What's the Big Deal About Mindset? The Answer is Just a Click Away.

By Erika Fehrenbach Prell

Mindset is EVERYTHING! There is a reason so many motivational and inspiring quotes, mantras, life mottos, and affirmations focus on mindset. Your mindset determines your success or failure, your possibility or limitations, a positive or negative attitude...catch my drift? Getting your mindset in check is your first step in calming the chaos inside yourself!

Mindset is closely linked to limiting belief and the Inner Critic, two concepts we feel passionately about here at SoulShine. Quick recap, a limiting belief is a false belief that you acquire due making an incorrect conclusion about something in life (for more information, check out this past blog “Limiting Beliefs are the Sneaky Villain to Your Goals and Dreams: Learning How to Defeat Them” here → https://www.findyoursoulshine.com/blog/limiting-beliefs-are-the-sneaky-villain-to-your-goals-and-dreams-learn-how-to-defeat-them). Limiting beliefs often show up as the Inner Critic (or as Jackie and I like to call them, the Itty Bitty Shitty Committee. Sorry, not sorry on the swear); this is that negative voice in your head telling you all kinds of awful stuff. The kicker? Not only does the Inner Critic tell you awful stuff but you believe it; that’s limiting belief taking over!
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Often, when the Inner Critic appears is when your mindset about a certain topic has faltered. This is a vicious cycle; your confidence falters leading to doubt in your abilities, then limiting beliefs are triggered, and that vicious Inner Critic starts in. See how this is all linked? 

Let’s take a quick physiology break to see how this all works in the brain. Have you heard the phrase, “what you think about, you bring about?”. There is a lot of truth in this statement. The part of the human brain that differs from animal brains is the ability for critical thinking. Critical thinking has two parts, the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. The conscious mind is what we are aware of or paying attention to while the subconscious mind is everything else. We are constantly taking in information from multiple sources - our bodies, our environments, our emotions, our memories. It would be impossible to deal with everything at once. Our brains have devised a way to deal with this. The subconscious mind takes everything in and stores the information for later use, meanwhile, the conscious mind is dealing with what needs to happen in the current moment. There is a lot more going on here, like habit formation and automatic responses, but we will save that for another day.

Your subconscious mind takes all information as fact, which is why it is so important to feed it the right information. If you say, I am a failure or unhealthy or lazy or unworthy, your subconscious believes that and pushes that over to your conscious mind. On the flip side, if you feed positive thoughts to your subconscious, like I am becoming my best self or I am confident in my abilities to learn and succeed, that is what is pushed over to your conscious mind. 

Since your subconscious believes all things are facts, you can use this to your advantage. Say you have a goal you want to hit like becoming healthy. Since you are just starting out, you may be overweight and out of shape. Using an affirmation multiple times daily like “I am becoming my healthiest self” puts that idea into your subconscious. Your subconscious mind believes you are already healthy but your conscious mind will realize this is not true yet. The brain does not like this mismatch and will direct conscious actions to make what the subconscious believes is true to become reality. Just to be clear, you still have to do the action; thinking about it does not magically make your goal happen. Choice is another higher brain function of us humans. But, feeding your subconscious positive, self-serving thoughts keeps your mindset positive, which keeps confidence high and doubts at bay, controlling limiting beliefs, and silencing the Inner Critic.

There is so much to mindset and how it works so stick with SoulShine this month as we dive deeper in the weeks to come! Here are 4 simple strategies you can use to help keep your mindset positive. You might notice that these strategies have come up in other areas, too. This is not a coincidence, DreamChasers! Many of the topics we cover are intertwined so the strategies work across the board. Talk about the ultimate simple way to calm the chaos of our lives!

1. Select a positive affirmation or mantra. Align your affirmation with a current goal. Say it first thing in the morning and right before you go to bed. This is when your subconscious is really ready to take in information. Also use this any time you notice your mindset shifting to the negative or the Inner Critic appearing. Using the mantra after you do something that aligns with your goals will help establish this as fact in your subconscious.
2. Practice self-reflection. This helps assess where you have had failures and successes, and how to turn these into lessons to succeed further in your goals.
3. Write in a gratitude journal. Gratitude is the most powerful human emotion and helps you physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Write down 1-3 things every day that you are grateful for.
4. Start practicing guided meditation. Meditation can help you in many ways, one being getting in touch with your thoughts and feelings and starting to shift them in a positive direction. A fantastic app to start this practice with is Headspace.

Alright, DreamChasers, go take on the day! As always, Shine On!
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