78. What's with all the mindset shifts?

'Change your mindset' has become the panacea for all life's frustrations. What exactly are we changing, and how are we doing it?

Photo by Skye Studios on Unsplash

Is it just me, or is everybody talking about mindset these days?

There’s always someone encouraging us to check our mindset and to make a mindset shift. Mindset shifts, it appears, are all the rage. And if social media musings are to be believed, changing our mindset is the fix for… well, everything it sounds like.

With all these brain matter movements, I began to wonder what it is exactly that we’re shifting. And how and what are we doing when we’re shifting?

Is this a new thing?

Mindset wasn't a word I heard much of during the first half of my life. My parents, teachers, college professors, early mentors — none of them talked to me about my mindset (or theirs for that matter). They talked about other things — like attitude, habits, outlook in life, philosophy, values, work ethics — but not mindset.

I feel that some of the blame for this sudden appreciation of mindset must be leveled at Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck and her uber-popular book: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (published in 2006).

In it, she talked about her mindset theory and the two kinds of mindset: the Growth Mindset and the Fixed Mindset. Her premise is that within these two types of mindset is the key to our success.

Believing that your qualities are carved in stone — the fixed mindset — creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character — well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.

[…]

There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with […] In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way, [...] everyone can change and grow through application and experience.

Reading her book (and the hundreds and hundreds of articles based on it) might lead you to believe that the whole mindset thing is about a shift between these two poles: fixed and growth.

But that would be an inaccurate conclusion to reach.

“The most important question anyone can ask is: What myth am I living?” — Carl Jung

Our mindset is a set of beliefs we have that helps us make sense of the world. The earliest uses of mindset back in the 1930s defined the word as “habits of mind formed by previous experiences.”

One of the better articles about mindset I’ve read describes it as “a collection of heuristics or mental shortcuts that you’ve developed to make moving through the world easier and more efficient.”

While there is a set of heuristics that lead to either the fixed or growth mindsets, there are others that lead to different mindset types: Scarcity or Abundance; Negative or Positive; Threat or Challenge; Worker Bee or Entrepreneurial, among others.

What are we shifting?

When we decide to make a mindset shift, we are choosing to believe something else.

We’re choosing to look at the same situation and apply a different outlook or set of principles. There is a conscious, deliberate action which — let’s face it — can be uncomfortable at times because it’s the opposite of what we would have normally thought or done.

If we break this down, there are actually four micro-steps that are happening here:

• We are noticing the way of thinking (mental shortcut) that we’re using in a given situation.

• We are recognizing that there is a different mental shortcut(s) that we can apply in the situation.

• We are considering the tradeoffs between our old and automatic way and the new way.

• We are choosing a new/different way of thinking.

“We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” — Buckminster Fuller

It’s a continuous practice. Lana Hernandez, a mindset coach and my guest in a previous episode of Second Breaks, calls it a ‘pushing through.’ We are constantly pushing through the discomfort, guilt, and second-guessing that will inevitably ensue. And in that process of pushing through, the shift happens.

In other words, we don’t simply listen to a talk or read a book and the clouds part, we see the light, and — voila — make a mindset shift.

It takes practice and patience and persistence.

It’s a bit meta.

In order for us to be open to making a mindset shift, some part of us must believe that we can change… which if you think about it, is the entire issue with having a fixed mindset.

If we’re of the mind that we are who we are and we can’t change who we are… then making us think differently will be like that proverbial pushing-a-boulder-up-a-mountain scenario.

Obviously, some mindset shifts are not too onerous where the leap isn’t that huge. Others are truly life-changing, and that’s when we may need some reinforcements to help us out.

Bottom Line

All this to say, mindset shifts may be a trending Google search phrase, and for good reason.

We have a golden opportunity in our midlife to check how we view ourselves, the world, and life in general. And make the deliberate choice to change those that don’t serve us anymore (perhaps, never did) or those that we’ve outgrown and no longer align with who we are today.

After all, just because we’ve always believed something doesn’t mean it’s true or that it can’t be changed.

SPONSOR

Today’s issue is sponsored by The Age Agitators Club. Founded and hosted by age agitator Yvonne Marchese, this community brings together women committed to busting through their Midlife Funk to inspire, cheer each other on, share our stories, and reimagine what’s possible as they grow older and support each other as they rock their next chapters. Find out more and join The Age Agitators Club and continue to make waves as you age.

🔗 building on this

• Cynicism is the unhealthiest of mindsets. “A healthy mind knows how to hope; it identifies and then hangs on tenaciously to a few reasons to keep going. […] But the healthy mind knows how to bracket negativity in the name of endurance.” The Qualities of a Healthy Mind

• Limiting beliefs typically come in three flavors: beliefs about ourselves, about the world, and about life. Best-selling author Mark Manson expands on each one and offers four steps to overcome our limiting beliefs.

• The Nature of Mindsets. A primer on how our underlying beliefs, attitudes and assumptions create our everyday lives — and our shared world.

📣 hear hear

“Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny.” — Mahatma Gandhi