This post is all about how to change your life by changing your mindset.
Looking to change your mindset but don’t know where to start?
Our mindsets have a HUGE impact in our lives. They are one of the most determining factors when it comes not only to success, but to who we are as people.
But how do they influence our lives? What determines our mindsets? And how do I know if my mindset is empowering me to achieve my dreams or holding me back from them?
If you are looking for the answer to these questions and most importantly how to change your mindset.
Here is the ultimate guide on how to change your life by changing your mindset and well cover:
- The conscious and the subconscious mind.
- What are beliefs and how they originate.
- How you can eliminate your limiting beliefs and create a healthy mindset.
Let’s begin!
From the moment you wake up, ´till the moment you go to sleep the way you view the world, your thought, your decisions, actions, behaviors… are conditioned by your mindset
But what does mindset mean? And how do I know if I have an empowering mindset or a limiting one? Why do our mindsets play such an important role in our lives?
Let´s start from the beginning…
Changing your mindset. The Subconscious Mind
As we all know we have a mind that enables us to be aware of the world and its experiences, to think, and to feel; the ability of consciousness and thought.
Our mind consists of two parts: the conscious mind and the subconscious mind.
The conscious mind is personal and the subconscious mind is impersonal. The conscious is the effect. The subconscious is the cause. The conscious is objective and the subconscious the subjective. The conscious mind acts from reason. The subconscious mind transcends reason.
The conscious mind is the one to create the idea and the subconscious is the one to print it. The first one gives the order, the second executes it without questioning.
The subconscious consists of a field of consciousness in which any thought impulse raised by the mind through any of the five senses is recorded. It receives and archives the impressions or thoughts felt by the mind through any of the five senses.
The subconscious mind acts based on a set of beliefs. Beliefs are repeated ideas that influence our thoughts, decisions, behavior, actions…
Our subconscious works like a computer. When we are first born it´s empty, it doesn´t contain any information. As we grow up it starts recording everything that happens to us.
Based on our experiences, our education, the place, and the conditions we grew up in, a set of beliefs is printed in our subconscious.
The strongest beliefs are recorded from the age of 0-15. And the interesting thing about the subconscious is that it acts first with the dominant desires that have been mixed with emotional feelings, such as faith, fear, hope, hatred…
Another thing to have in mind about the subconscious is that it was not created to judge, analyze, or question. It simply acts based on the beliefs and orders it is given without questioning.
Our beliefs control our lives like puppets with strings, except that unconsciously, we are the ones to create the strings. The best thing about this is that we can change them and modify them as we wish, but first, we have to become aware of them.
Did you know that 95% of your actions, feelings, thoughts, decisions… come from the subconscious?
This means that most of the time your brain works in autopilot mode. And it acts based on the set of beliefs printed on your subconscious.
But based on what kind of beliefs: positive or negative ones, empowering or destructive ones?
How to change your mindset. The power of beliefs and mindsets
Most people don´t realize the power that those beliefs have over us, over our mindsets.
Your mindset is a set of beliefs that shape how you make sense of the world and yourself.
Our mindset is the glasses through which we see the world. If your glasses are distorted, so will be the way you see yourself and others. Our beliefs and thoughts shape the way we behave, the decisions we make.
I want to show you the power that our beliefs and our mindset have in our lives and in any situation that we encounter in life.
The placebo effect
And this example consists of the placebo effect. Today´s medicine uses placebo treatments to treat patients, meaning that they use a nonactive treatment on the patient (especially on medical trials) to test if there are any improvements caused by the patient’s belief that he/she is being treated.
The placebo effect is triggered by the person’s belief in the benefit from the treatment and their expectation of feeling better. If there is an improvement in the patient´s condition it is caused by his/her belief that they are being treated and getting better.
The placebo effect is used in our daily life as well. Many buttons on semaphores for walkers to cross the street are placebo for example.
The power of our beliefs and thus our mindsets have been proven many times thanks to placebo studies.
I want to talk about a placebo study in particular conducted by Dr. Fabrizio Benedetti. After the patient’s surgery, they were administrated morphine. Half of them by a doctor, the other half by automatic machines they had in their rooms.
The first half notoriously felt the effects of morphine, but the other half barely noticed it.
This experiment was tested further with patients with anxiety, Parkinson’s, depression…
And the results were always the same. Both groups had different outcomes, even though they received the same treatment.
What made the results to be different for each group was their mindset towards the situation and their beliefs about it.
The first group saw the doctor administrating the morphine and that small action conditioned their mindset and consequently the outcome.
Here you can find more placebo studies.
The placebo effect is just an example to represent the power of our mind and how crucial our beliefs and mindsets about the situations we encounter affect their outcome.
Acknowledging our mind’s power makes you question which outcomes are conditioned by our mindset and which are not.
Think for example of working out. The changes you see when you exercise are caused by moving your body or by the beliefs you have about working out?
How limiting beliefs influence our mindset
The next question I want you to ask yourself is:
Are my beliefs negatively affecting my life?
Remember that the subconscious is not created to judge, analyze, or question. It acts and responds according to the beliefs and the orders it receives. And you may have beliefs and experienced recorded in your subconscious that is limiting you, rather than empowering you.
These are called limiting beliefs and changing these are the first step to creating a healthier,
more successful and empowering mindset.
Limiting beliefs, as we discussed are beliefs that have a negative impact on your life and limit you, your success, and/or any project or objective that you pursue.
These limiting beliefs depend on your upbringing, your experiences when you were a kid, the education you received…
Our only limitations are the ones that we establish in our minds.
How can we identify and neutralize limiting beliefs?
The key to identifying limiting beliefs is simply by becoming aware of your thought. As simple as that.
When you become conscious of your thoughts and the way you talk to yourself, you start noticing patterns and repetitive thoughts or opinions.
A limiting belief can look and have an effect like in the following example:
Say you have a limiting belief that is you don´t believe yourself good enough to succeed at any project or goal you begin.
You unconsciously think to yourself: “ I am not good enough, I cannot succeed at this”.
The consequences of having this belief recorded in your subconscious can look this:
-Every time that you start a new project, you don´t finish it, because you would rather leave it unfinished than risk the possibility of failure- you don´t believe yourself enough to succeed at it. Maybe you abandoned that project because “you don´t have enough time to finish it”.
- Lack of self-confidence and self-esteem because you don´t think very highly of yourself.
Other examples:
- Never saying what you think or your opinions because you think you´ll be judged.
- Thinking “I am not skinny enough” every time that you see a piece of clothing is extremely hurtful for your self-esteem and confidence.
- Thinking that you don´t deserve a relationship because you are not good enough, that you are not pretty and because of that no one will love you.
How to change/neutralize limiting beliefs?
Now we know that the first step to change those limiting beliefs into healthier ones is to become aware of our thoughts and the way we speak to ourselves.
Let´s say that you have identified a limiting belief. What do I do now? How can I change it into a more empowering belief?
I want to share with you one method you can use and start changing your mindset into an empowering one.
- The first step of this method is to write down on paper the limiting belief.
- The second step is changing that limiting belief into something positive, useful, and changing it around.
Let´s do an example with one of the previous limiting beliefs.
“I am not good enough”. We could turn around that belief by saying instead: “ I have and am everything I need to succeed”.
- The third step is to internalize and change that belief. Every time that you catch yourself saying that limiting belief, stop and instead repeat to yourself the positive affirmations you changed that belief into.
So instead of letting ourselves think that we are not good enough, we say to ourselves “ I have and am everything I need to succeed”.
There are several methods in which you can turn around and neutralize limiting beliefs. The methods you need to use depends on how strong it is printed in your subconscious. Feel free to investigate the matter and the different options and methods that exist.
Our limiting beliefs are the limits we establish to ourselves about what is possible and what is not, about what we can achieve, and what we´ll be a failure at.
How successful you are going to be is defined by your beliefs, and if most of your beliefs are limiting you, if most of those beliefs are recorded with the emotion of fear, you are not going to be able to go very far.
I like to think of limiting beliefs as ropes that tie you to a tree. Some are thinner, others are tighter, but they are all tieing you to the tree, you are unable to move forward.
The objective is to start untieing those ropes and instead, knotting together and using them to help you move forward.
The benefit of changing your limiting beliefs with empowering ones is the motivation and the belief that you can achieve whatever project you pursue, that you feel comfortable and confident in your own body, that you can live an abundant and balanced life, that you are wealthy and successful…
Now, in order to help you identify and eliminate your limiting beliefs, I have created this FREE limiting beliefs worksheet specially for you. Don’t forget to grab your copy!
Side note on changing your mindset
Now that we have learned about beliefs, limiting beliefs and how they affect our way of
viewing the world, ourselves, and others around us, I have to tell something…
As we discussed earlier, the strongest beliefs are recorded in our subconscious from the age of 0-15 years young. But beliefs can also be engraved throughout the rest of our lives.
Remember that beliefs can be recorded in our subconscious by repetition or as a consequence of a traumatic experience
The benefit of learning about beliefs, how they are recorded, and how they affect us, is the consciousness you acquire about the matter.
Meaning that in the future, you can avoid negative and limiting beliefs from recording in your subconscious. And only let positive and empowering ideas in your mind.
Final thoughts on changing your mindset
Our mindsets are the way we view the world, ourselves, and others around us. Mindsets are shaped by beliefs, which condition our thoughts, behaviors, actions, character, decisions…
Beliefs are repeated ideas that record on our subconscious, a field of consciousness that receives and archives the impressions or thoughts felt by the mind through any of the five senses.
Our strongest beliefs are engraved from the age of 0-15 years young. Our subconscious mind acts first with the beliefs that were recorded with strong emotions like fear, hope, hatred.
The important question to ask ourselves is: is our mind controlled by empowering and positive beliefs, or limiting and negative ones?
Our negative beliefs are called limiting beliefs because they do more harm than good. Changing these beliefs is the first step to having a healthier and more successful mindset.
There are many methods in which you can change limiting beliefs, depending on how strong they are recorded in our subconscious.
We learned about one method with which we can start changing our limiting beliefs for more positive ones. And the steps to this method are:
- The first step to any method is to become aware of your thoughts and the way you speak to yourself to identify limiting beliefs when they appear on your mind.
- Write down on paper the limiting belief once that we have identified one.
- Turn around the belief into a more positive and empowering one.
- Internalize and change the belief. Every time that you catch yourself saying that limiting belief, stop and say instead of the useful belief you changed it into.
I hope you enjoyed this blog post on how to change your life by changing your mindset. Success is not something that you can achieve in one day or one week. It´s a path filled with struggles, teachings, blessings, setbacks…
However, it´s not impossible and I hope the steps in this post will help to make that journey a little easier and more enjoyable and become your best self!
What were your 3 biggest takeaways from the article? I would to read you in the comments!
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