Have you ever wondered what potential your mind can achieve? I asked myself this very question.
In the days that followed, I started studying everything about the mind and the people in our world that achieve their potential from CEOs, athletes, millionaires, billionaires and anyone I could find who’s achieved success in their life.
I found that no one immediately stands out as someone majorly different from you and me. But what they did better was unlock the potential of their mind through their thoughts, habits, belief in themselves and perseverance to name a few.
All stemming from the choices we make in our minds.
A recent study has shown that brain surgeons, rocket science and the general public have no major differences in brain function only by experiences and the choices we make. That should give you a lot of confidence that you can achieve anything you set your mind to.
Below I will quickly discuss how to unlock the mind in your favour followed by 10 easy steps that you can start practising to see the results you want in your life.
Let’s get to it.
How To Unlock The Full Potential Of The Mind
Our brain is what stands us apart from the rest of the animal world. It’s the most powerful muscle in our body.
When used the right way it can create all sorts of wonderful things in our lives.
The mind can create happiness and financial abundance, but when it’s neglected, it can be our worst enemy. This leads to us not living out our full potential.
If the mind is trained every day it will be the difference between a life of success or regret. This is the main reason why people are the best in their field of expertise, from business, sport or marriage. The reason being is they fulfil their full potential by focusing on developing their brain.
A lot of our important mindset habits are taught to us at an early age.
It’s the luck of the draw to get the right mentors to teach and show us the correct traits. Unfortunately for the vast majority of us, I included, we are never taught the winning formula to success early on.
This can not be an excuse as we grow older. The amount of books, podcasts and videos we can view, allows us to gather all the information we need. This was a major help for me in developing my own mind.
Let’s take a look below at some easy steps for anyone to start unlocking their full potential today.
10 Easy Steps To Unlock The Power Of The Mind
1. Learn Self Control
In our world, there are many things we can’t control that we put a lot of needless effort into.
The one thing we can have control over is our thoughts.
We can decide to pause when we start to feel angry or our ego gets attacked to reflect and make better decisions. We can create an environment where the impulses of sugar, phones and gaming can be neutralised.
Lastly, by learning self-control we can delay gratification for greater things in the future. Just like the famous marshmallow study found that having self-control invertibility is a trait of a happier and more successful person.
2. Practice Visual Discipline
The difference between succeeding at a task is solely down to your ability to stick to it.
This can be challenging. Especially when expecting yourself to just do it.
When this happens the likelihood of you following through is in the lower percentages. That’s why create visual stimuli for the mind to follow through on your goals. Has been proven to work rather well.
This can be having your shoes and outfit next to the door to go for a run or having your desk set out beforehand to make it easier for you to start.
Even tracking sheets clearly visible allows you to remember the habits you have to keep to.
For most of us, we can see and we rely greatly on this sense. That’s why putting it to good use can help to unlock our minds to follow through on our intentions.
3. Have A Growth Mindset
After reading the Mindset book by Dr Carol S Dwick. It brought home how we think about everything in our daily life. She put mindset into two categories, you either have a Growth Mindset or a Fixed Mindset. Upon reading I noticed I had a mixture of both mindsets based on my upbringing and who I associated with.
A growth mindset is someone who always believes they can get better through their efforts and are open-minded to change. Whereas a fix minded person is someone who believes things can’t change and are closed-minded to the development of themselves.
This can range from how they view challenges, obstacles, effort, criticism and the success of others. When viewing my own, there was room for improvement. So within my life now, I am conscious of how I talk to myself and others.
I ask myself am I ignoring this person feedback as a personal attack (sometimes the ego can be overpowering and loud and gets the best of us) or is this information beneficial for my growth.
A second example I ask myself is, am I resentful of this person success or can I learn from this person to speed my journey.
So my advice is to be conscious of your thoughts and the importance to try to live a life open-minded. By doing this I’m sure you will be happier for it but also a far better person at relationships with colleagues, friends and family.
4. Be Patient
You’ve probably heard before the saying “Patience is an exercise of self-control”.
Upon hearing this again whilst researching the topic, it stood out what patience is.
It’s you being in control of your decision making in a calm manner. The opposite is anger, Impatience and rashness. All emotions will lead to your downfall eventually. This is why developing patience is of the most importance.
In a world where we want fast progression and we want everything now now now! This is what can hold us back.
From my experience, I wanted to progress in my industry so badly when I joined. I made careless choices to fast track myself without planning or thinking of the bigger picture. This led to me failing.
I learned a valuable lesson in my younger years. That having the patience to take a step back to evaluate the situation and then act accordingly. This gave me a better chance of succeeding.
In your life, imagine some professions where if they weren’t patient how this would affect you. Imagine a doctor or a dentist as good examples.
Ways to help develop patience is;
- Pausing before reacting
- Breathing two quick breaths then a release
- Listening instead of talking
- Utilizing sand timers can help you stay in control
5. Learn To Focus
When focused on a task have you ever noticed how quickly time goes by when you come out of that zone?
The zone could be binge-watching Netflix or it could be taking massive action on your goals.
For example, Someone who focuses on saving will accumulate more money than someone who focuses on spending all their money every paycheck.
The tool to get what you want is to focus on the outcome you want.
Humans are capable of so many things but where we focus our mind determines what we get in return. What also stops the flow of focus is distractions from outside sources like family, social media or responding to those emails. My distractions are my two children as I work from home now and young kids demand your attention all the time.
So you have to come up with solutions to any problem that takes you away from your focus.
When I’m at home working, I have my headphones on with relaxing music, my children are occupied with studying or playing. My phone is away from me or is put on aeroplane mode. I’ve pre-tidied my workspace to get me into my Zen state and most importantly I’ve pre-planned this time to make it more streamlined to keep my thoughts flowing.
To make massive change and be the person you want to be, you have to make a list of what can keep you in your best state. Your zone that eliminates all distractions. Then apply this throughout your day and your life.
6. Choosing Positivity
We all know someone who’s mostly positive and who’s mostly negative.
I’m not sure about you, but I know I prefer to be around a positive person. That’s not to say that we can’t have any negativity in our lives, because let’s be honest. We do, but it’s just how we react to it that matters.
Hanging around with someone who’s constantly negative and feeling sorry for themselves can be pretty draining and not so fun, and vice versa.
Just like Yin and Yang, positive and negative energy are opposites and neither one likes each other to the point that they don’t ever want to be around each other.
Is being positive easy? The answer is clearly no, just like getting a great body isn’t easy or studying hard for your exams isn’t easy, but is it worth it? Yes!!
That’s why being positive is worth working on every single day of your life and doing whatever you can, to rid yourself of negative energy.
Give up friends who bring you down, constantly listening to all the bad news in the world, probably even EastEnders (You know who are) and you’ll see your life become brighter for it.
You have control over your positivity of what comes into your mind and that’s why like a muscle, you have to build it strong to withstand the barrage of negativity and the best way to combat this, is being aware of yourself and how you talk to yourself and the actions of others around you as they are too trying to knock down your positive wall.
You might ask why is all this important?
Here is why, you will be happier, purposeful, healthier, calmer, you will attract like-minded people and improve relationships.
The benefits far outweigh the negatives. Being positive isn’t going to be easy, but it is a choice that we make. It’s going to be very difficult at times, but the journey to adding more positivity into your life will be rewarding for sure.
7. Taking Action
Have you ever heard someone say “that person is so lucky” or “that person is doing well because of luck?” This is a universal misconception.
Whilst reading the book the Richest Man In Babylon, it states “Women and Men of action are favoured by the Goddess of good luck”. This bold statement opened up my mind to taking action and learning about the importance of mindset.
There are plenty of smart and capable people within our world and people we know within our social circle, who we wonder why they’re no further ahead. The answer is, they are not taking action in their life, with more procrastination taking its place.
An example of this is someone who wants to change their life but they spend half of their day on computer games and not taking action on their goals or they’re scrolling through mindlessly on social media apps, they then wonder why they are not hitting their full potential and feel stuck with life.
It’s all based on choosing the easy option or the hard option.
Easy Choice vs Hard Choice
The easy choice brings you short term gratifications but you stay in the same position in life or at worse go backwards or the hard choice, that’s challenging and difficult, but brings long term success and real happiness in your life.
I was the foremost, choosing the easy choice for a long time, entertaining myself with games, films, chilling with friends etc. What was holding me back was the lack of action and this led to a lack of fulfilment in my life.
Take Action Today
Throughout your day you need to ask yourself is this helping me grow or keeping me stuck in the same place, if it’s the latter, drop it straight away and move on to a task that will give you your biggest return.
You can achieve anything you set your mind to and the only way that you will be lucky in life is if you take action NOW! And every day create habits and momentum through your actions, where it will become a part of you and feel less like a chore and instead feels enjoyable and a normal thing to do.
You know the right choices to make today, it’s just down to you to make them.
8. Find Solutions
Have you ever heard someone say “I can’t do that, that’s impossible” or “I don’t know?”
What’s happening there, is the person saying this, is telling their brain the problem and all the brain gives back is nothing, because the brain is not in control of thought, you are and it will only respond to what you say to yourself.
What stops the brain in its tracks is when we say “I can’t” to something. My son had the same problem when he wants to find lost toys or his school kit. When it becomes difficult his mind will find lots of reasons why he can’t find something instead of where could it be. That’s why the importance of developing a solution mindset is crucial.
Adults perceive that as an easy thing to do, because growing up we have learnt that to find things we must look for them even if it takes many tries to find them. Have you ever had a problem finding your keys, phones, wallet etc? Don’t worry. I do too! As adults, we found the solution to putting those things in places where we can always find them. Finding the solution to our problem.
This is a learnt trait over time. As is when people say “I CAN’T” when things get tough. Instead of saying “can’t” say “I can” or “how can I do this?” this allows the brain to be confident in doing a task or it will find solutions to fix it. To create constant progress, using our vocabulary can become one of our biggest weapons to overcome negativity.
So today listen to what you say to yourself and others. The best way to correct these habits is to create a journal that you can just write in whenever things start to get a little overwhelming for you. By finding better solutions we can create an incredible mindset.
9. Learn To Never Give Up
What helps anyone get over the finishing line is never giving up. This is a powerful trait to have. There is the famous picture of one person digging for gold and giving up just short of finding what they were looking for then the other person who never gives, and keeps going ends up finding the gold.
From my own experience, I had an 8-week deadline and I was ready to give up on my career, it just seemed impossible to achieve but some wise wisdom from my partner enabled me to refocus and coincidentally changed my whole future. I couldn’t imagine failing now.
Sporting Examples Of Never Giving Up
In Sports, we see it all the time when the best teams never give in and go to the final whistle. I have witnessed the famous Fergie time with Manchester United vs Bayern Munich, where they came back in stoppage time to win 2-1 and lift the Champions League.
In the same competition, I’ve witnessed my team Liverpool come back from 3-0 down to beat AC Milan in the famous Istanbul final.
I have also seen Liverpool being down 3- 0 to the Messi led Barcelona, to then go on to win 4-3 on aggregate.
Imagine if they gave up, their club’s history would be changed forever. That’s why the importance of a never give up mindset is paramount to success.
You will find countless stories throughout history of when someone didn’t give up and we all have our stories and experiences of this too. This is one of the strongest characteristics that make us human and determines our success. Understanding why people give up is just as important as how not to give up. The main reason why someone gives up is that they see their goal out of reach of their capabilities. Whereas the person who keeps going has learned to create mini wins along the way like climbing steps.
That’s why we have to take control of our vision and build the stepping stones to create a vision that you can see as already being done in mind. Because if you believe it to be true, your mind will believe it and it knows it will receive its reward in time but if you don’t believe it will happen your mind will want you to give up along the way.
So plan and envision your way to your goal and have accountability partners of like-minded people and this will greatly help you in your achievements. Remember it’s ok to have the thought of giving up, it’s natural, but we all have a choice whether we listen to it or not.
10. Create A Vision
Without vision, nothing is possible. If John F Kennedy didn’t have the vision to beat the Russians to the moon, they would not have won the race. If Florence Nightingale had no vision we wouldn’t have the modern nursing we have today. That’s why vision is the creator. Without it, we wouldn’t know where we are going or what habits to form to get there.
The best thing about vision, you can create whatever you like. Leonardo Da Vinci invented plans for tanks and planes well ahead of his time. Steve Jobs invented the iPhone to make using a phone easy. Throughout history, there are men and women who utilized their vision of the future for the betterment of humankind.
Whatever future you desire, you can create it. But first, you have to see yourself in your mind’s eye visualising what you want to achieve. This allows the brain to create the course for your destination.
After reading Think and Grow Rich, we were arriving at our business trip a day early on a sunny Sunday evening. I closed my eyes and took myself into the future and created my week ahead. I imagined the meetings I would run, the goals I would achieve that week and the people I would help and inspire.
The week went by and on reflection, this was one of my best weeks. I hit all my targets and I was number 1 in the UK for sales that week and helped 4 of the people with me, hit every target they wanted.
This is when I knew the Power of Visualising your future works. Through a great idea from Jack Canfield, I now have cards with my goals written down with the date and place of where it happened. To help me visualise further I have a book with pictures of what I want to achieve. I look at both the cards and book 2-3 times a day to keep me on track, motivated and making my journey clearer.
Your vision needs to be clear and you will find a way to reach it, I have no doubt.
Conclusion
This list above shows the importance of an incredible mindset. By finding techniques to help develop yourself you change your life to be whatever you want it to be.
Follow those 10 principles above and you will see improvements. We want to hear your stories of how you have developed your mindset so please comment below.
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