This article is a chapter from my book The Life Actionbook: Tools and Actions for Personal Development. The entire book will eventually be available on this website for free in web format, but if you prefer to read it in ebook or physical formats, you can find The Life Actionbook on Amazon.com (affiliate link).
Mindset Quiz
It’s hard to find success when your head is a mess. You might be your own worst enemy. But once you’re at peace with your mind, everything will fall into place. Why? Because your mental state is what drives all your actions. And your life can only improve through action.
The questions in this quiz are subjective. Spend some time thinking about each one. Be honest with yourself.
Question 1: Do you know your purpose in life?
Your answer:
○ No. Struggling through life every day seems meaningless: 0 points.
○ Maybe. I enjoy what I do, but I’m not sure I’ve found my life purpose yet: 1 point.
○ Yes: 2 points.
Question 2: How anxious, stressed, and mentally overwhelmed are you?
Your answer:
○ I’m mentally overwhelmed to the point that I have trouble sleeping because I can’t turn off my thoughts: 0 points.
○ I often feel stressed or anxious: 1 point.
○ I’m laid-back and find it easy to stay calm: 2 points.
Question 3: How much control do you have over your actions?
Your answer:
○ I turn to distractions, alcohol, or other harmful compulsions to relax my mind each day: 0 points.
○ I have trouble reaching my goals because of distractions or self-sabotage: 1 point.
○ I have no trouble setting goals and succeeding: 2 points.
Add up all your points and see how you fared.
0-2 points: you MUST read this article.
3-4 points: you will probably find some useful tips in this article.
5-6 points: you can skip reading this article.
The Importance of Mindset
Attitude is everything. Mindset is everything. For you to be successful, your thoughts need to be organized. You need to understand yourself.
Many people view meditation as superstitious new age woo with no basis in science. But the practice actually goes back to the beginning of human history. Meditation is not just sitting with your legs crossed, eyes closed, and humming “om.” You can think of any practice of focusing on your mind as a form of meditation. It might be visualization, sitting in silence, gratefulness, prayer, or even doing yard work while immersed in deep thought.
If you want to be successful, you need to think like a successful person. When you start thinking like somebody who is successful, everything else will fall into place. Success begins with mindset.
A good mindset to have is Stoicism. Stoicism is all about not worrying about things that you can’t change. Some things are out of your control. Worrying about those things will get you nowhere. Instead, you should occupy your mind only with things that you do have control over. Let go and accept anything that is out of your control.
Success is all about being able to conquer the challenges you face to reach the goals you set for yourself. A good mindset is the difference between solving every unpredictable challenge you encounter, or breaking.
Meditation
At the broadest level, meditation is any practice that clears the mind of undesired thoughts. When most people think of meditation, they think of someone sitting in a lotus position, eyes closed, and in deep thought. But there are so many ways you can meditate.
Sound. In general, you perform meditation in silence. But, some forms of meditation encourage saying mantras. A mantra is something you chant over and over again to get your mind into a meditative state. Some people also like to have external soothing sounds or sounds of nature around them as they meditate.
Pose. The primary consideration for the pose is that you are comfortable while meditating. The classic meditation pose is sitting with your legs crossed in a lotus position, but you can also sit in a chair or even stand. Most practitioners advise against laying down because it’s too easy to fall asleep that way. Another option is to immerse yourself in thought while walking or doing a repetitive task. Whatever you choose, make sure you are comfortable and it is safe to “zone out” for the duration of your meditation.
Breath. How you breathe is vital to the meditation practice. Breathing helps you relax and channel your energy. There are many techniques for meditative breathing, but most involve taking slow deep breaths. The easiest way to regulate your breathing is by counting in your head. Again, there are many variations, but you can start with this: breathe in for 5 seconds, then breathe out for 7 seconds.
Thought. Meditation is useful for clearing your mind of unwanted thoughts. Think of nothing as you meditate. It’s much harder than it sounds, especially if you are used to keeping busy. If you have trouble, try concentrating on your breathing. Or you can repeat a nonsense word (a mantra) in your head to prevent you from thinking of other things. As you meditate, try to gain an awareness of your body. How does your chair feel against your back? Do you feel pain anywhere in your body? What are your five senses telling you as you wait in silence?
Time. An old Buddhist saying goes, “You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day. Unless you’re too busy, then you should sit for an hour.” It sounds like a paradox, but there is an important truth in it. The people who need meditation the most are the ones who think they have no time for it. If you’ve never meditated before, start with five minutes. Set a timer and zone out. Adjust your future sessions based on what you learn during your five-minute experiment.
Mindset Action #1: Incorporate meditation into your daily routine. Devote a minimum of ten minutes a day to meditation practice.
Purpose
What is the meaning of your life? What drives you to get out of bed each morning? Why do you do the job you do? What makes you happiest? Where do you want to be in life ten years from now?
Success is fleeting if you don’t have answers to these questions yet. Some people get lucky and make a fortune before understanding themselves. But that kind of success is different from the kind you find when you know yourself. Often, the people who get lucky don’t know how to hold onto their fortune, or they can’t appreciate it. If you understand yourself and your desires and wants and work towards your goals, the feeling is much more satisfactory and lasting. That is because money is not what drives all of us. Some people have a lot of money, but the money is not what makes them happy. You need to understand yourself and what makes you happy.
One way to understand what makes you happy is to write down your thoughts. Keep a journal and write in it every day. Write whatever comes to your head. Don’t edit what you write. Let the words flow as they come to you. Try to tap into your subconscious and write without any regard for whether your words make sense or are politically correct or not. Nobody will read it except for you.
Mindset Action #2: Every day, write your thoughts in a journal.
Once you have a sense of what drives you and what makes you happy, it is time to set your life goals. Everybody will die someday, and your purpose in life should be to have no regrets when you do die. Every action you take should be in the direction of your goals or a constant drive for improvement. In the end, nothing in this world matters to you except for your final thoughts as you lay on your deathbed.
Mindset Action #3: Write down your life goals. Do you have regrets? What can you do to rid your mind of those regrets?
Programming Your Brain
You are what you think. If you think you are worthless, then you are worthless. If you believe you are successful, then you are successful. If you think you’re happy, then you are happy. Each person has their own mind. Each mind creates its own reality.
Your mind is more powerful than you think. Whatever you truly believe becomes your own reality, unless it clashes with somebody else’s reality. You can’t control what other people think, but you have full control over your thoughts.
There are ways to program your brain to think in specific ways that manifest your goals. One such away is affirmations. Affirmations are things that you say to yourself over and over again. If you say something to yourself enough, then you eventually believe it. Believing something does not make it real, but it does make you more aware of opportunities to make it come true.
Mindset Action #4: What do you want more than anything else? Make it an affirmation. If you want to be a millionaire, affirm to yourself several times a day, “I will be a millionaire by the end of this year. I am working hard to make money.”
Another way to program your brain is through visualization. Visualization is like affirmations because you’re repeating something in your head so that you will believe it. With affirmations you’re repeating words, while with visualization you are repeating images in your head. Close your eyes and visualize yourself completing your goals. When you can see yourself accomplishing your goals, you are much more likely to succeed.
Mindset Action #5: At least once a day, close your eyes and visualize yourself succeeding in your goals. Visualize with as much detail as possible.
A more direct way of programming your brain involves feeding your mind with a steady diet of inspirational and educational content. Just as you are what you eat, you are what you watch and read. There is a lot of junk content out there. Make sure that the content you consume is worthwhile. You can never get back a wasted hour of your time.
Mindset Action #6: Think about all the content you consume each day, such as news, social media, and television. Is there better content you can consume instead?
Finally, it is crucial to surround yourself with positivity. When you have a lot of negativity around you, things look bleaker and more impossible. It is hard to do things when a fog of doubt surrounds you. Try to cut out the negativity in your life and seek out the positive.
Mindset Action #7: Do you come in contact with negativity in your life? Is there anything you can do to replace it with something positive?
Mindfulness
You are an extraordinarily lucky person. You might not feel that way, but you are. Think about all the good things in your life. Sure, there are plenty of places where your life can improve. But you have many good things going for you that other people don’t have.
Don’t take anything for granted. If you have a sense of gratefulness for the things that you have, you are much more likely to be happy when you reach your goals. People who are not grateful are never happy. Because they don’t practice gratefulness now, they won’t practice gratefulness in the future when they have even more good things.
Mindset Action #8: What are you grateful for? At least once a day, take a moment to relish in happiness for what you have.
Gratefulness is intertwined with mindfulness. You need to be mindful of the things you have to be grateful for them. Mindfulness is a simple concept. You practice mindfulness by ridding your life of distractions. When you are not distracted, you can focus on the most important thing. You can focus on one thing at a time. That consistent focus is mindfulness.
Be mindful of everything that you do. While you are doing something, don’t think of other things. Don’t think about what you’re going to do next. Don’t think about what you did earlier. Just focus on the task at hand.
If a thought comes up while you are doing a task, write it down and continue doing your task. Always stay in the present because there is nothing you can do about the past and we are terrible predictors of the future.
Mindset Action #9: Do one thing at a time. Be present while you do each thing.
Hacks
There are many little things you can do now to make yourself calmer and more in control. Here are a few things you can try.
Mindset Action #10: Don’t waste time deciding things that don’t matter towards your goals. Steve Jobs famously wore only black turtlenecks. He didn’t have to waste mental energy every day deciding what to wear. Focus on the things that matter in your life. Don’t spend too much time on the things that don’t.
Mindset Action #11: Try deep breathing. Take a five-minute break. Close your eyes and spend those five minutes concentrating on your breath. Breathe in for five seconds. Exhale a little bit slower and less forcefully for seven seconds.
Mindset Action #12: Avoid all technology for the first hour of every morning. Keep your phone and computer off. Use the time to read, write, meditate, or reflect on the day ahead.
Mindset Action #13: Thank someone each day. Put gratefulness into practice by thanking at least one person every day. You can give them a hand-written note, give them a call, text them, or thank them in person.
Mindset Action #14: Take a walk. We often lose sight of the simple things in our hectic lives. Schedule a daily walk. Having a regular walking habit allows you to get some sun, exercise, and lifts your mood. There are many ways to go about it, depending on what you want to get out of it. You can walk in silence and experience the environment around you, or you can listen to music or podcasts. You can walk alone or with your dog. You can walk fast or slow. Do what feels natural to you.
Mindset Action #15: Start your day grateful. Whenever you wake from sleep, say “thank you” in your head. Think of the things or people you are grateful for and say “thank you.”
Mindset Action #16: Exercise. Get the blood flowing and energy levels up. Do a few minutes of yoga. Go for a jog. Run out the door and sprint for a minute. Drop down and do twenty push-ups. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time or effort.
Mindset Action #17: Write every day. As writer Anne Lamott advises, write one crappy page a day. Write whatever is on your mind. Just brain dump and get it all out of your head. Then you can shred the page.
Mindset Action #18: Say a prayer. You don’t even have to be religious to say prayers. Just tell yourself what you want. It helps move your unconscious desires into consciousness. When thoughts reach consciousness, you are more likely to turn them into reality.
Mindset Action #19: Craft an evening routine. Quiet your mind before you sleep. You might read fiction before bed, or write in your journal. You might pray, or watch some television. Do the same thing every night before you sleep. It will train your mind to know when it is time to end your day.
Mindset Action #20: Make your bed in the morning. When you make your bed, you accomplish something. It’s an early win that boosts your confidence for the rest of the day.
Supplements
People have long used psychedelic drugs to give themselves otherworldly experiences. Most are illegal, so I cannot recommend them here. I have also never tried any for myself. Some are legal, but I will not recommend them because they can be dangerous when used without medical supervision. Instead, we will explore other, less hazardous supplements that can affect your thinking, creativity, and mood.
Mindset Action #21: Take vitamins. B vitamins including B6, B1, and B3 help stabilize the body’s lactate levels to reduce the chance of anxiety attacks. Large doses of vitamin C creates a tranquilizing effect that decreases anxiety. Vitamin E helps transport oxygen to the brain and thereby helps your body cope with stress.
Mindset Action #22: Try a supplement to boost your creativity. Aniracetam activates parts of the brain responsible for creativity. Choline increases blood flow to the brain. Aniracetam is often taken alongside a choline source (such as centrophenoxine) to improve creative problem-solving abilities. Piracetam is also part of the racetam family of nootropics. It increases communication between the two halves of the brain and has fewer known side effects. Researchers have shown that L-Tyrosine improves some creative thinking skills.
Mindset Action #23: Promote lucid dreaming. A lucid dream is a dream in which you are aware you are dreaming. Not only that, but you also have some control over your actions during your dreams. It allows you to have new experiences while you sleep, similar to hallucination. Huperzine-A is one supplement that increases the likelihood of lucid dreaming. It helps your brain keep access to your memories when you sleep, thus promoting lucid dreams. Dimethylaminoethanol (also known as DMAE or Deanol) is another supplement that aids in lucid dreaming. It is a naturally occurring compound in the brain that increases visualization activity in the brain. It also causes you to wake up in the middle of deep REM sleep without sacrificing your sleep quality. The combined effects of increased visualization and waking during deep sleep make DMAE an excellent supplement for lucid dreaming.
Tools
It doesn’t cost money to set your mind straight. However, if you like having extra guidance or just like playing with new toys, you can check out some of these tools.
Mindset Action #24: Create a vision board. It’s a place where you can pin up images that represent your dreams for the future. Put the board in your work area or somewhere where you can see it every day, especially while you visualize and meditate. You can also create a virtual vision board with Pinterest.
Mindset Action #25: Keep a daily journal. Write about anything. The point is to write whatever is on your mind every day to get it out of your head. The DayOne app is an excellent choice for journaling on your mobile device. If you don’t like the idea of typing on your mobile device, try recording your thoughts with a voice-to-text feature on your device.
Mindset Action #26: Try a meditation app. If you’ve never meditated before, you can download a free meditation app to guide you through the process. Headspace and Oak are two meditation apps you can try.
Mindset Action #27: Draw on a Buddha Board. The Buddha Board is a canvas that you paint on with water. As the water dries, your drawings disappear. It encourages you to be creative and value the present.
Mindset Action #28: Try Muse. Muse is a brain-sensing headband that tracks your brainwaves as you meditate. It records your brain activity data as you meditate so you can measure the effectiveness of your meditation sessions.
Resources
Mindset Action #29: Listen to podcasts.
- Aubrey Marcus Podcast. Aubrey Marcus talks with top performers to bring forward the lessons learned from triumph and disaster.
- Inspirational Living. Inspirational books and essays are adapted to motivate your mind, body, and spirit.
- Mind Body Musings Podcast. Maddy Moon offers guidance for women who want to stop overthinking, and start living with more trust, intuition, and flow.
- MindSet by Design. Andy Murphy interviews world-class performers to find out what gives them a competitive edge.
Mindset Action #30: Visit blogs and websites to learn more about mindset and meditation.
- Zen Habits is about finding simplicity and mindfulness in the daily chaos of our lives.
- Marc and Angel Hack Life gives you the tools to identify and transform the limiting beliefs that keep you stuck.
- Transcendental Meditation is a technique for inner peace and wellness used by many famous people.
- Vipassanā is a form of mindfulness meditation developed in the Buddhist tradition.
Mindset Action #31: Read books on mindset.
- Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius.
- Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales AD Lucilium, by Lucius Annaeus Seneca.
- The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph, by Ryan Holiday.
- Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, by Greg McKeown.
- Declutter Your Mind: How to Stop Worrying, Relieve Anxiety, and Eliminate Negative Thinking, by S.J. Scott and Barrie Davenport.
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