Life happens in our heads. We are constantly translating what is happening to us through our own lens of beliefs, experience, and our genetic predisposition. It’s long fascinated me that two people can share the experience and have wildly different perceptions of that same event. Two people jump on a rollercoaster – one has an amazing time and the other is terrified. They both shared the exact same ride, but had wildly different experiences. Why is that?
Life is full of choices. What am I going to eat? What am I going to wear? In the same way that we are making choices about our physical life we are making choices about how we are going to mentally respond to the world. Just like we develop habits and preferences for our physical world we can develop habits and preferences for our internal world.
In psychology there’s this idea of a growth vs fixed mindset:
A growth mindset is certainly more challenging to adopt. It requires me to take personal responsibility for more of my life. However, if there’s a choice to be made, I want to try to choose the option that’s going to be better for me – even if initially it’s harder. In the same way that we can choose to exercise daily and eat food that will nourish us, we can learn to choose daily exercise our brain and nourish ourselves with thoughts that will benefit us.
This won’t happen right away. We need to approach training our brain the same way we would train for a marathon. You wouldn’t just run 26 miles without training. The same principle applies to our brains. If there’s something we want to change we need to be patient and find ways to slowly grow our resilience.
Which of the aspects of a growth mentality can you start to work on developing today? For me, I’m trying to better see challenges as opportunities.