Your life depends on your mindset.

The sooner you deeply believe in that, the happier you’ll become.

If I could only choose one skill to train, that'd be my mindset. Without hesitation.

I’ve invested (I never see that as an expense) a lot just in learning, knowing, reading, speaking, writing, and training about it.

Your mindset sets everything in your life.

It will define if you are happy or not, if you achieve your goals or not, if you are proud of yourself or not.

In short, what you are and how you feel.

Your life is not how much money you have, how many championships you won, or how others see you.

Your life is just how you feel.

If you don’t feel great, proud, or satisfied, it doesn’t matter what you do or achieve.

• Do you feel motivated when you wake up?
• Do you enjoy what you’re doing during your day?
• Do you laugh a lot every day?
• Do you learn something new every day?
• Do you go to bed with a sensation of fulfillment?
• Do you love people?
• Do you love yourself?

If you got 7 “YES”, you have a positive and growth mindset. It will take you to fulfillment and happiness. It’s just a matter of time.

Is it your life or others?

Your mindset will allow you to disregard the opinions others have about you.

It will give you the freedom you need to not care about what they think about you, how they see you, or what they tell you.

You can decide if you want your life to depend on you or others. It’s your personal decision.

When you understand your life only depends on you, that’s freedom in its purest form.

Success or failure?

If you check these two terms in a dictionary, this is what you get:

• Success: the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.
• Failure: lack of success.

For me, that only gives me a feeling of emptiness.

I do believe success and failure are subjective concepts that depend 100% on your mindset.

You may not finish a marathon having a feeling of success because you gave it all.

You may win a marathon, having a feeling of failure because your final time wasn’t the one you expected.

As you can see, you can spend all your life working around success or failure, setting yourself greater and higher goals you never achieve, taking your life to a sensation of total failure. It’s a never-ending road.

You have to decide whether you want to have a positive mindset or a negative one.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t set goals and work hard on trying to achieve them. You have to look for an intermediate-term in which you set goals, work on moving towards them, and grow. Always with a positive mindset.

The only way to grow

You have to decide if you want to have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset.

The former will tell you that you cannot grow. You are what you are, and you’ll never become a better self, no matter what you do.

The latter will let you improve daily, giving you the lovely sensation that you have no limits, that you can be a better self day by day, step by step.

I highly recommend Dr. Carol S. Dweck’s book “Mindset: changing the way you think to fulfil your potential”, to go deeper into this concept.

Believing leads to action. Action leads to achieving. Achieving leads to fulfillment.

As you can see, again, it all begins with mindset.

Tools

Now, I will share some tools that work for me, talking about improving and growing your mindset.

1. Meditation
Many people think meditation is just about relaxing. Closed eyes, crossed legs, candles, and incense.

I think these archetypes hurt what meditation really is.

For me, meditation goes far beyond.

It is a way to know yourself better and, mostly, improve your performance, better focus on things, and increase your ability to concentrate.

2. Biographies
I love reading biographies. There you can feel the goal achiever’s mindset. You just have to start copying masters.

It doesn’t matter if they are entrepreneurs, scientists, athletes, politicians…

All of them share one thing: a positive and open mindset.

3. Learning
Learning is the best way to expand your mindset.

Whenever you learn something, you become a new person.

There’s no such pleasure as looking back and feeling you’re a better self.

Think you can learn anything, and you can improve in any field you set your mind to. Because it’s true.

Don’t be afraid of learning. Be afraid to remain the same.

4. Online communities
Today we have a significant advantage in our lives.

We can search and join an online community that fits our needs, our concerns, our knowledge.

There’s nothing better than being able to know people worldwide, share with them your knowledge, become better thanks to them, progress, evolve, grow.

That’s the way life should be.

Takeways

If you didn’t want to read this article, even though I appreciate it a lot, this would be my takeaways:

• Your mindset determines your life.
• Your mindset will allow you to believe everything depends on you.
• Your mindset will give you the freedom you need to live the life you want.
• You have to decide whether you wish to have a positive mindset or a negative one.
• An open mindset is the only way to grow as a human being.
• Use these 4 tools to improve and develop your mindset: meditation, biographies, learning, and online communities.

Your mindset is how you see life, your life.

Photo at the top courtesy of Miguel Bruna on Unsplash.