Setting Your Mind
So often, our days start with a jolt and run away from us. We find ourselves running from meeting to meeting, answering emails from our smart phones while we walk to lunch or to the next meeting or to the bathroom. Sometimes we send emails from the bathroom! Choosing what mindset you assume going into each of these different contexts might seem like a luxury in the rush of it all, but it is critically important.
As a leader, identifying your own mindset before beginning a project, assembling your team, walking into a meeting is a critical habit to incorporate into your daily practice. Mindset, the particular framing of your own experience of the world and of moving in it, will determine how you show up to the experience which awaits you. “Ask, (mindset) and you shall receive (experience).” The different mindsets we choose, or default to out of habit, prime us to be able to have different experiences.
If my mindset is fearful of failure, risk avoidant, when I take on a new challenge, I have primed my mind to find all of the justifications for this mindset. I’m going to find reasons to hold back. I going to weigh minor risks as outsized threats. On the other hand, if my mindset is tuned to curiosity and discovery, an attitude of, “Huh, I wonder what this could be? I wonder what I could learn here?” then my mind will look for every opportunity to meet that expectation. Something unexpected occurs. My mind says, “Oh, this is interesting. Let’s see what happens next.”
Here is an exercise you can practice to make mindset a critical ingredient in your leadership game.
The Mindset Pause
Consider your next meeting or conversation or email you need to respond to. How do you want to feel while you are doing it? While you are in-process? Write down the feeling or feelings on a piece of paper.
Next, describe a mindset that will support those particular feelings during the experience. Write it next to your feeling(s)
Now, rewrite it as a single sentence like this:
“To support my feeling confident and competent , my mindset going into this next challenge will be grounded in my experience, knowing what I know and accepting what I don’t know, yet .
Now read your sentence aloud to yourself as a reminder and get to it. You got shit to do!
Don’t forget, the next time you have a meeting to jump into or a critical email response to send, pause for two minutes. Consider how you want to feel while in-process. Describe your mindset (aloud if you’re feeling saucy), and then get to it.
Practice won’t make perfect, but it will make choosing your mindset a critical element of your leadership journey.
