I met Melissa through a friend and quickly joined her growing community. The beauty of working with her is that she meets you where you’re at – sans judgment and with practical, consistent, and empathetic advice. My ‘big ahas’ included recognizing how unconscious sugar was sneaking into my day and how easy and refreshing it was to give up my daily dose of caffeine. Seeing a physical transformation is exciting, but what’s even more fulfilling is enjoying a better night’s sleep and discovering health as a way of life.
This month the theme is mindset! This is a favorite topic of mine because it is so instrumental in everything we accomplish in life. There are so many books on this subject, but the first one I read about 10 years ago was “The Mindset” by Carol Dueck. It was back when I was in the corporate world and working for a boss I didn’t enjoy working with. You know the kind of boss that likes to control everything, right down to telling me I had to take vacation time to go to the dentist, in 15-minute increments!
At that time, I worked from home, 4.5 hours across the country by plane from this person, and yet she felt it necessary to make rules like this – as if she’d really know that I’d gone to the dentist, and as if it really mattered, seeing as I would go only twice / year for 1 hour each time. These types of rules though made me feel undervalued, and unappreciated, disrespected. Especially as my previous boss had a very different approach, he had said “I don’t care when you work, as long as when I travel across this country, I hear our hotels speaking highly of you. You know your job, you know what you need to get done, just get it done, if that means you go on a school field trip with your kids and then work into the evening to get caught up, that’s fine”. With him, I felt appreciated, respected, and valued as an employee. Guess who inspired me to want to give my best effort?
Since I was struggling to adjust to the style of boss #2, my sister recommended I read “The Mindset” and that helped me to understand the reason behind why these 2 people had such different leadership styles, and it all came down to mindset. This understanding allowed me to be in a place of tolerance with boss #2 and let go of constantly complaining about her, to my husband and family who I’m sure were sick of hearing it from me. Always complaining about it didn’t serve me, or allow me to move through the frustration, it kept me stuck there, regurgitating it repeatedly!
What I learned from that book is that there are 2 types of mindsets – The Growth Mindset and the Fixed Mindset.
People with a growth mindset believe there is unlimited knowledge in the world, and you can’t possibly know it all, and therefore you want to surround yourself with people who are specialists in areas where you have limited knowledge, so you can learn from them or be advised by them. There is no ego here, and it is acceptable to say to someone, “great question, I don’t know the answer to that, but let me find out and get back to you”. In work, guiding people in their health journey, I will never profess that I know everything. I am a big believer that there is so much information in the world that we can not know it all. What I choose to do is surround myself with a whole community of other health holistic practitioners who I can go to ask questions of when I need answers for my clients.
Now a fixed mindset person on the other hand, is trapped in the idea that ‘I have to know everything and if I don’t know something, it makes me look bad. It’s a sign of weakness’. It means I am not good enough. Therefore, I cannot admit to not knowing something, I have to make it up, or take someone else’s work as my own to make me look like I do know everything.
There are of course different aspects to this definition depending on where you are applying your mindset – at work, at school, in sports, in relationships. For instance, in sports – the fixed mindset believes that they were born with an athletic gift, and they don’t need to practice or work hard to improve as they already have been given this gift and that’s as good as it’s going to get.
Whereas the growth mindset in sports, again believes in the ability to improve oneself through effort and practice, and that no matter how good you are, there is always room to get better. This is an easy area to give examples, as we all know famous athletes.
The Growth Mindset Athlete is Michael Jordon. After being cut from his HS basketball team in grade 9, and his mom told him he’d have to practice harder so he could make the team next year, Michael committed to successfully shooting 100 baskets after school every day, and that is 100 consecutive baskets! If he got to #98 and missed, he had to start all over again a #1. That constant practice is how he improved and of course we know the rest of the story of who Michael Jordan turned out to be.
The Fixed Mindset Athlete is John McEnroe, who is famous for his on-court temper tantrums. When the game wasn’t going his way, he didn’t ask ‘what I can do to improve my game today?’ He instead blamed the court surface, blamed the umpire, blamed the weather, blamed the opponent – it was always somebody else’s fault, because he had a gift, so it couldn’t be him.
So, back to my two bosses, as I’m sure you’ve gathered, boss #2 had a fixed mindset, and boss #1 had a growth mindset. He surrounded himself with advisors, of which I was one and when he needed an answer to something about my market segment, he’d come to me, and we’d discuss it. Together we’d create strategies, budgets, marketing plans, and while we didn’t always agree, we always respected each other’s ideas and reasonings and I really enjoyed working for him and with him.
Boss #2 on the other hand, had a chip on both shoulders, as she was promoted more quickly than what I think she was comfortable with. So, she had to hide all the insecurities of not feeling ready for this big job, as such her fixed mindset dictated that she had to cover up that fact she didn’t know all the answers, by making up answers, making decisions about my markets without including me, despite having no expertise in my market segment, thus causing problems in the long run as her decisions weren’t factoring in the cultural nuances and the history of our client relationships.
Have you worked for both types of bosses yourself? Which type of mindset do you have? It’s interesting as we can have different mindsets in different aspects of our lives without knowing it. Although now that you are aware of these types of mindsets you can consciously choose to step into a growth mindset in all areas of your life! When you do that, trust me you will achieve so much more!!
As you shift into your growth mindset, you are going to want to dig into this topic even further, as I have, so you might also like to read “Secrets of a Millionaire Mind” by Harv T Ecker and “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. These are both books connecting mindset and the ability to become wealthy. Mindset is key in this process, because as with anything, you first have to believe you can become wealthy before you will actually become wealthy.
It is the same with your health. If you have health issues and do not believe you can heal, guess what, you won’t, or if you do manage to heal when you don’t think you can, it will have taken a lot longer than it needed to with more suffering than necessary. This is why I am a big proponent of getting second opinions when it comes to your health, if the practitioner you are working with doesn’t believe you can heal, but simply gives you a drug to mask symptoms, seek out another practitioner who does believe you can heal. Even if you can’t quite believe it yourself yet, because you have already been told by someone that you can’t heal, you can borrow their belief and that is enough for you to take action and follow that protocol and as you start to heal and feel better, you will build your own belief around your ability to heal, as you are experiencing it first-hand. Hope is therefore one of our greatest healers, when we have hope, we can heal. When there is still something that hasn’t been tried yet, there is hope. Where there are lab tests that give us clues to imbalances and toxicities in our body there is hope, as they provide clear steps that we need to take to rebalance the body so the body can heal itself.
So don’t give up!!
The only failure is choosing to quit. Everything else is data and learning, and as we keep moving forward, whether in our health, business, or life in general we continue to learn when we are in that growth mindset.
As an example, when I had boss #2, I didn’t quit! I refused to quit, I figured I’d been around longer than she had and powered with my mindset knowledge, I was able to instead accept that she wasn’t going to change, but I could change how I responded to her. I could stop feeling angry, disrespected, undervalued and unappreciated and instead realize this was all about her, not me. I could simply continue doing the best job I could do for the benefit of my clients and the hotels and know that one day, one of us would go, and if it was going to be me that had to leave, I’d leave with a compensation package for my years of service, and not just simply quit! Guess what happened? The Universe granted me that desire 2 years later, when I was let go. Looking back, it truly was a gift as it has allowed me to discover and then step into my purpose, as I have continued my personal growth journey to discover who I am truly meant to be!
Along the way I discovered some powerful quotes, one of my favourites is by Henry Ford:
“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are right”.
It really is as simple as that! If you think you can do it, you’re going to get there. If you think you can’t you are not going to get anywhere.
I also love a quote by Wayne Dyer:
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”
Here is an example of that – What is FEAR to you? How do you look at the word fear?
Do you look at it as “Forget Everything and Run”? or “Face Everything and Rise”?
You see you can change the way you look at things, and the things you look at will change.
What messages do you have looping through your mind day in and day out, impacting your ability to take action and move forward?
Your mind is so much more powerful than you give it credit for!!! And in “Don’t Wait for Your Wake Up Call!” episode 88 I’m going to be talking about that, and how your inner world creates your outer world, and how you can tap into that power!
Join me next week, on my podcast “Don’t Wait for Your Wake Up Call!” when I have my business coach Colleen Biggs on the show, because being an entrepreneur and working by myself, leaves me open to my own mind talking me down, telling me I’m not good enough and so I choose to surround myself by coaches and mentors that help me nip that in the bud so it can’t take hold! We can’t do it on our own, we need the support of others to lift us up in all areas of our life!
Join The YGHJ Membership Community
If you're enjoying my content and are someone that wants to step into being more proactive in your health, I would love to welcome you into my membership community.
You will get access to all my health content, as well as weekly calls where you can come and have your health questions answered. It's truly priceless.
For more information about my membership community please click the button below.