“You cannot have a positive life and a negative mind.”
– Joyce Meyer –
Interviewing is a tedious and psychologically challenging activity. Consequently, we must have the tools and skills to do it well, but we also must have the right mindset to be successful. So today, we are talking about mindset and some experts’ advice on how to modify and change it. We all want happiness, success, and fulfillment. So, what’s standing in the way? It’s often a matter of mindset.
Your mindset is how you approach the issues and challenges you face. How you think about these matters affects everything you do, so it’s essential to remain positive. How many times have you walked into an interaction or interview in an audit, investigation, or inspection with a bad attitude, negative demeanor, or just plain rude? Do you think that doesn’t have an effect on the interview? How quickly do people make first impressions? Have we handicapped ourselves for the rest of the interaction?
With the right mindset, you can rise to any challenge. Here are tips from the experts on shifting your mindset for success.
Change the Wording
One way to adopt a better mindset is to reframe the wording of what you think and believe. It should also cause us to verbalize things differently as well.
We all have negative beliefs and biases that hold us back. Sometimes, they manifest themselves as negative self-talk. For example, you might say, “I’m not good enough,” or “I can’t do this.”
You can adopt a more positive mindset by reframing them:
I’m not good enough. -> I’m getting better each day.
I can’t do this -> I’m learning how to do this.
Even something like, “I hate my job,” can be reframed to, “I’m doing what I need to do now and transitioning to something better.”
The first step to reframing is to identify your negative thought patterns. Then, pay attention to the voice inside your head and what it tells you.
Other ways to discover your negative thoughts are to journal, practice mindfulness, or seek feedback from people who know you well. All of these involve the elements of planning and strategizing how we aren’t going to remain static, but how we are going to change our course.
In interviewing we know how important credibility and confidence are to success in the interview room, so obviously a positive mindset needs to be present.
Challenge Your Limiting Beliefs
You can create an even more lasting effect by challenging your negative thought patterns and demonstrating they’re untrue.
For example, you can collect evidence that proves otherwise if you feel you’re an imposter and not good at what you do. When these negative thoughts appear, you can counteract them with this evidence. Look at good results you’ve gotten before or seek positive feedback from others.
It can also help to look at the lives of successful people. If you feel like you’re not successful, it might help to realize that no top performer was born that way. Everyone needed to improve like you’re doing now. Don’t live in a vacuum, find those you can confide in and share with who are likely much more objective than you are. These colleagues can greatly improve your views.
Improve Your Content Mix
You can significantly change your mindset by consuming more empowering content. Stop wasting time on mindlessness. Find videos, books, articles, podcasts, and blogs that make you feel inspired. Use content that fires you up, makes you more positive, and gets you ready to act.
Podcasts are a great way to feel more empowered because you can listen to them while you work, commute, or do things around the house. It’s like a voice in your ear inspiring you as you go about your day. There are so many out there that can encourage you in every aspect of your life.
Create a Positive Morning Routine
What do you do when you first wake up in the morning? How do you spend the first few hours of the day?
The way you spend the morning sets the tone for the whole day. So, creating a morning routine that makes you feel positive and energized is an excellent idea. Then, you’ll approach everything you do with more positivity. This fits right in with have a good breakfast, nourish yourself across the board to start that day.
Start by deciding what you’ll do when you first wake up. Next, choose activities that will help you feel positive, such as light exercise, meditation, prayer, a healthy breakfast, reading time, or enjoying content that inspires you. A combination of several may be what the doctor ordered.
Set Goals
Setting goals helps you shift your mindset by focusing on positive future outcomes. When you make goals, you create this future for yourself, choosing what you want and don’t want.
You know what you’re working toward when you have clear and specific goals. Staying motivated is more manageable when you have a bad day or experience a setback. You’ll realize that one setback doesn’t erase all your progress. Whatever you do, don’t remain stagnant and do nothing, that is what so many do. Institute planning and strategizing to change the course of your future. Then start moving and keep moving.
“The more you feed your mind with positive thoughts, the more you can attract great things into your life.”
– Roy Bennett –
Visualize the Future You Want
Along with setting goals and coupled to it, visualization helps you focus on the future you want, which brings positivity into your life today. You can see the change and direction you need to go.
Choose a time in the future and imagine your life and business in as much detail as possible. Use all your senses to visualize what it would be like. You can practice this visualization daily or whenever you need some positivity. This is a great element to add to your morning routine.
Express Daily Gratitude
Daily gratitude is extremely powerful in creating a positive mindset and sense of abundance. It makes you appreciate all the good you have in your life.
The best way to do this is through a gratitude journal. Sit down every day and write down 3 things you’re grateful for. In addition to positivity, your gratitude journal will make you more resilient, reduce stress, and improve your mental health.
I constantly teach the need to use people’s names frequently in interviews, and to say thank you a ton. People like to hear their name, and like to be thanked, even if for the smallest things. Think about it, how many of you are just waiting for your boss to thank you instead of saying, “what have you done for me today”? Building rapport, relationship, and commonality makes everyone feel better.
Embrace a Growth Mindset
Growth mindset is a perspective that sees human beings as capable of change and growth. It differs from a fixed mindset, which says people can’t fundamentally change. Developing a growth mindset will give you a more positive way of thinking. And we all can do it. I have sat in the same course over and over and I always gain a new understanding or perspective from that training. You must be open to it and have the mindset, that things can always be better.
There are many ways to do this, but the most impactful is to reorder the way you see challenges and learning. For example, people with a growth mindset see every experience as a chance for growth. This is particularly the case with challenges, failures, and hard times. Instead, it would help if you understood that whether you succeed or fail, you’ll come through your trials knowing and experiencing more than before.
Keep a Journal
Keeping a journal is a great way to become more positive. Reflecting on your thoughts and feelings makes you more self-aware, so you can quickly identify negative thoughts or self-talk. Then you can develop strategies to change them.
Journaling helps your mindset by allowing you to work through problems and brainstorm solutions in writing. You can then develop action plans to make the changes you need. It also provides a way to “talk” and vent your anger or frustrations. Journaling can significantly change the stunted communication of texting and other electronic media. It facilitates critical thinking which is another diminishing resource in today’s world.
Creating Positive Success Habits
Creating positive success habits is the best way to shift to a positive mindset. Choose a few from the above or others you may find and create a routine where these strategies become ingrained in your everyday life. Those things that we make habits we don’t have to think about and we just do. With increased positivity, you’ll find it easier to get things done and keep negativity and stress at bay.
When it comes to accomplishing a positive mindset and minimizing stress have you considered if you are investing to get a handle on these? We must have the passion (I wrote about this several weeks ago) to work to change and improve these. With that positive mindset comes so many improvements in so many diverse areas of your professional and personal life.
Anderson Investigative Associates is positioned to custom-tailor training to your specific needs. If you have any questions or would like to discuss the above issues of positive mindset and stress, or any training need, please reach out. Additional issues pertaining to interviewing, auditing, and investigations can be found in other blogs and videos that I have produced and are contained in most blocks of instruction that our company presents.
If you have additional questions, comments, or have an interviewing topic you would like me to address, give me a shout. In the meantime, be well, stay safe out there, and get busy building that positive mindset and controlling stress.
Mark A. Anderson
Director of Training and Development
Anderson Investigative Associates, llc
114 Loucks Avenue
Scottdale, PA 15683
manderson@andersoninvestigative.com
tel:912-571-6686
.
