When you’re feeling stressed and take a step back and consider a larger macro perspective and practice gratitude and happiness for what you have now. Below are ten steps to resetting your mindset:
1. Fix the Comparison Culture Trap
Comparison is insidious. It destroys creativity, clarity and growth (and happiness). So, let’s nip it in the bud. The only person you should compare yourself to is yourself, in the past. The only question that matters is this: am I growing and am I improving? If not, that’s the perfect place to start for reclaiming a wandering mind, or a feeling of being stuck. If you need to, get off social media – or change who you follow and what you see. There’s a lot of toxic, unhealthy content out there, so choose things that are inspiring and helpful. Eventually, with the right mindset you can start to shift comparison to healthier inspiration.
2. Refocus On Skill Building + Education
Skill building and education always give me new perspectives, motivation and ideas. You can feel, in real time, that I’m bettering myself and working towards some higher goal or purpose. A great way to reset yourself is to learn a new skill or improve on an existing one — because even experts have more to learn. Bonus points if you can attach that skill to some personal goal or your values and vision.
3. Use A Growth Mindset
Our mindsets will influence our health, wellness, happiness and confidence. Literally, everything we want to do and achieve traces back to our mindset. This is a fascinating field that essentially proves our brains are able to adapt, change and learn new things – like, anything. This throws a wrench in the whole fixed mindset idea that we’re either “born with it” or not and this reality of being able to grow our skills includes being able to change our perspectives on things. At the end of the day, it’s just way more fun, inspiring and motivating to come from a place of growth potential (vs. thinking you have no control or ability to improve). So doing a hard reset with a growth mindset is pure synergy.
4. Exercise Break
A simple way to reset our minds and energy to start implementing an exercise routine – whatever that may look like. You don’t need to stress about pushing yourself to some extreme either, even light exercise has benefits and leads to a healthier, more sustainable habit formation.
5. Step Away
Stepping away is a classic move. It can help us refresh and reset our perspectives on things. We can step away by taking a short twenty minute break or going for a walk, or we can get away, by taking a vacation day or even traveling. These things can seriously help reset our life. A simple solution to not losing our minds is simply scheduling in more breaks.
6. Remember Your Values
This is a big one – knowing and remembering my core values and if you’re not entirely sure what they are, it’s actually kind of fun to find out. You know those personality-type tests we all love? If you’re doing a reset, having some values in place can be great way to build up after the refresh.
7. Know Your Why
Having a driving purpose, reason and goal that’s attached to the things you’re doing can provide a lot of motivation and inspiration. Once you have isolated some larger, long-term goals, a good strategy is to break them down into smaller bite-sized goals and tasks to complete.
8. Reorganize My Schedule: Do More of What I Want
It’s often forgotten or not taken seriously. So reorganising and reprioritising your schedule is a helpful strategy for a successful reset. After all, we don’t want to just end up in the same situation that got us to needing a reset in the first place. Schedule more time for you. Find a new hobby if you need to, otherwise find a way to make more time for yourself and your passions.
- (Re)prioritise things
- Organise your day differently
- Delegate tasks or outsource tasks
- Make a schedule for you time, and stick to it
- Status Check: Is the Deck in Our Favor?
We’re surrounded by all sorts of outside influences, people and ideas. And they’re not always conducive for our goals, clarity and mindset. Take stock of the things in your life and adjust them to better support you. Here are 3 key areas I feel are most important:
- Your inner circle (who you spend your time with)
- Your outer circle (the content you consume daily and download subconsciously)
- Your environment (your home, room and spaces – the smell, design, sounds, etc.)
- Laugh More + Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously
We can sometimes put too much pressure on ourselves, our work and life in general. Refocusing things to a more casual place can do wonders for our sanity. Laughing more and not reacting to everything with quick emotional responses is like a secret wisdom weapon.