Cultivating a Growth Mindset
You’ve decided to take the next step in your healthy living journey (congrats!), but after a short few weeks of eating healthy and exercising, you’ve run out of steam. Your motivation is at an all time low and life is getting in the way of your success. You thought you built a functional daily routine that would be easy to follow, but you jumped in head first and you’re beginning to forget why you even started in the first place. Where did it all go wrong and why are you already feeling burnt out?
Making the decision to focus on your health and well-being is something to be extremely proud of and is certainly a step in the right direction. But there is more to living a healthy lifestyle than over-exerting at the gym and swearing off your favorite late night snacks. Building and achieving a sustainable healthy lifestyle means you are fully committed to putting in the work that’s required, even when things go unplanned. The key to finding true success is to cultivate a growth mindset.
A growth mindset can be described as using your failures and setbacks as lessons for improvement, seeing obstacles as opportunities instead of challenges, and believing that you are capable of achieving anything you set your mind to. Mindful practices create physical, psychological, and social benefits. In the simplest of terms: you will not see the results you want until your mind is fully committed.
This sounds great in theory, but where do you start? How do you cultivate a growth mindset to use as your base foundation? First, you need to understand why you are seeking changes to your lifestyle and what specific goals you are hoping to achieve. Your plan needs a purpose to it and by writing down the answers to these questions, you’ll have something to look back on to help track your progress.
Now that you have a deeper understanding of why you want to make changes to your lifestyle, you can begin developing the necessary growth mindset that will help you navigate the ups and downs. Here are some examples to help get you started:
1) Identify your challenges and embrace them. Be open to new possibilities and enjoy the shifts and changes in all experiences. Understand that your goals may not be easy to reach, but the reward for achieving them will be life changing.
2) Practice self love every chance you get. Commit to working on ways to embrace your imperfections and use them to your advantage. Accept things the way they are, not how you wish them to be.
3) Reward your success. You’ve worked hard - celebrate both the big and little moments… you deserve it!
4) Hold yourself accountable for your failures. Ask yourself, what caused this to happen and what can I do to avoid this in the future? Be sure to constantly observe and pay attention to the present, without judgment for things you cannot control.
5) Add the word ‘yet’ to your vocabulary - a concept that was formulated by Dr. Dweck. During moments of self doubt, and even criticism, rephrase all of your thoughts to include this word. Instead of ‘I haven’t hit my goal weight’ say to yourself, ‘I haven’t hit my goal weight, yet’.
6) Set realistic goals. There is nothing more damaging to your growth mindset than setting yourself up for failure. If you know you have bad knees, don’t set a goal of running a marathon after a few months of training. Identify goals that are challenging, but attainable, then allow things to happen in their own time. Trust your feelings and intuitions and use them as guidance.
7) Don’t compare yourself to others. Everything you’re working towards and everything you have achieved is custom to YOUR LIFE! Everyone has their own style of healthy living. Stay in your lane, focus on your own goals, and accept what others are doing does not affect your progress.
Building a growth mindset takes time and is something you will always have to continue working on. Staying motivated is a challenge for everyone, but with the right mindset, you’ll be able to navigate through the ups and downs to come out stronger on the other side.
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