Finding your sense for how your mind works is your third step of being able to transform your life. By exploring different senses & getting a feel for how you optimally can make change, get in the right flow, and embrace discomfort.
Luckily, this page contains the best ideas & top research on how make sense of your mind. We will break down the science between making mindful change. Whether you’re looking to change how you think or how to trick yourself into taking action, this page should cover everything you need to know.
I. Pain and Pleasure: Creating Change
II. Successful Experiences: Using Talent, Environment, and Work Ethic
III. Flow State: Never Interrupting Unnecessarily
IV: Embracing Discomfort: Failure Is Success
I. Pain and Pleasure: Creating Change
When you want to make long lasting change in your life, you must associate varying levels of pain and/or pleasure. When something is not painful or too pleasurable, you’ll find yourself in a state of complacency. To make change, you have to associate varying degrees of pain and/or pleasure.
Short-term and Long-term
Change happens in two main ways. First, it is instant. You decide one day that you want to change and therefore do whatever you need to do to make the change. Second, it is gradual. You decide one day that you want to change and work to make the change every subsequent day after.
You can change overnight whether you want to believe it or not. This is because you associated an extreme amount of pain or pleasure from the thought of not changing. When you do this, you think both in the short-term of making the change today, and the long-term in what making the change could manifest into.
Increasing and Decreasing
Knowing that you can always associate more pain or more pleasure with your acts of change to keep your momentum. By doing so, you’re able to master the decisive moment because it will either be too painful to not do, or you’ll reward yourself with something you can’t live without.
There is a sweet spot with regards to pain & pleasure. Only you will be able to determine that. If you notice that you’re struggling to do something in particular, play around with each of these levers until you take action.
Choosing Who To Disappoint
You get to make the choice of who you disappoint. You can either disappoint yourself today, or future you when reflecting on why you didn’t make a decision to change. Who will you choose to disappoint today?
Would you rather hate yourself today by doing something difficult, or would you rather hate yourself in the future by the amount of regret of not starting sooner? Only you get to make the choice, and you are choosing the amount of future pain or pleasure you receive.
II. Successful Experiences: Using Talent, Environment, and Work Ethic
You’re destined to succeed with the many things you set out to do in life by ensuring you use the most of your natural-born talents, leveraging your environment, and outworking everybody else in the room.
Using Your Natural Gift
When people think about talent, they think about one’s natural or acquired ability to do something. Not everyone is born with the same gifts of natural talent, but we are all born with the ability to use our natural gift of being able to learn effectively.
Learning to learn is your natural gift to be able to outpace those who have natural talent and choose to not be deliberate in their actions towards improvement. Not only will you have a good idea of how to learn the foundations that gave someone else a natural talent, but you are also able to build upon those foundations which blaze your trail forward.
Embracing Your Surroundings
You can design your environment to work for you, not against you. When an environment does not push you towards being successful, it’s time to look for another which will. You can only do your best work by embracing your surroundings to the maximum capacity.
Your environment can mean a number of things. It could be a physical location, a group of people, a way of thinking, and much more. You can change this at any point in your life if you truly desire change. Having an empowering environment is critical in order to be successful.
Outworking Others
Although there may be many more talented people than you out there in the world, you have the unique ability to outwork others with a work ethic. For what makes up for talent, you can make up for it by outworking others.
The challenge with outworking others is that you have to be intentional and purposeful with the work you are doing. The work needs to be directed in the same direction as one with natural talent would have. You will be able to find this direction fairly easy once you’ve mastered the fundamentals of what you’re pursuing.
III. Flow State: Never Interrupting Unnecessarily
The flow state is the magical state we get in where we’re feeling productive and the time passes by without us noticing. You can get into the flow state more easily by focusing on the present, emptying your mind, and only worrying about things you can control in your life.
Past, Present, and Future
The past and future are things we constantly worry about. These are things that have already happened, or things we speculate will or will not happen. One of the biggest challenges with thinking in terms of the past and future is that we create unnecessary thoughts that occupy our brain making it harder to think.
Being able to focus on the present is how you can optimally use your brain. You’re able to process things as they come up which is what your brain was created to do, think and process through one thing at a time.
The Empty Mind
Having an empty mind will help you think clearer on a regular basis. We keep way too many things in our heads like our grocery lists, upcoming events, and work deadlines. Rather than storing these things in our heads which only adds clutter to the future category, we can rid our mind of these by writing them down.
Your mind should be able to shape like water. Your mind adapts to the present thought rather than trying to navigate through the clutter of the past and future. Getting in a habit of clearing out your mind and processing the emotions you’re feeling because of it will only help you in your journey.
Locus of Control
When there is an event that we can control & influence, we say that it’s within our locus of control. These are things such as doing a good job at work to get a promotion, learning a new skill to build a business, and eating healthier to lose weight.
There are events that we cannot control nor influence, we instead say that it’s outside our locus of control. These are things such as the weather, economic conditions, and other people. No matter how much we believe we can influence these things, we simply cannot. Understanding what is within our locus of control vs. what is not within our locus of control will give you much more ease of mind to focus on what really matters.
IV: Embracing Discomfort: Failure Is Success
Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. It’s the only way to grow as a human and by embracing discomfort, we’re challenging our limitations we’ve adopted as truth in our lives. We can stop living in lies, raise our standards, and find a sense of certainty by doing so.
Living In Lies
Everyone lives in a lie they told themselves when they were younger. You may believe your body or mind cannot do something effectively and you give up. These are limiting beliefs that keep you stuck in your ways rather than embracing the possibility of change.
Challenging a lie you’ve believed for most of your life is difficult. You start to question the many more lies you may have been living after you start to see that the lie is just something you told yourself so you feel comfortable with not changing.
Raise Your Standards
Once you have realized you’ve lived within a certain limiting belief, you have to raise your standards to make a change. What this means is that you must tell yourself that from this day on, you will be making a conscious effort to no longer live in that lie.
Rather, you are progressing towards making the limiting belief an actual reality. You’re starting small, working on it everyday, failing early and often, but ultimately overcoming the barrier that prevented you from taking action in the first place.
A Sense of Certainty
When you break past one limiting belief, you’ll feel a sense of certainty in which you’ll feel that nothing is impossible, but rather it takes a tremendous amount of passion & perseverance to do instead. You’ll start to take on larger feats you never thought possible.
Each subsequent milestone is another vote towards your future identity & ensures you that you’re on the right track for whatever you decide to pursue in your life.