In life, we sometimes face stressful situations that lead to difficult decisions. But, it’s how you react and what you learn from these situations that determine the type of outcome you will experience.
There are two mindsets, a fixed mindset and a growth mindset, that often affect how people reach decisions:
With a fixed mindset, people believe their qualities are organic and unchangeable. They also feel natural talent leads to success, as opposed to ongoing effort and dedication.
Those with a growth mindset believe that learning and intelligence usually improve any experience, and that effort has a direct impact on success.
It is important to work to develop a growth mindset to realize your ability to succeed, and articulate how your emotional intelligence will affect overall stress.
Practice these tips as you work to develop a growth mindset:
View challenges as opportunities. Embrace challenges as opportunities to learn and grow. The more we challenge ourselves to achieve a healthier lifestyle, the more opportunities we open up for ourselves.
Choose learning over approval. It is important to focus on improving yourself for your own benefit to increase your growth potential rather than seeking the approval of others.
Focus on the process. Major changes take time, so it is important to be realistic when creating your timeline for reaching your goals. By practicing new and healthy habits during the learning process, your goals will be more likely to stick as time goes on.
Reflect on your learning. Journaling is a great way to reflect on new lessons learned by writing them down and revisiting them along your way to optimal health and wellbeing. Also, keep track of healthy tips you acquired and document the physical and emotional feelings you experienced during the process of learning a new habit. This will help identify what worked well so you can adapt and apply learnings as you continue to grow!
Meditation and Breathing. We at times bring a lot of "JUNK" from our past, so taking the time to breathe and align with who we really are, can be a game changer. Getting centered and identifying our responses vs. reactions from where they are coming from, will help us to be more open about situations than shut off or defensive. We then have responses from a place of strength instead of a reactionary one coming from fear or old beliefs. We can be open minded and curious with less judgement on ourselves and towards others.
SO BREATHE!
