Creating a mindset of abundance
The word mindset is the combination of two words: mind + set. The definition of mind is “the part of a person that makes it possible for him/her to think, feel emotions and understand things. The definition of set is “to put something in a particular place or position”. Combining these two words together we arrive at the definition of mindset: a person’s way of thinking and their opinions. We can conclude that mindset is something changeable, after all set means to put something in a particular place or position, therefore you can choose it. But how do we choose what our mindsets are going to be like? Well, the same way our body feels hunger, our mind also does. If we think of eating only apples and carrots for the rest of our lives, we can imagine what will happen. Now imagine what happens when we only read one book, watch one show, do one thing for the rest of our lives. Our bodies and minds will stop growing. And guess what, if we want to improve the quality of our lives, we must come up with ways to grow our minds and our bodies. Many people say that we aren’t our thoughts, we aren’t our minds. I beg to differ though. I believe we are our thoughts and our minds, because if we think we can’t do something, then guess what? We can’t. If we think we can accomplish something, now guess what, we can.
In order to change the way we think, our mindset, we must change the places we go, we must hang out with different people, we must do different things. Imagine going to a lawyer for health advice or going to a plumber for building wealth. Will that work? Although the lawyer and the plumber might want the best for us, they don’t know what that is. Therefore, to change our mindset from one of scarcity to one of abundance we must stop hanging out with people who want what’s best for us, we must start hanging out with people who want what’s best for them so we can learn different types of bests and choose one or a combination of many. Those who understand that what’s best for themselves is what’s best for you and me are those who are more interested in genuinely contributing beyond themselves, than those who only wants what’s best for you and me. Those who want what’s best for you and me are generally afraid to go find out what’s best for themselves. We don’t want to spend most of our time with cowards, fearful and ignorant people, do we? I know I don’t. After all, how are going to serve those around us if we stop growing? We never arrive to an abundant mindset, we’ve got to keep constantly working on it. When we reach a certain place, we gain the ability and opportunity to see beyond that place where we’ve arrived. The growth and the work never stop. They say that win a championship is difficult, but to remain champion is a whole other level of difficulty. But we’ll never see that if we never win the first one.
I have learned that there are three major steps to changing our mindset, to continue evolving as a human being. The first step is to gain cognitive understanding of what we’re trying to do. We can read books, go to seminars, watch movies and documentaries about abundance. However, we won’t know it yet. We will know about it at best. We don’t know it because we heard of it. We don’t know how to swim because we watched the Olympics. We don’t know how to be a mechanic because we read about cars and trucks. It’s not about knowing, it’s about doing it which leads me to the second major step: emotional mastery. We gain emotional mastery by doing something so many times that we start feeling it in our bodies. We won’t go to the gym a couple of weeks and we’re fit for life. We won’t learn to play the guitar if we memorised a couple songs. We’ve got to do it so many times that we can feel it working. We went to the gym so many times that we feel it in our bodies, we play the guitar so many times that our fingertips are calloused, and we feel we can play it for hours. For something to work successfully we must embody it, we must feel it in our body. And the third major step to changing our mindset is gaining physical mastery. This is when we no longer think about it, we just do it. This is what separate peak performers from the rest of us. LeBron James, Paul McCartney and Tony Robbins don’t think about what they do, they go and do it. They know what they have to do, their bodies are prepared to do what they have to do, and they’ve done it so many times that they don’t even think about what they’re doing. They think about how they do what they do so they can do it better.
To sum it all up, changing our mindsets is a matter of declaring it. When we declare something, it powers up the body and mind so they’re ready to act on it. Upon making a declaration, we’ve chosen to believe that we can do it rather than assuming that it can’t be done. Usually, such assumption is based upon ignorance and/or fear. We choose to believe that we have physical and emotional limits without even trying. Although the world has no shortage of abundance, it has a staggering shortage of skills to create abundance. There are plenty of opportunities out there, however, all opportunities are taken by those who prepared. If we aren’t courageous enough to prepare for when the opportunities arise, we are choosing to impose limits and boundaries to our ability to create abundance. We owe to ourselves to think and dream so big that others will think we’re crazy. If others don’t think we’re crazy, we aren’t thinking and dreaming big enough.
