You cannot create a rewarding career (or achieve any BIG GOAL for that matter!) with the same mindset you landed your boring job with.
John: “Hey Sara, what’s new?”
Sara: “Nothing. Same old, same old.”
If we are not creating anything new on a regular basis, we are probably heading in the wrong direction and blaming others or finding excuses. If we are not consistently creating something new, we are destroying possibilities and wasting potential.
1) A New Mindset
Success, achievement, and happiness are not born out of negativity and pessimism. When we are feeling unhappy or experiencing adversity, we are told to grin and bear it or make the best of a bad situation. The problem is that we are not taught how to maintain a good, positive attitude in the wake of setbacks, obstacles, and unexpected circumstances that throw our lives into chaos.
It is difficult, at best, to create anything of substance with a negative outlook, self-doubt, pessimism, or an apathetic and indifferent attitude. Successful athletes, for example, will confirm that the best of skills and intentions are wasted when infected by a negative mindset. So the first step to creating anything new is to manage our mindsets. We can do this by:
Focusing on what we have, and all that we have to be grateful for (more than you know)- Surrounding ourselves with positive people and avoiding negative voices of influence
- Exercising and living a healthy lifestyle because “motion creates emotion”
2) New Thoughts
New thoughts can be destructive and inhibiting if our mindset is not functioning at peak performance levels. With a healthy and positive mindset, we can create new, empowering thoughts.
It’s been repeated throughout history that you can’t fix a problem with the same mind that created it. No matter how hard we work or how committed we are to achieving our goals, if we don’t continually rethink what we think we know, the same thoughts will become old-thought gatekeepers; and no new viewpoints or considerations are possible.
New thoughts create new goals, new dreams, and a new life because new thoughts create new beliefs. New thoughts that create new beliefs have the influence to empower us to lose weight, stop smoking, repair damaged relationships, overcome life challenges, land new jobs, enhance business opportunities. When we create new thoughts and new beliefs, we then create new habits. We can do this by:
- Asking higher quality questions such as, “what is possible for me that I currently believe is impossible?” This is known as the Socratic methodology. The Socratic Method is universally recognized for being the single-most effective critical thinking process there is. New thoughts and new beliefs derive from asking ourselves, and others, high quality questions that lead to high quality answers.Our brain is a highly advanced computer that is conditioned to answer virtually every question we ask it. This is how we got to the moon. This is how we got the iPhone. This is how we will find a cure for cancer. This is how our dreams are created and how we resolve our problems.
3) New Habits
According to a recent study conducted and published by Duke University, more than 40 percent of our daily actions are habits. Some habits serve us; others do not. The key is learning how to recondition limiting or destructive habits with empowering ones. I use the word “recondition” because most habits have been conditioned at the subconscious level. As you go through your day, try and identify how many times you find yourself doing the same things at the same time for the same reasons. Some people wake up in the morning and habitually grab a cigarette, or their phone, or get out of bed and grab a cup of coffee. Habits determine whether we exercise or not, how much television we watch, how many books we read, how we treat and respond to others, how we grow or fail to grow, and of course, our quality of life. By becoming mindful of our habits, we can better understand our actions and, in turn, make more deliberate and success-oriented choices.
Keep in mind that when habits materialize, our brains stop fully participating in the decision-making process. We sort of operate on autopilot. In many cases, habits are formed without our consent or full awareness – our intellectual capacity is diminished; severely at times. For instance, we eat ice cream every night prior to going to bed, stop working out or going to the gym on a regular basis, return home after work and reflexively turn on the television, or awake every day with the fear of being unemployed, lonely, broke, or unhealthy.
But once we become AWARE of our habits and identify those that do NOT serve or benefit us, we can change our thoughts and beliefs to create new patterns of behavior, new routines, and new actions that generate new outcomes; in other words – new habits to create a letter quality of life. We change habits to significantly improve our lives for the better! We replace the ice cream with an apple. We replace some TV time with a consistent exercise regimen. We read a book on job search or hire a coach who helps us neutralize fear in order wake up every day with courage and hope. We can do this by:
- Using Discipline as our guide. Discipline means being conscious of our thoughts, beliefs, and habits; doing what we DON’T WANT TO DO in pursuit of what we want; taking self-responsibility to do the things we need to do in order to enrich the quality of our lives.
- Embracing discomfort. To break any habit and replace it with a new one that will provide us the opportunity to live a better quality life, we need to accept and endure some degree of discomfort. Discomfort DOES NOT mean pain. In fact, discomfort suggests liberation and freedom from old, limiting, and destructive habits. For the first few nights, it might be a bit discomforting to eat the apple rather than the ice cream. But when we embrace the discomfort and envision the significant benefits of switching from ice cream to an apple – a healthier body and lifestyle – we then recondition our habits and will soon routinely reach for the apple a day.
4) New Desires
Napoleon Hill, author of the book, Think and Grow Rich (the bible of all success books), said, “Desire is the starting point of all achievement… not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.”
We often undervalue goals and ambitions that would make life more valuable (like finding a truly rewarding career). Author Neale Donald Walsch (Conversations with God), said, “Somewhere between the age of 40 and 50, most, most people have given up on their grandest dreams, set aside their highest hopes, and settled for their lowest expectations… or nothing at all.”
Why do most people place limitations on their abilities and potential? The answer is “fear.”
Most people are afraid to set significant goals for themselves because they fear they can’t achieve them. They fear failure, rejection, ridicule, and resistance. As Hill said so well: “…a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.” When desire transcends everything, there is no such thing as fear of failure, rejection, ridicule, or resistance. And if there is, it doesn’t matter!
It’s true that if we don’t have exciting goals for ourselves, we will be destined to awake every day of our lives to help others achieve theirs at the expense of our own.
TRY THIS: Ask people what has to happen so that this day, this week, this month, or this year will be your best ever? What is their true potential and what is genuinely possible for them if they were to identify and pursue it? When are they going to get going and be all they can be to achieve all they can achieve? Most haven’t a clue. We all have pulsating desires. We only need to muster the courage to identify and pursue them. We can do this by:
- Taking the time to go within. Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” So we must take the time and examine what our hearts yearns for. Once we awaken the giant within, we need to write our desires and goals down on paper to then pursue them with reckless abandon.
- Acknowledging the consequences of settling for less and knowing we never gave life our best shot, that there are no do overs in life. Perhaps this shot of reality, this shot of self-inflicted pain, will be the catalyst for going for the gold in the short time we have on this planet!
So, hey… what’s new?
Hopefully you won’t respond: “Same old, same old.”