Winning mindset: 4 steps to build your success
When we speak of a winning mentality, it is easy for the first thing we imagine to be an individualist whose main goal is to be more competitive than the rest. However, we can also understand this concept in a way that has nothing to do with greed: Being a winner can mean, simply, not giving up on achieving those personal goals that, if committed to the effort, can be achieved .
In other words, having a winning mentality implies not being seduced by the many excuses that we often put on ourselves so as not to leave our comfort zone.
Renouncing our goals unconsciously
For many years now we have known to what extent the human being is prone to deceiving himself without realizing it. Phenomena such as cognitive dissonance, for example, cause us to embrace unreasonable beliefs for the simple fact that they allow us to reduce the discomfort that appears when we notice contradictions in our way of thinking: I could have studied for the exam but I have not done it although I want to approve, but at the end of the day it does not matter because that teacher was going to suspend me anyway.
In the same way, the heuristics, or the mental shortcuts of our mind, cause that in a matter of seconds we "fabricate" reasons to opt for a decision that does not seem very rational. For example, we want to lose body fat but the packaging of a pastry product filled with refined sugar seduces us, we can believe that eating it will give us the energy to work our muscles in the gym and improve our ability to burn fat afterwards.
These are examples in which obedience to impulses and desires linked to the search for pleasure in the short term are camouflaged under a layer of apparent rationality. Oddly enough, human beings can become very creative when it comes to giving up our long-term goals in favor of short-term goals. These small traps that you put yourself are the main obstacle with which you must deal with a winning mentality : many of the goals that will give us greater benefits can only be achieved with persistence and effort, and we will never reach them without training ourselves in a certain self-discipline.
Building a winning mentality
To get used to maintaining a productive mentality it is necessary to adopt new habits and customs. These are some of them.
1. Locating the objectives
First, it is necessary to know what are our main objectives in life or in a specific area where we feel we are not moving forward. For this it is good to write a list of possible goals, so that we do not forget after thinking about them for the first time, and then doing a filtering exercise, crossing out the least important ones until leaving no more than 4 or 5. This It will allow us to know our priorities and to know better where we want to focus our development strategies in the medium and long term.
2. Detecting the excuses
The second step to building a winning mentality is examine your own thoughts and learn to locate the excuses that keep us stuck . It is convenient to do this without pretending to be very lenient with ourselves and, if we have doubts, we can always ask the opinion of trusted people to have a second opinion.
3. Leave the comfort zone
This is the most difficult step, since it involves exposing ourselves to situations that are somewhat stressful but that bring us closer to our goals. For this it is good to find strategies to "force ourselves" to follow a sequence of very clear and specific actions; in this way we can not justify ourselves with convenient excuses, because the guidelines of what we must do are so clear that there is no doubt as to whether we have done them or not.
Procrastination, or "I'll do it tomorrow syndrome" is also a very usual refuge among people stuck in their projects, and that is why it is necessary to prevent their appearance by making everything that matters during a moment to be what we feel we should do. In the same way, the paralysis of the analysis (discussed in this article) is frequently used to disguise inaction as if it were a productive activity.
4. Keep the habit
Once we have broken with the dynamics of immobility, it is much easier to keep moving forward , but we must also monitor what we do so as not to renounce the project.
For that it is good to think about the satisfaction that comes from having overcome the previous difficulties, which once gave us so much laziness or fear, and thinking that many small awards like these await us. It is also necessary to continue programming sequenced action plans in very short and concrete stages, so that at all times we know what to do and we use all our energies to execute those actions.
Concluding
Maintaining a winning mentality will allow us to be forewarned against the excuses we use to avoid leaving the comfort zone and, at the same time, see how the goals we fantasize so much in the past are approaching or fulfilling, provided they depend only on we.
That is why we adopt this way of thinking, making it part of our everyday life will have a very positive impact both on our self-esteem and on the satisfaction generated through the effort .
