Janis Pettit, President SmarTrack

Mindset for Success

As professional women, most of us were fortunate to receive a great education and industry specific skills training. In addition, many of us have increased our knowledge through on the job experience. Yet, how many of us would say that we’ve reached our professional or personal potential? We have what it takes but we’re still not there. Why? If you compare two people with similar education and training, why does one seem to reach or surpass her goals easily, while the other struggles?

From working with hundreds of professionals to increase performance and productivity over the past fifteen years, it’s become quite clear to me:

It’s simply a matter of Mind Set.

Each day, many thousands of thoughts pass through our minds, most of them unnoticed. Sparks of energy, which propel us toward action, these thoughts determine the choices we make and the results we experience. They can create limiting patterns that repeat over and over, stopping us short of reaching our goals. They drain our energy and we’re often not even conscious of them.

Have you ever felt stuck? You know what you want to achieve in your career, business or relationship, but it’s just not happening. You’re working hard, but feel frustrated and unhappy with where you are. Not only have I observed this over and over, I’ve lived it. What a “eureka” moment when you suddenly begin to understand that wonderful saying,

“if you always do what you always did,
you’ll always get what you always got!”

Key to developing a mind set for success is realizing that how we perceive our job, our career, our success, is what determines their reality for us. If we perceive a situation in a negative, limiting way and our thoughts about that situation are defeating, those thoughts will cause us to act in a way that keep us from getting the desired result. But if our self-talk is positive, powerful and purposeful, the result is that we achieve what we set out to achieve.

To begin identifying which limiting patterns may be preventing you from reaching your highest goals, during the course of your day ask yourself which activities are:

• avoidance based ( you try to avoid it, or procrastinate)
• energy draining
• currently getting poor results

Then ask yourself if this activity is necessary or important to your success, or is it something you could delegate elsewhere. If it is vital, you need to get to work understanding how you feel when you perform that activity and why you feel that way. Then, for a week or so, write down the self-talk that’s going on while you’re doing this activity. This will give you a keen understanding of what needs to change and you’ll be ready to begin putting together an incremental plan to change your limiting pattern. This is where the hard work begins. To initiate awareness we use proven techniques such as:

• mental emptying (a meditation technique) to get to a stress and thought-free state
• mindfulness (a visualization technique) – helps bring focus to the present and bring you to an keen awareness of your thought patterns
• mental imaging -- creating a detailed mental picture of the results you want to achieve
• intending -- setting a clear powerful intention to fulfill your visualization
• action -- developing an incremental guided action plan with milestone markers.

As you become conscious of both the positive and negative messages you give yourself, write them down. Choose the ones that will propel you forward. Repeat them out loud. Post them where you can see them. Find a mentor, coach, manager or friend who understands what you want to change and supports and encourages you in a non-judgmental way. Even though this is just the beginning of the Mind Set journey, you must begin somewhere if you want to experience the phenomenal long-term results possible from this inner process. If it’s true that we only use three percent of our brains, just imagine how much potential we have waiting to be tapped!