Start with Self Awareness
An evaluation of your social media contacts will give you perspective on the importance of mindset and how it affects people over time, including you. Looking specifically at people you know well, you will realize that most people do not change much. When people do change for the better, it’s because they have matured from both accepting responsibility and experience. When an individual declines, it is usually because they failed to maintain or appreciate their health, relationships, and talents. It may also be because they did not recover from an unexpected or tragic situation. Are you self aware? Consider how much you have changed over time to adapt to circumstances, opportunities and relationships. You cannot turn things around operating from the same point of view and behavior. Consider your act and how you have developed in terms of the way people around you see you. If you need to pick yourself up, own this.
Evaluate Your Situation
Be grateful for your circumstances when things are going well. Your values, efforts and motivations are aligned effectively in your favor. When life takes a turn for the worse, composure is the first thing you lose which can lead to your decline. The faster you bounce back, the less the impact an event has on your life and well being. Bouncing back from failure is a skill, but it can be developed through effort and the attitude to recover. At the other end of the continuum is having the good fortune to be offered a new opportunity where at first you may lack the knowledge or skill to succeed. Either way, your most important asset to overcoming a situation is the intelligent use of your mind. Reflect at patterns in your life that seem to be repeating. During periods in your life when you had better control, consider why.
Composure, balance, confidence and the tenacity to overcome hardship are all mental functions that a turnaround scenario requires. Successful people develop these capacities through training and practice. Conditioning methods are best developed through some discipline that will test and build mental toughness. It takes mental effort to power through fatigue, negative thoughts and anxiety. Successful people find a way to do this better than others with either experience or by acquiring the training and mentorship to learn how. The vast majority of successful people have a hobby or practice physical fitness to cultivate mental health and high self-esteem.
Challenge Yourself to Grow
Practicing a challenging activity develops attention, focus, and determination. For example, the practice of strength and conditioning will boost confidence, instill discipline, and improve posture. Endurance, speed, strength, the correctness of form, and the ability to recover from exertion are all beneficial aspects of athleticism, where mental toughness is necessary to improve. The other advantage of having a recreational interest is that it enables a person to channel negative energy toward a positive effort and trigger endorphins that counteract negative emotions and speed recovery.
As mentioned in an earlier post on Ultimate Freedom, accepting a certain purpose is the key. Shift your focus to your purpose and your skills toward a vision instead of wasteful distractions, and you increase the probability of your success. The challenge is that it takes work to identify a purpose and the courage to act. The courage to move forward is based on one factor: mental toughness. How does one summon this capability?
Be Honest with Your Intentions
Establish an intention to develop high self-esteem. This need not be across all aspects of your life, but specifically in matters related to your purpose. At least in this respect, you can certainly achieve mastery. When it comes to their field, successful people have an incredible work ethic, a clear understanding of their priorities, discipline, the ability to sacrifice, with the capability to adapt to changing conditions. The mind over matter belief enables an individual to overcome setbacks, failure, discomfort, and distraction.
Resilience is a product of repetitive conditioning, desensitization to rejection, failure, pain, and loss. Persistence is often cited as the reason for eventual success. There is a language to success and the effort to learn the terms mentioned requires practice, which in turn makes you fluent. It takes mental concentration and effort to learn this language, progressive challenges and frequent practice to achieve mastery.
Consider Your Options
- Do Nothing – this is still a choice, in that you defer decision making
- Do What You are Trained to Do – pull yourself together and act
- Run – Avoid the situation and the confrontation to survive
- Fight – Use the tension and fear as an aggressive reaction
- Positive Effort – envision the desired result and move forward with the courage to face the issue without aggression
Make a Conscious Decision
Consider the characteristic differences of the various paths. Of the options identified, there are 3 that you can follow to develop your capacity to handle greater challenges in the future. Namely, to train mentally to handle stress. By exposing yourself to stress in a controlled environment and develop skills, a framework with feedback and consistent practice is required for skill and eventual mastery.
Turnarounds require that you take hold of your mind first and build up anew with the personal development that best serves your growth. To develop the courage to handle situations better in the future, Leaders demonstrate mental toughness. SELF-CARE is a framework to identify the efforts that will best serve you when there are negative emotions that follow from any poorly handled or unexpected situation. Use the techniques outlined in this post as a daily practice to maintain your mental health and build mental toughness.
Get Your Mind Right
A focused mindset as a starting point requires that you establish an intention to develop high self-esteem. This need not be across all aspects of your life, but specifically in matters related to your purpose At least in this respect, you can certainly achieve mastery. When it comes to your field, successful people have an incredible work ethic, a clear understanding of their priorities, discipline, the ability to sacrifice, the willingness and capability to adapt to changing conditions. The mind over matter belief enables an individual to overcome setbacks, failure, discomfort, and distraction. It’s difficult to persevere, especially when it comes there is high risk and reward scenarios.
Resilience is a product of repetitive conditioning, desensitization to rejection, failure, pain, and loss. Persistence is often cited as the reason for eventual success. There is a language to success and the effort to learn the terms mentioned requires practice, which in turn makes you fluent. It takes mental concentration and effort to learn this language, progressive challenges and frequent practice to achieve mastery. When in touch with your values and with a healthy degree of modesty to adopt a beginners mindset, you can move things in the right direction. Often times, it isn’t necessary to have the right answer, just the willingness make effort with the right attitude.
How to Do It Step by Step
To turn things around from a practical standpoint, change your physical and mental state first. The following steps will integrate your body and mind into a beginners mindset with Presence of Mind.
1. Find 15 minutes to dedicate for a distraction free process of reset – shut out notifications, background noise and people interference
2. Identify ahead of time what it is that you want from your situation, set a timer if possible so not to be distracted
3. Ensure your posture is correct from the ground up to the top of your head as if one single unit
a. Feet flat on the floor, preferably barefoot
b. Standing in attention, with your hips slightly forward so you feel your inner thigh muscles tense
c. Pull your tailbone down vertically so you can elongate the spine
d. Pull your neck muscles up so to fully extend the crown of your head upward, chin slightly downward
e. Pull your shoulder back and down so your chest is pushed forwards
f. Bring your hands to your abdomen, just below the navel
g. Breathe with inhale extending your abdomen forward and exhale pull your navel back towards your spine
h. Box breathing – inhale to a count of 4, pause, exhale to a count of 4, pause and repeat until you are done in 15 minutes
4. Make a firm decision to carry this renewal mindset forward and do your best to accomplish the goal of turning things around
5. Using the original intention of what you want to accomplish, identify the activities and people that need to be organized to contribute
6. Identify the motivation for each collaborator and mentally message the reason for their participation
7. Use the Time Management System to organize your workplace and begin to work diligently to achieve your aim
Why This Works
Your situation will not change until you yourself change. The preceding steps are an intervention with your mindset leading the way. Once you have made the decision to turn things around, the people that contribute to your plan buy in when they see your mindset as a leadership that in turn makes them take notice. Be sure to apply this technique before things get out of control. The longer that you wait to address the issue, the less likely it is that you will see your course correction pay off. Before you start each day of the process, repeat the steps above to ensure that you are approaching the interactions with people and work that needs to be done with Presence of Mind.