25 Sep 10 quick tips for more happiness & success
via Psychology Today by Bryan Robinson
“Nothing has changed but my attitude; everything has changed.” —Anthony DeMello
Years ago, I spent several weeks in Asia, where I immersed myself in Eastern cultural practices. When I returned to my post as a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, I went into the Dean’s office for a meeting. I glanced at a book on her sofa and saw part of the title, “Tea-Ching.”
Still basking in the afterglow of my trip, I exclaimed, “Oh, I see you have an interest in Asia, too!” She looked at me as if I were crazy and held up the book so I could see the whole title, Teaching in the Elementary School. My Asian frame of reference brought an entire set of assumptions about the Dean and her interests that were actually about my experiences, not hers.
It’s In Your Hands: Your Attitude Determines How Happy And Successful You BecomeSource: Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash
Your Mindset
If you’re like most people, you unknowingly enter a new situation with a certain mindset based on your past experiences as I did. Sometimes these distortions can be problematic because you’re operating on dinosaur beliefs, not present-moment awareness.
It’s amazing how your mind can trap you when it uses you, and yet you’re not aware of it. The key is to be mindful that your outdated mindset can be inaccurate, even self-defeating. When you set your sights in a certain direction, the mind sees what it expects to see. If you look for misery, you find it. If you look for success, you find success. This seems like a very simple idea, but don’t let the simplicity obscure the firepower and far-reaching possibilities it injects in the quality of your life. These 10 tips can help you sidestep your mind’s distorted perspective and adjust your attitude so you can live happily, successfully, and fully.
10 Tips To Change Your Attitude For Happiness And Success
1. Reframe. Every time you get caught in the difficulty of the moment, take a breath and give yourself a few minutes to step back from the situation. This gives your reptile brain (old or emotional brain) time to settle down from flooding you so your rational brain (new brain) can reframe the situation and look for the opportunity in the difficulty. Baseball great Babe Ruth said, “Every time I strike out, it brings me closer to my next home run.” Every loss has a gain; every downside has an upside; every difficulty contains an opportunity. When you take time to look for it, you become calmer, stronger, and more successful.
2. Cultivate a “Growth Mindset.” Consider that each disappointment—no matter how discouraging—is a lesson to learn, not a failure to endure, that it can teach you something to help you grow. The professor Carol Dweck said, “The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset.” Situations often won’t work out to suit you because life isn’t designed for your convenience. Imagine that disappointment is your “tor-mentor” or teacher, and ask how you can learn and grow from it. Look the “tor-mentor” straight in the eye and ask, “What do you have to teach me that will make me wiser, more resilient, and lead me to happiness and success?”article continues after advertisement
3. Halt “stinkin’ thinkin’.” Jumping to conclusions without evidence gives you a distorted view of your predicament, leaves little room for clarity, and leads to bad decision-making. The writer Virginia Woolf said, “The mind, which is most capable of receiving impressions, is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions. Talking back to your thoughts is one of the best tools in modern mental health for self-assurance. When you catch your thoughts predicting negative outcomes, talk to them and remind them that forecasting the future rarely yields the truth. Tell them, “I’ve got this” or “I’ll deal with whatever happens.” You can save yourself a lot of unnecessary misery by questioning automatic thoughts and waiting to see if the hard evidence supports them…
…keep reading the full & original article HERE