As I start my travels and learning in this new journey, I am finding a theme that keeps coming up over and over. The idea that the most important thing to do to be successful is to change my state of mind; the framework that I see myself in and that I see the world in.
Every time I have run into this, it is presented as a needful thing and something that I just need to do! But how do I get that done? Everyone of us has the demons in the back of our mind that cry out that we are not worthy enough, or good enough, or smart enough to be successful and live the lives that we want to live. The idea behind changing our state of mind is to silence those demons, or a least gag them, so that we can move forward in our lives and be confident in our beliefs.
The challenge I kept facing in my efforts to change my outlook is finding ways to have ammo to use against those demons so that I could change my mindset. For me, it wasn’t simply a matter of flipping a switch in my head and having a new outlook on life. So for me, it was not about suddenly believing that I was worthy, it was about changing the definitions that surround my concepts to support the new belief structure.
One of the biggest hurdle that I am working on overcoming, that thought of “work”. To me, “work” has been something that I do so that I can enjoy the rest of my life, the shorter and more profitable the “work” the better. In this new endeavor that xiaoyi and I are undertaking, the assumption is that we will be “working” 24/7, 365 days a year to be successful and to have the life that we want to lead. With my definition of “work” in place, this does not obtain the freedoms that I am looking to have. In fact, with my definition of “work” it takes away the little freedom I do have.
So how do I overcome that? How do I silence the demon that tells me that I will be doing nothing but working from here on out and have to give up the things that I love such as travel and time with friends?
The answer came while on a trip this past weekend and it came in the form of an understanding about this new endeavor and what the “work” we put into it looks like. There is the “work” of sitting at a computer and typing out things like this, or watching training videos and posting ads, but that is all peripheral to the real work that we do. The real work that we do is on self-improvement and in living our lives the way that we want to, and this was the mental change that I underwent. No longer are the trips out to another city to do sightseeing a thing that I only get to do outside of “work”, but now they are part of work, an opportunity to learn something new and find a way to apply those thoughts to my new life. They become an opportunity to meet people that want to move outside their daily “work” routine and make changes in their lives as well.
Changing my state of mind was not a flip of a switch; it was seeing the world that I live in and move through in a different light, to see the opportunities for self-growth and understanding and how I can share that growth with those around me. My time sitting around with friends and a good bottle of wine is now work and I am loving it. Every step I take from here on out is work and another step towards the life I want to live, and it all starts in the mind.
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