your brain is just narrating and narrating. And a lot of time, we don’t even notice these thoughts or if we do, they just “seem true.” Like, yeah, all that noise upstairs is just my brain observing facts of the universe, this is hard, that’s gonna take forever etc etc.
But the reality is our thoughts are not objective facts. Like I said, thoughts are a collection of observations, assumptions, conclusions, attitudes, and beliefs. While observations can be objective, many times they are not. And assumptions, conclusions, attitudes, and beliefs tend to be subjective interpretations, as well. What this means is that while these thoughts may feel true, they actually have a layer of meaning being added to them in the form of an interpretation.
Let’s look at an example. Let’s say that you have a work assignment to write a communications plan. You’ve done several similar assignments and you struggled with them. So, your thought, based on your previous observations and your current assumptions, is that this assignment will be hard. That just feels true, right? But is it objective? No. The objective truth is that you have an assignment to write 6 emails. That’s all. How you think about that assignment - what you think it will be like, what you think it means about you as an employee - that’s all thoughts, and those thoughts don’t just magically appear. They come directly from your current mindset.
But there’s more to mindset than just our own observations, assumptions, conclusions, attitudes, and beliefs. On top of that, we learned many of our thoughts from outside sources, often without our actual buy-in. We call these kind of thought patterns our social conditioning. Humans are social mammals, and we learn by how others behave and interact with us. As kids, we absorb thought patterns from all around us, especially from authority figures and our peers. We learn what we are directly taught to think but we also learn through inference. It’s also worth pointing out that we learn through misinterpretation sometimes. Brains make associative connections, so sometimes they decide that one thing is safe or fun or dangerous because of unrelated but overlapping experiences.
So when we add all of that to our communications plan example, what do we get? Not only do we get our thought that it’s going to be hard, but we also get our social conditioning, which often kicks in with something like: it’s not ok to struggle with this or I should be better at this by now. Again, these thoughts may feel true. But that doesn't make them objective. Even more importantly, these kind of thoughts don’t help us show up and kick ass at our assignment. Instead, they leave us questioning our abilities and feeling sorry for ourselves.
This is why mindset - and specifically cultivating a resilient mindset - is so important. Our brains aren’t bad, but left to their own devices, they tend to look for evidence for what they already believe while also focusing on the negative. (I’m talking about confirmation bias and negativity bias, which I mention a lot, and which will have their very own blog post, coming soon.)
The very first thing you can do to create a resilient mindset is just to notice the thoughts you already have. We’re so in our thoughts most of the time, we think that they’re just true, like our brain is a reliable narrator. But it’s not. So as you’re going about your day, just tune in and notice when your brain says something. Then take a moment to pause and ask yourself, is this objectively true? Or is it an interpretation? This will help you begin to see that difference between your thoughts and the actual facts.
From there, you can ask yourself: is this thought helping me show up the way I want to show up right now? Even if the thought feels true to you, that doesn’t mean it’s a helpful way of looking at the situation. Do you get things done when you think this way? Or do you get overwhelmed and give up? I want to be clear that I’m not saying to just think positively. Instead, I am saying, think in ways that help you do the things you want to do. It doesn’t mean you tell yourself that things are fine when they’re not. Instead it means you tell yourself something helpful like, you can handle it.
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