Changing Your Mindset Success
You change your mind everyday. You are very familiar with how to do that. But changing your mindset involves a little more than does changing your mind. However, changing your mindset accomplishes much more than changing your mind. It is that more that brings you to this blog and it is that more that your mind can give you. The power of your mind is awesome, and nothing illustrates that better than your mindset. In the blog, Depression, Positive Mindset Part 2, you learned that a mindset is much more than something mental, although it is that. You learned it has a structure, and that structure is composed of seven components. By knowing this structure, you are better prepared to use and change your mindset. But changing it requires a technology of behavior. It is that technology that this blog provides you.
What is Mindset Development
You are at an advantage if you are aware of your mindset. You are at a greater advantage if you can change and use your mindset. The big insight of science is that there is much more to knowledge than knowing. There is also doing and what you can do with what you know is very important. By targeting the seven components of a mindset with specific behavioral technologies, much can be done with a mindset. Emotional and behavioral problems can be solved that otherwise are difficult to understand. The components of a mindset are grouped into two categories: the core and support. The blog, Depression, Positive Mindset Part 2, identified those components. This section will discuss the technologies that can be applied to the core components.
Change Your Mindset Positive
The first and most important component is the Environment. The environment is the places your actions occur. You want your environments to be friendly, positive places. To make your environment more positive, you will use what behavioral psychology calls non-contingent reinforcement. A simple explanation of this is that you will give yourself a positive reward just because you are you, not because you have earned the reward. A reward is contingent when you perform some action to earn it. A non-contingent action does not require an action to be performed. You might say it is free. These kind of rewards are important, because they become associated with the environment. It is from those associations that you perceive your environment as positive or negative. Everyday you should give yourself a reward in your environment that you did not earn. A positive environment is a very powerful force for you.
The second component is Actions. Actions are the things you say and do in your environment. The main procedure for changing this component are what behavioral psychology calls contingent reinforcement. As stated above, contingent reinforcement requires an action to be performed in order to occur. Positive and negative rewards are tied to specific actions. The effects that positive rewards have on our actions is to strengthen them. This makes them more likely to occur when we need them. We are more likely to perform an action that has been followed by positive rewards than an action that has been followed by negative rewards.
How you use a reward is important. To do its job of strengthening an action, the reward must be provided shortly after the action has occurred. The longer a reward occurs from the action it is intended to reinforce, the less likely it will actually reinforce the intended action and the more likely it will reinforce some action you don’t want to reinforce. If you don’t want an action to occur, then don’t reward it.
A second procedure for Actions is called the Premack Principle. The Premack principle involves using activities as rewards. In the Premack principle, you arrange for a preferred activity to follow a less preferred activity. For example, assume that at work writing reports is less preferred by you than conversing with a coworker. After finishing a report you could have a coffee break with a coworker. That would reward the action of completing reports and thus strengthen it. Using the two procedures described here will help produce a positive mindset .
The third component is Rewards. You may have noticed we have been using rewards in all the components so far. That is because rewards are the energy that sustains your mindset. There are two basic types of rewards, positive and negative. They have opposing effects on your actions. Positive rewards increase the strength of your actions. An action that has been strengthened is more likely to occur in the future. A negative reward weakens your actions. You want to strengthen those actions that will change your mindset in the way you want but weaken those actions that don’t. For example, suppose you want to change your mindset from negative to positive. To do that, you will want to follow positive actions with contingent, positive rewards. The absence of an expected positive reward produces a negative reward. You will identify the actions you don’t want to occur. You will make sure these undesired actions are not followed by positive rewards.
Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of these strategies. If you think you do these everyday, you are probably correct. But you probably don’t do them systematically. Sometimes you do them and sometimes you don’t. You want to develop consistency in the way you manage your actions. The three components discussed above, Environment, Actions, and Rewards, are the core components. The other four components are the support. The core components are the engine of your mindset. The other components help that engine run well.
Changing Your Mindset Success
Most of what you will do with your mindset is to change it. One might say that mindsets happen to us. Sometimes we realize we have a mindset that is holding us back or creating problems for us. Then you need to change it. Some of the changes you may need to make may be in the support components. There are four of these: Rules about the Environment, Emotional Associations, Objective Facts about the Environment, and Beliefs about the Environment.
Component number four is Rules about the Environment, Your rules about your environment are found in the things you say about it. The change procedure for this component has two parts. First, systematic observation throughout the day of what you say about your environment. Secondly, reflection on what you say. To change an action, you have to first become aware of the action. You talk a lot but do you always listen to what you say? If you systematically listen to your own speech, you will be surprised at what you hear. Closely listening to your own speech will give you insight into your relationship with your environment. If you need to change your
relationship with your environment,
you can begin by changing
how you talk about it. Reflection on what you say can help you make that change. Reflection is an act of memory. You must remember that in reflection you are encountering facts second hand. But these memories will reflect what you really think about your environment. However, your memories may not all be accurate. You want to always evaluate them for their accuracy. Make the changes in your memories that need to be made.
The fifth component is Facts about the Environment. These are the things you think you know to be true about the environment. They may not all be true, but you think they are. To evaluate the facts, you will use two procedures. These are: systematic observation and self statements. You systematically observe when you observe with an idea of what you are seeking when you look at an environment. For example, assume I want to systematically observe how positive conversation is in my workplace. As I survey my workplace, I am looking for positive and negative statements made. I don’t just gaze about the environment with no purpose in mind. In verbal self statements, I tell myself what I see. For example, assume I hear my fellow workers making positive statements. I will repeat this to myself, ” People making positive statements.” Stating what you see will help put what you see into memory. In systematic observation, focus on describing what you see and not what you believe is happening.
The sixth component is Emotional Associations. Your emotions strongly influence your thinking. You want to be aware of the emotions that your environment brings out. You can change the emotional tone of your mind with self statements that bring to mind different emotions. Just thinking about your emotion will help you change it. Think about a different emotion you could have had in this situation. This process of thinking about the emotion will put some distance between you and the emotion.
The seventh component is Beliefs about the Environment. Our beliefs are things we think are true but have not been proven scientifically. While beliefs are important, wrong beliefs can interfere with our lives. You need to be constantly evaluating your own beliefs and changing them when you find they are not correct.
Let’s review systematic observation. You systematically observe when you look at a situation with an idea of what you are seeking. Your idea of what you are seeking will include the question: “Am I seeing this correctly?” For example, I may believe my coworkers are talking about me behind my back. When I see my colleagues talking and think it’s about me, I can question this impression. This strategy keeps our minds open to new possibilities beyond our emotional responses.
Taking Control Your Mind
Your mindset is a very powerful part of your mind. Knowing how to change it is knowing how to control it. Making changes in any of the components produces changes in your mindset. Different mindsets overlap in their components. Thus, you will likely not need to change all components to make the changes you desire. Mindsets take time and effort to change. Thank of a mindset as something that develops each day. Knowing the components of a mindset makes you more aware of how your mind works. By changing your mindset, you can achieve significant
control over how your
environment controls your
thoughts and feelings.