by Internet marketing for seniors team | Sep 2, 2016 | Mindset
Have you got a growth mindset?
What’s the right attitude to online business success? That is the question. In 2010 at Michigan State University the psychologist Jason Moser began a test which we define whether or not you believed you could improve the abilities you were born with persistence and determination.
Neural Signals
To test this, he needed to understand what happens on a neural level when people make mistakes. He was interested in testing to brain signals.
The First Reaction To Failure
This signal is known as the error -related negativity or ERN signal. This signal begins in the cortex which is the brain area that helps us regulate our attention spans. It’s mostly involuntary which means we not consciously aware of affecting it and it’s the brain’s response to a mistake.
The ERN signal is the first reaction from the brain and is a bigger signal the second smaller signal causes us to focus on the mistake and hone in on it. Previous medical studies have shown that we learn best when both of these signals come into play.
The Second Neural Signal is the one That Affects How we perceive Failure
The second one was error positivity or the Pe signal. This reaction happens between 200 and 500 ms after a mistake; it happens when you realize you have made a mistake. The reason it was interesting to Moser was when people are aware of the signal are they more likely to learn from the mistake? This signal determines the right attitude to online business success.
Before he began his experiments, Moser divided his students into two groups. He has both groups to fill in a questionnaire. The purpose of this survey was designed to find out about their mindset. Did they believe that they could improve in life with practice and tenacity or did they believe that their abilities were more or less fixed at birth and couldn’t be improved?
Nature v Nurture
Science believes that success is based on innate qualities and also what happens in your life. The debate between nature and nurture still rages, and they can’t be separated. This was not so much of interest to Moser what he wanted to drill down into was how the volunteers rated their thoughts on the issue. This challenged them to think about their basic belief and assumptions. Most of the time when we are not consciously thinking about something we are driven by these unconscious thoughts.
Thoughts That Shackle us Are Not often Ours
Ironically these conscious thoughts are often other people’s thoughts! We have incorporated those thoughts into our beliefs when we have heard our parents say negative things, or our grandparents or anybody else we been in contact with.
The essence of the experiment was to place an EEG In the schools of all the participants. Their task was to isolate the middle letter of a five-letter sequence. Essentially the series is very simple sometimes they had the same letters such as CCCCC, or it could have been CCRCC. Despite the fact that this test was essentially very simple most of the participants lost focus and made mistakes.
All this is fairly predictable because the tests were essentially boring the participants lost focus and made a mistake. What was interesting was the dramatic difference between the two groups in how they reacted to their mistake.
A Powerful Difference In Signals
Both groups had a strong ERN response because this is largely involuntary, the brain sits up and pays attention when it makes a mistake. When it came to the second signal the Pe signal, there was a huge difference in the reaction. The people who had identified themselves as having a growth mindset had a huge reaction. In fact, the growth group had a signal which was treble the fixed mindset group.
The Conclusion
Moser interpreted this to mean that those with a fixed mindset essentially ignored the problem of a mistake. Those with the growth mindset paid attention and their second signal was very strong. But more importantly, the size of the signal was in direct proportion to the improvements in their performance following the signal.
The Positive Power of Engaging With Failure
This means when we engage with failures we improve. It also explains very graphically how some people learn from their mistakes and other people just keep repeating them again and again. We react to our failures in direct proportion to how we conceptualize those failures. The participants with the growth mindset believed that failure is the inevitable part of learning. Therefore, they attached no culpability or blame to it. They didn’t hang onto it ,they felt it could be changed and in a dramatic way it was.
Those who believe that talent is innate we are born with a certain amount of it and it can’t be improved are threatened by their mistakes. Every time they fail they think “well, of course, I don’t have what it takes!” It doesn’t matter what I do I will never be good enough!
Embrace Failure
Does any of these two attitudes strike a chord with you? Which one are you? Another experiment by Carol Dweck illustrated this in children aged between 11 and 12. She gave all the children eight easy tests and followed this by four very difficult ones. Those with a fixed mindset said things like I’m not smart enough to do that test. All my memories and good enough. Essentially they gave up trying to solve the problem.
The kids with the growth mindset showed an 80% improvement by changing their strategies and learning from them. They taught themselves Moser fisted ways of addressing the problems, and a few of them managed to completely complete the tests even though technically it was beyond their abilities.
Both groups in Dweck’s challenge were equally motivated. She offered them both toys as an incentive. Still, some of the children failed, and some thrived. Those with a static attitude to intelligence decided to give up the other children decided to plow on regardless. The children that did improve could not have known they would. What they learned is that growth is dynamic we can expand and improve.
Don’t Crash and Burn
This research has given me some amazing insights as a life coach and a business coach. A few years ago I was mentoring a student who had a fantastic niche, he was an expert in the subject, potentially everything was pointing to profit. He failed. He didn’t just fail, he burnt out spectacularly.
I couldn’t understand why? I knew, of course, it was a mindset, but now I do know exactly why.
Tomorrow we will look at this striking example of a child who would never give up and who practiced and practiced. That child’s name is now synonymous with football the world over tomorrow we will see why.
by Internet marketing for seniors team | Aug 30, 2016 | creativity
This is the second article in this series about increasing creativity. The first article is here. Creativity needs a relationship between change, testing and sheer genius! Sometimes ideas change so radically they blow the original thought right out of the water!
The Mechanics of Change
Einstein’s general theory of relativity didn’t just tinker with Newton’s law of universal gravitation, it blew up the original paradigm. Relativity was a response to the failure of Newtonian mechanics to make accurate predictions when objects were moving very rapidly. Likewise, Dyson’s Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner was not a marginal improvement on the conventional Hoover it changed the face of cleaning altogether. Dyson’s response was driven by the fact he had to keep bending down and picking up things that are vacuum cleaner couldn’t. His starting point was a design that didn’t work.
This is known as the problem phase of innovation and change. Creativity is a dialogue without a flaw it has nothing to create the spark of the solution.
Changing the Way You Think
Dyson’s unique propensity for creative change, altered not only the shape of the vacuum cleaner but also the existing science. Innovation is not something that happens to geniuses or geeks; it’s something which has specific characteristics. It involves learning from the bottom up and implementing and testing those changes.
Before Dyson, vacuum cleaners had a bag which doubled up as a filter, a tube, and the motor. The motor sucks up the dust from the floor which goes into the bag with air; the air escapes through tiny holes in the bag but because the dust is heavier it remains behind.
Acknowledging the Flaws
The flaw in this design model was the fact that the dust clogged up the thin walls of the bag, actually blocking the filter. This caused the Hoover to lose suction within seconds. Dyson wanted to create a bagless vacuum cleaner. Dyson wrestled with this problem for three years. The company he worked for resisted his ideas, after all, how could Hoover be improved on?
The practicalities of the design also stumped him. One day while he was in the timber mill he noticed a cyclone which is a cone-like device which changes the dynamics of the airflow and separates the dust from the air through centrifugal force. What struck Dyson was this involved a significant amount of very fine dust which didn’t block anything at all!
Eureka Moments
This was Dyson’s Eureka moment. As with all Eureka moments of creativity, they seem very obvious in hindsight. Today in every airport, bus station and shopping mall we see suitcases with wheels. The idea is so glaringly obvious and yet it didn’t happen until about 20 years ago. Before that, we all lugged our cases around.
Dyson was able to come up with a completely new idea because his imagination was fuelled by a flaw.The flaw was the conventional vacuum cleaners lose suction.
Dyson is creative because he can look outside of the box and see a problem from all angles. He can see the big picture and also look at tiny component parts at the same time.He is also creative because he’s curious, he does not necessarily see what he expects to see!
Being Original
A study by Nemeth and Kwan entitled “originality of word associations as a function of majority versus minority influence processes” demonstrated how pattern interruption helps people to be more creative.
In a free association experiment, most people replied sky to the word blue or grass to the word green. In other words, they were fairly prosaic in their choice of associations.
Nemeth spiced up the experiment by showing the group coloured slides while at the same time someone called out an entirely different colour. Suddenly blue became lonely or jeans.
Pattern Interrupt
Pattern interrupt introduces something we are not expecting into the equation, and it spurs us on to thinking a new way because it has jarred our complacency. This enables us to find connections we would not normally have thought of.
Dyson is a connector as well as being an inventor. He connected a sawmill where he saw part of his design with a vacuum cleaner. The solution was about combining two different types of existing technologies!
This is not a new concept Johannes Gutenberg combined the technology used to press grapes to press pages and invented the printing press. As Steve Jobs once said: –
“Creativity is just connecting things.”
Quite often when ideas just pop into your head the gestation period has been a lot longer, and when to converging technologies merge you have a bingo hey presto moment.
Increasing Creativity Needs the Right Conditions
Great creativity needs space, and if you are too focused on the problem, your mind can’t work it out by itself. Sometimes to increase your creativity you have to stand back and relax and let it happen in your brain.
Another environment which fosters this creativity is mastermind groups. Speaking with other entrepreneurs fosters creativity and ideas.
If you have one person thinking about a problem you have one brain. If you have two people talking and discussing the appropriate problem they feed off each other and the results is more than two brains combined. This is exponential five people arguing about a problem will be much stronger than five single brains.
Dyson himself explains during his career he has applied for other 4000 patents and never has he been the first person to apply for the patents.
The difference is all the other people who patented his device didn’t carry through it was nothing more than the Eureka moment. Taking action is important.
The Second Great Breakthrough
Dyson’s real breakthrough came when he left his employers who didn’t believe in the project and started his own business. Rather like Unilever he kept adjusting the Cyclones the size and the shape.
He tested it using fine white powder cloth. In doing this, he began to see a pattern as to what worked even though we had many many prototypes that were failures.
The cyclone has some variables not least of which are the entry and exit, the size of the entry, the length, the angle and the diameter.
This testing led him to realise that the single cyclone could pick up very fine dust, but the problem of hair both pet hair and human hair and pieces of fluff remained.
He created the first dual cyclone. The first got rid of the big clumps such as hair of fluff before the air is pushed into the second cylinder to get rid of the fine dust. He failed 5127 times but in doing so, he began to create the perfect vacuum cleaner.
Combining Study and Practise
Dyson bought two books about cyclones, and one was by the author and academic R G Dorman. During his testing, he discovered that Dorman’s equations predicted that cyclones would only be able to remove by particles of dust to a limit of 20 µm. By the time Dyson had finished testing and changing he could remove particles is fine as those found in cigarette smoke in other words down to 0.3 µm.
This is why I am so in favour of mastermind groups and meet with my peers in the Internet marketing world as often as possible certainly every six weeks.
by Internet marketing for seniors team | Aug 28, 2016 | Mindset
We all know that it’s easy to take action and do something when we are all hyped up. When our emotions are high, and we are vibrating with an energy, it’s easy to do something. If we don’t take action immediately or at least relatively soon, we lose the passion and the energy and somehow another the action never gets done. This is the law of diminishing intent.
Putting into Action Business Knowledge
I used to notice this when I went to seminars with Sarah Staar. At the end of the day after eight hours of listening to people speak, my mind was on a gin and tonic and a break. On the other hand, Sarah was making a master plan. At the end of the day, she was ready to put into action what she had learned that day.
Part of the reason here is the Sarah is teetotal! The other reason is, she knows that to make learning really work it’s not just understanding something it’s also putting into action. She also understands she doesn’t do it therein then, then the chances of her doing it later diminish. Two days later the moment is lost, the passion gone.When I say this to people now they invariably say, “well that was before she was a millionairess”. They are correct of course, it was, but she does the same thing today. The difference is so do I.
Act Now
If you’re motivated to learn how to make some extra money online do it now. What are you waiting for? To be another year older? Or alternatively another year poorer? If you want something, take action now.
If you like the idea of earning more money in your spare time, but don’t do anything that either means you don’t really want it, or you are lazy! When you really want to do something you will find a way and if you don’t you will find an excuse.
The Correlation between Self-Esteem and Discipline
When I was younger self-esteem and discipline were regarded as hand-in-hand bedfellows. Discipline enabled us to harness the power of emotion and translate it into action.
Setting up disciplines allows you to start a whole new life process because it expands your motivation and reach. When we do not connect control with self-esteem, we allow our psyche to be eroded.Small changed become habits in thirty days.
You, and you alone have the choice! The choice to vibrate at your highest frequency, or you can ease up a little bit. When you vibrate at your highest frequency, you attract others with the same energy.
The Law of Diminishing Intent in Practice
If you choose to perform slightly under par not giving your best, you will not attract the same caliber of people. Bingo, your psyche is eroded and your feelings of self-worth diminished.
Achieving your goals requires both the plan and discipline. Single-mindedness will always make you a success. This is because if you decide you are going to do something you will not let anything stand in your way. When you hit challenges or obstacles you will climb above them, tunnel under them, walk around them or fly over them. You will take action to overcome them, and you will learn from your mistakes.
Do the Best You Can
When you perform at less than your best you are cheating yourself. You are diminishing your self-worth. Unfortunately, one neglect is easy it is just a little thing. You can easily say oh I’m tired I’ll do it tomorrow! Sadly, neglect is one of those things that multiplies once you do it once so easy to do it again.
If you work on your goals, they will repay you by working on you. They will change you and make you feel more respect for yourself.
Change Begins With Choice
Any day we wish to change ourselves we can do so. Change starts with the learning process if you decide you want to make money from home then wealthy affiliates is a good place to start. It’s a free online university where you can learn to build a basic website.
On the other hand, you can do nothing. You can dream of having more money in your pocket, but that’s all it will ever be a dream. In 10 minutes from now if you take one small action and click on the link you can start building a business from home.
Thirty days from now you will have a business.
Bring About Change in Your Life Now
You can start that change at any time. If you start it now, it’s done, but if you put it off, then chances are you won’t do it tomorrow because you will have thought of an excuse.
It’s your choice whether you perform or pretend. If we want to change our lives and we have to do something outside of our comfort zones. Our subconscious doesn’t like change, and it comes up with all sorts of excuses to keep us in our present state.
It will throw up all kinds of reasons why you shouldn’t take action, but again the choice is yours. You can be lazy and do nothing or you can do a small something. That small action acts like a pebble in water. It continues to ripple out and has far-reaching change.
The choices we make our ours. There is no point in cursing the fact that you haven’t got enough money, or you want more money, or you need more money if you do nothing to change anything.
The fault is not in the stars, but in ourselves
All our past choices have contributed to where we are now. We have created our circumstances. We have the ability to make better choices now. If you are in search of a good life or a better life, you don’t need more time to mull this over.
What you need to do is take action and make it happen. You need the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Every choice we make brings either darkness and despair or joy and happiness into our life. Being comfortable and doing nothing will just bring a feeling of being a bigger failure.
Failure is not one massive thing as we said, in the beginning, it is a result of small errors of judgment.
You can do nothing or you can
Set Goals.
Starting now create a new view of your future. By defining your goals, you will be able to identify your master plan and make it happen. If you choose to work hard probably to jobs for the next four months, you will be doing something most people are not prepared to do. On the other hand, after that, you will have a lifestyle that most people will never have because they can’t afford it.
Educate yourself
The knowledge you learn at wealthy affiliates will allow you to rinse and repeat the process again and again. Hang out with people who already a success online people who will help you. The community at wealthy affiliates will go out of their way to help you. Don’t squander this incredible opportunity.
- You must constantly ask yourself these questions
- Who am I around?
- What are they doing to me?
- What have they got me reading?
- What have they got me saying?
- Where do they have me going?
- What do they have me thinking?
And most important,
- what do they have me becoming?
Then ask yourself the big question: Is that okay?
At the end of each day, you should play back the tapes of your performance. The results should either applaud you or spur you on to greater efforts.
Learn From Other People’s Mistakes
Life asks us to make measurable progress in reasonable time. That’s why they make those fourth-grade chairs so small – so you won’t fit in them at age twenty-five!
There are some things you don’t have to know how it works – only that it works. While some people are studying the roots, others are picking the fruit. It just depends on which end of this you want to get in on.
Don’t let the learning from your own experiences take too long. If you have been trying and failing to make money online then now is the time to get the right type of help.
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by Internet marketing for seniors team | Aug 26, 2016 | Mindset
Unilever is one of the biggest washing powder manufacturers in the world. You would think that they would also have a massive research and development budget. Like many companies, they will have to make the decision to manufacture by top down thinking or bottom up thinking.
While their sales and PR department may well have developed since the company began, the process in of the production of washing powder has changed little. It’s still a horrible dirty job which involves forcing boiling chemicals through a nozzle with terrific levels of pressure and speed behind it. Once this chemical concoction comes out of the other side, they should naturally disperse into vapour and powder.
In the 1970s Unilever had a massive problem the nozzles just didn’t function efficiently. This may sound like a small problem but in a market that makes sales of 5 billion a year, this is a mega problem.
The company response was predictable. They had the brightest and best physicists and mathematicians, experts in chemical analysis, specialists in the transition from liquid to solid, simply the best of the best.
Starting with Intelligent Design
Today those experts would be called intelligent designers – they could be trusted to come up with an optimal plan.
So these men sat down and worked out long complicated equations of what happens during the manufacture of washing powder. After a long period of discussion, they came up with a brand-new design.
Guess what happened to this new design?
You’ve got it, it didn’t work. It had the same design faults as the original model. Not every granule powder was the same size and the nozzles themselves blocked frequently causing a break in production.
In desperation, Unilever tried an in-house solution. They commissioned people who knew nothing about physics and even less about fluid dynamics. They commissioned their own biologists.
These biologists have one distinct advantage, they were scientists they understood the difference between failure and success and we used to empirically testing their solutions.
Building failure into the system
They took the nozzle and made ten copies of each one, so they had eleven identical copies of one nozzle. They then made incredibly small measurable changes in each one. Each nozzle was only about 1% different from the original. The nozzles may have been smaller, wider, fatter or thinner; they may have had a bigger borehole or a smaller one.
The biologists rigorously tested each of these nozzles under working conditions in the plant. They then took the best performing nozzle and created ten more almost identical but 1% different new models.
This whole process was repeated until they had 50 generations of nozzles. That meant that they had had 499 failures.
In the process, they had created one outstanding nozzle that was a hundred times better than the originals.
The mathematicians approach with top-down thinking they used their best brains and designed it there was no testing and therefore no measure of success or failure. Once it was produced and tested it failed.
On the other hand, the biologists started with one failure and no plan. They didn’t hold meetings; they didn’t understand the equations. This different approach produced the nozzle that had many shapes and thicknesses in its design. It would have been inconceivable any mathematician could devise a shape anything like it.
The biologists’ approach was building from the bottom up. They created the right kind of system. One that was enabling a means of driving progress and a mindset to accept that failure was inevitable that this system to flourish.
Combining Top down thinking or Bottom up
There are many examples in the natural world and the world of artificial intelligence that demonstrate systems that can learn from failure have a distinct advantage. It’s not surprising that a team of biologists chose this strategy of slightly adapting each model. It mirrors what happens in nature in the process of evolution whereby the failure test is known as natural selection.
Survival of the fittest reigns supreme. The biologists set out to create failure because they understood that by doing so they could empirically test the result and come up with something outstanding. In this case, the rejected nozzles help to drive progression of the design because they recognise the failures.
Recreating Hamlet
Richard Dawkins in the blind watchmaker mathematically worked out how long it would take a single monkey to type out the following line from Hamlet.
“Me thinks it is like a weasel.”
If the monkey randomly types and there are 27 letters and spaces in that phrase, then he has a one in 27 chance of getting the first letter. Assuming he does that he has the opportunity of getting the second and third letters right at the same odds. Unfortunately, this is where the math comes in. The answer doing that are 1×27 multiplied by 1×27 multiplied by 1×27. Mathematically that would mean to get them all right would be 10,000 million million million million million.
Dawkins, on the other hand, set up a failure mechanism. He programmed a computer to see which of the nonsensical phrases was closer to the target phrase. The computer rejected every other possibility. It takes the phrase which is the closest and randomly varies it. Incredibly it took only 30 generations of very small minute changes to have something that vaguely resembled to the naked eye me thinks it looks like a weasel. By the 43rd generation has got the right phrase.
The Power of Memory
This is because the computer was using memory. The natural world calls this the illusion of design. It looks as though a vast network of intelligence created some animals, but the only force at work was a blind process of testing for failures. The Unilever nozzle looks as though it comes under this category looking at the exquisitely designed not nozzle it looks as though the intelligent design was at work.
As we’ve already seen, there was no design capability at all in its manufacture. The biologists use evolution.
Markets have an ongoing process of trial and error. In businesses is called bankruptcy. In a free market system when a company goes the wall it is revealing that at least one process of price, advertising, management or the product wasn’t working compared with the competition.
The Principals of Evolution and business
This is the way the business weeds out weak performing companies; the market forces send them bankrupt. The companies who thrive and prosper have strategies that are replicated by their competitors. Like the Unilever nozzle, the companies successes are driven by cumulative adaptation. The failure of businesses in a free market is not a defect within the system it is the indispensable aspect of evolution. On the other hand, communist countries which don’t have a free market economy protect companies from failure by subsidising them.
This is the reason why planned economies don’t work then manned by intelligent planners who don’t test their design. Without the benefit of a valid test, any system is plagued by rigidity. In free market bankruptcy lubricates the system. Planners learn from the mistakes within the system which in turn creates new ideas driven forward by testing.
This isn’t to say that free market systems are perfect. They create problems price-fixing, inequalities tells monopolies and in the end companies to large to fail so, they have to be protected by governments. However, these markets work because of business failures not in spite of them.
Testing Your Systems
In Internet marketing many new beers as the same questions. These questions are
does video marketing work better than text
does Google penalised duplicate content
do some themes work better than others
et cetera et cetera
Unfortunately, they often take the trite answers as gospel. They make assumptions because some guru tells them it is correct. What is needed is a mixture top-down reasoning of the sort the mathematicians applied and bottom-up in the innovation of the type the biologists used which fuses knowledge. This type of knowledge reveals potential flaws.
Fortune Favors the Brave
To do this, you have to have the courage of your own convictions and the ability to test early. If you have a squeeze page then from day one, make to squeeze pages but don’t change one more than 2%. Test for a week. Take the best-converting one and change this by 2% and then split test both of them.
Only by this method of testing within your own business can you come to any reasonable conclusion. You have to accept that the majority of your results will be failures. On the other hand your successes will have been empirically tested and in the long run, your profits will increase exponentially.
Read the Second part of Increasing Creativity here
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by Internet marketing for seniors team | Aug 24, 2016 | Creativity, Mindset
You Are Not Creatively Dense
It may be hard for you to believe but everyone is creative. Possibly you have not found a way to tap into your natural creativity. That doesn’t mean that your creative juices are not running silently underground.
Perhaps you went to university or college and studied the sciences or law! Nothing wrong with either of these two subjects but they don’t encourage creative thoughts.
It may be that you worked all of your life outside, or in the construction business, or in an industrial plant. Chances are you didn’t even get a single second to become more creative.
You Are Not Alone
The truth is there are millions of people out there who drag themselves out of bed every day to go to a life of drudgery.
They daydream about being somewhere else! Ironically this daydreaming is actually creativity. It usually stunted before it has a chance to grow because many people in dead-end jobs feel that they have not got the opportunity to do what they really want with their life.
Maybe You Feel You Don’t Deserve Anything Better?
Abundant thinking is believing the universe will provide for all of your needs, and limiting thinking is believing you don’t deserve any better. The truth is, everyone deserves to be the best they can be
in this life.
Changing your life requires you to make a change in how you think towards it. If you have struggled with money all of your life then it is difficult to believe that you can have as much money as you want or need.
Take time out! Give yourself two hours to daydream and imagine that you have all the money that you need to pay your bills. Imagine that you also have money over for fun projects.
In other words, you are not driven by your bills to go out and work. You have the liberty and freedom to be able to do whatever you want to do with your time.
Follow Your Passions
Over the next month, keep a journal, write down everything you enjoy doing. This does not have to be earth-shattering things like climbing Everest! It could be something a simple as digging the garden. The only criteria you should think about is what you would like to do if money or time was no object.
Write down what you would like to do, as it comes up. Don’t consider whether you have the talent for it or the money for it. Maybe your art teacher told you at school that you couldn’t draw a straight line with a ruler. But, you have always wanted to paint a watercolor. Write it down.
The object of this exercise is to allow your mind to be free to imagine would really like to do. It may well be you will write down things you hate doing in reality. This is not important allow your mind to be free to wander where it will.
If it is tough to even to imagine what you would like to do. Try and remember things you have seen on your holiday you thought would be fun.
Did you see someone surfboarding and want to do that? Have you seen something on the television in the last week you thought would be fun if only you could do it?
Keep that Journal
Every day over the next month, spend 10 minutes a day asking yourself questions. Those questions will be personal to you, but some ideas might be:-
- What did I see today that was fun?
- Could I have done today to make me happier?
- What would I have liked to do today just for me?
- How could I have others happier today?
- What made me smile today?
- What would increase the joy in my life?
These Ideas are only suggestions
Feel free to add your own ideas here. You will not need to answer every question every day, but you are looking for patterns emerging.
It may be that you want to have your own organic vegetable garden because you love cooking or looking after your family.
Again this is not necessarily earth shattering but something that you personally want to do.
Hopefully, This will develop into a Gratitude Journal
A gratitude journal will be honestA gratitude journal will be honest, punchy and inspiring. This is your personal record, for your eyes only. You can doodle and draw and dream.
The idea is it will reveal your innermost feelings. Whatever people think is not very important because this is for you.
However, you may find some valuable insights into how other people think of you. Do they come to you as a problem solver or do you inspire People? Do other people see you as an organiser or as a fun loving addition to a party?
This is not the judgemental views of your family and friends this is how the people who love you regard you.
Watch the Patterns Emerge
If you are a problem soIf you are a problem solver then you may well want to pursue software development or continue to do your own bookkeeping when you are self-employed. On the other hand, neither of these pursuits will increase your creativity.If you can’t see those patterns emerging, then ask your family and friends why they value you. They know your skills and weaknesses and the clue to where your passions lie.
Everybody has done something to improve someone else’s life. Maybe you don’t realise you have and have to ask.
Ask yourself what your greatest accomplishment has been. Would this be something you’d want to pursue further?
Look back at the golden time of your life. It doesn’t matter whether you were five or 50, choose a time of your life when you were at your happiest.
Try to isolate what made that year different? What is your favourite memory of that time?
Expand Your Horizons
See the wonder of a flower, even if it’s only a wildflower strongly in the breeze to stay upright.
Go to night school and learn new things. Only by experiencing new things can you work out what you love and what you hate.
This journal should lead to a “someday” list. Make plans for things you can do in the future but make them concrete. Journal a start date write about your plans and also write a completion date.
Over time these exercises should point you to the things that make your heart burst with pleasure and isolate the things that make you constrict and shrivel up and die inside.
As you become braver your life will be filled with things that make you joyous rather than things that weigh you down. Your journey will not end with the journal, but it will have been the beginning. Letting you understand and create your ideal lifestyle.
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by Internet marketing for seniors team | Mar 21, 2015 | Mindset
It’s clear that life doesn’t divide up all good things evenly among all people. You can tell that just by people watching. Some people are better looking than others. Then there are people who are richer than their peers, some men have more hair than others.
There are people who come from a good background. They have a great education. They’re intelligent, well-liked – and it appears the world is theirs for the taking. Then, there are people who are average in looks. They don’t have all of the money they need, much less all that they want. They come from backgrounds full of various struggles. They may not have attended a prestigious college – or even any college at all.
Yet, so many times, it’s this second group of people who end up far more successful and enjoying more personal satisfaction than the first group. The reason for this is mindset. Remember that someone who seems to have it all doesn’t always stay that way. And what you see on the outside – the nice car, the fancy clothes – doesn’t necessarily reflect inner happiness.
It’s not enough to wake up every day and tell yourself positive things. That’s a great start, but mindset isn’t enough to change your life. You have to have an active role in taking action to leverage mindset into a new existence for you.
How to Develop a Strong Mindset
Understanding Mindset It’s not your lot in life that determines what you can or can’t achieve. Being successful in life is something that can happen to anyone because the key to success in business or in your personal life is having the right state of mind to carry you forward. There are two kinds of mindsets.
One of these appears successful – but in the end, that success will stall out. The other mindset will pave the way to a life full of personal accomplishments, business achievements and deep inner satisfaction. The first mindset is called a fixed mindset. This is what people have who rely on what they know, what they’re born with and what they believe they’re capable of currently to succeed. They believe that they have everything they need within themselves.
That sounds positive, and in some ways – it is, but it is not a strong mindset it is a fixed mindset. When a fixed mindset runs into obstacles it falls down, because it can't be creative to deal with the problems. As Albert Einstein famously said you can't deal with problems using the same mindset that created the problem.
People who have a growth mindset, they believe that anyone can work hard. They don’t have quitter’s attitude toward achieving success. This attitude causes them to strive while others coast by and get stopped by roadblocks. The two differences can be compared to the race between the turtle and the hare This was a race between unequals. If anyone were to bet on success between these two opponents, they would have bet on the hare. From the outside, he had everything. He was faster – because biology guaranteed that. Surely, he would finish the race with success because he started out equipped to win.
But as everyone knows, the story didn’t end up like that. The turtle was the victor because he wasn’t afraid to keep on going – despite the fact that the odds weren’t in his favor. He didn’t have the speed or talent the hare had, but he was willing to stay in the race because he knew what the hare didn’t. He knew that while he didn’t have the ability to run that fast, he had the ability to go at his own pace and cross the finish line. That race all boiled down to mindset. The hare also got complacent and didn’t even try to create a strategy because he, too assumed it was a given that he would win.
Your mindset has three parts that make it work – your IQ, the behavioral patterns you’ve learned, and your abilities. In those with a fixed mindset, they think that they have the talent and behavioral patterns they were given – and it’s set in stone. They believe this guarantees them success because of their talents. And if there ever happens to be something they can’t do, they don’t attempt to push it because they don’t believe they’re capable of doing more than they currently can. Though people with a fixed mindset can achieve some success – and many do – the level of success has a ceiling.
The kind of breakout success that they want always seems to elude them. And it always will, because they keep on doing what they’ve always done – relying on themselves and foregoing any chance to grow so they’ll know how to be the successful person they want to be. But in people who have a growth mindset, it means that they’re highly flexible and teachable.
You often hear people say that they think out of the box! Usually this means they've heard this expression and they repeat it. The very fact that they see the box indicates that they don't think outside of the box! They are not creative thinkers because creative thinkers don't even see the box.
Creative thinkers are willing to learn what they don’t know. They believe that they might have some natural ability or talent in an area, but that it needs to be cultivated. They realize that they can always improve on what they already know. They’re not afraid to try and fail because they understand it’s a common part of learning and achieving. People with growth mindsets are willing to put whatever effort is needed to achieve success.
They’re willing to take action that will propel them toward their goals and their dreams. Look back on the past three months of your life. Think about whether you’ve had limited self talk that convinces you that you can’t go after something “out of your league.” Have you quit on a project or partnership because you felt it was simply too much for you to handle? That’s a sign that your actions aren’t aligned with the positive mindset you’ve adopted over time.
Letting Go of the Wrong Mindset
If you have a fixed mindset, it doesn’t mean that you’re stuck with it.If you are aware of the negative aspects of your personality you can change your outlook. Let's face it few people are fixed all of the time that would make life such a battle. Every second of every day would be a fight.
Fixed mindsets will always see the dark side before they see the potential, this actually closes doors. Fixed mindsets think I was born a working-class boy, what makes me think I can be an entrepreneur. You want to make a fool of yourself? Open mindsets think Richard Branson made money from nothing so did Alan Sugar, if they can do it I can do it. When they hit obstacles they don't think that's it I have failed, they plough through they go around it, under it, over it anyway they can to smash the barrier.
So how do you stop these limiting beliefs?
The first thing about the strong mindset is that you need to take action. If you're not taking action you are standing still and you are not moving forward.
A success mindset can be harder for those who struggle with self-esteem. Maybe you had someone who told you that you couldn’t do something that you always wanted to do. Maybe you don’t have a strong support system in your life. Or maybe you’re the enemy of your own success. That’s what you are if you tell yourself that you can only accomplish so much and you shy away from bigger goals or dreams.
You believe those are for others. The others that you’ve convinced yourself deserve it more than you because you think that they’re more talented or smarter. Or you might have the right self talk, the positive mindset, but fear paralyzes you into procrastinating on the actual action of making beneficial life changes.
You have to plan for your successful outcome. Begin what it is that you want to do – even if every move you make is screaming that it’s not going to end well. You want to do this because when you take action, your beliefs follow. This is what trips up too many people. They think they must believe something before they take action, when it’s the opposite. They need a leap of faith before they start!
Take action, then watch how much you’ll believe in what you can accomplish. Every time you complete a task toward your goal, you gain self confidence in your abilities. This is how you develop a strong success mindset. It’s like working a muscle. Action strengthens the belief. People who have a fixed mindset will often avoid taking action.
They want to do what they know is safe – what they’re already good at. Because if they take an action step and it doesn’t work out, it will make them feel as if they’ve failed. This is a hard thing for people with a fixed mindset to experience. Some will never take that leap of faith again, while others will keep going because they want it bad enough. It’s action that takes someone with a fixed mindset frees them up to the potential lurking inside of them.
Using Your Mindset to Define the Action You Need to Take
Too many people make sweeping statements about what they want their success to look like. They follow this by coming up with goals that are vague and out of their control. For example, if someone were to say, “I want to make a million dollars,” that goal, while one a lot of people have, is too broad. You can’t take action if the success you want is too generic. Making a million dollars would need to be defined by how, when, and what actions you need to take to reach that goal.
If you were to say, “I want to make a million dollars on the stock market,” then that gives your action a way to focus on the process. You need your actions to be definable in order to develop a strong mindset that takes progress toward success. You would focus making your million dollars by learning all that you could about the stock market. You would study tutorials, read books, and maybe even take classes.
You would try to find a mentor. Each of these steps moves you toward what you’ve defined as your ultimate goal. You would analyze where you are right now in your life so that you could clearly define the action steps needed. If you want to earn a law degree, but you didn’t finish college, you would define one of your action steps as finishing college before you could apply to law school.
What helps when defining action is not to look down the road at where you’re going to arrive some day. You have to stay focused on the here and now. By being in the present, it’s easier to continue taking action.
Like the turtle in the race, you focus only on the step directly ahead of you. You don’t focus on how many more weeks or months or years it’s going to take you to reach the success that you’ve defined. The reason that you don’t want to focus on the broader single goal is because that can lead to a fixed mindset. You’re in a constant state of failure until that goal is reached.
If you’re achieving mini goals on a regular basis, then suddenly the world is wide open to you because you have a growth mindset – you can see evidence of your consistent accomplishments and it reinforces your belief in yourself.
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