Grow With Soul: Ep 70. Cultivating a Positive Mindset With Kayte Ferris
So far in this Staying The Course series, we’ve looked at letting go of the old plans and goals and creating a daily routine, and this week I thought we’d look at mindset. During times of uncertainty, mindset can be something that holds you, an anchor point to keep coming back to when you feel worried or stressed or lost. It is a way to care for and support oneself. In this episode, I’m going to talk about how I perceive and use mindset and some ways to start cultivating your own mindset during a stressful time.
Here's what we talk about in this episode
What does mindset mean?
Ways to have a positive mindset
Having a vision to return back to
Making a choice
Competence & achievement
Self Trust
What we discussed in this episode
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Read the episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to episode 70 of Grow With Soul, and the third in our Staying The Course series. So far we’ve looked at letting go of the old plans and goals and creating a daily routine, and this week I thought we’d look at mindset. During times of uncertainty, mindset can be something that holds you, an anchor point to keep coming back to when you feel worried or stressed or lost. It is a way to care for and support oneself. In this episode, I’m going to talk about how I perceive and use mindset and some ways to start cultivating your own mindset during a stressful time.
Mindset is, I think, one of those terms that we all kinda know what it means, yet ask us to define it and our mind goes blank. That’s how I felt writing this episode, anyway. I know what I mean when I talk about mindset, but what does mindset mean. I looked up a couple of definitions. One was, simply, ‘a person’s way of thinking’, another, ‘an established set of attitudes’. Personally, when I think about mindset it is really a combination of those two definitions - a person’s way of thinking based on a set of attitudes. So, you might think that everything is going to go wrong for you because you have a pessimistic or un-confident set of attitudes. Or, you may be open to and love experimenting because you love learning and are unafraid of failing. Your mindset isn’t just the way you think, it’s the way you think because of your previous experiences and mental make up. I believe we have different mindsets in different scenarios: you may think you're lost and incompetent when it comes to business, but are full of confidence in the kitchen with no qualms about testing recipes and flavours. Even if, overall, you’re not feeling like you have a positive mindset now, there are very likely areas of your life you do feel positive about.
In times of stress and turbulence, it can be hard to sustain your positive mindsets. This is our challenge in this moment, to, amongst uncertainty and upheaval, create and sustain a mindset that will serve and help us, rather than pull us down.
Here are some ways in which I am fostering a positive mindset at the moment...
Feel the feelings and understand them
Before making any changes, and rather than beating yourself up for not feeling upbeat, we need a period of feeling the feelings. Particularly in unprecedented times where there’s no model for how we’re supposed to think and feel, we need to let our emotions course free for a while. But crucially, we need to not let them drown us. There needs to come a point where you start to take an objective view of those feelings and start to understand where they’re coming from.
For me, I realised in doing this that the Coronavirus worries were really just colonising existing ones, and magnifying them. My worries and negativity about money were actually the age old worry of whether I was cut out to do this - I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to weather the storm because I didn’t think I was good enough. On Instagram, Dr Ruth Allen spoke of how the trauma of the pandemic can trigger and remind us of previous traumas. Once you can pinpoint the worry or the feeling like this, understand where it’s coming from, you can tackle it and build a mindset to overcome it. It’s easy for the feelings to become a big ball of non-specific worries, so try to write down specifically what is troubling you, isolate the worry, in order to start to work on it.
Because once you do isolate that worry, once you understand why you’re feeling a certain way, it feels a lot more in control. “I’m worried I’m not good enough to do this” feels easier to tackle than “a global pandemic is going to destroy my business”. There’s not a ton you can do about the latter, but you are in control of the former. In many cases I’m sure you’ll find that the Coronavirus is just the stage set where existing worries and problems are playing out.
Once you have isolated and understood the feelings you’re feeling you can choose how to tackle them. You may already have methodologies in place that you can call on now that you’ve identified the true cause of your worry. You may be able to work through it using some of the techniques here, or you may need to reach for professional support. Do what you need here.
Have a vision to return back to
Once we’ve allowed the emotions to burn through, and we’re at a place where we understand what’s been coming up for us and feel on more of an even keel, now we can start to get intentional with our mindset. I think it’s important for this to be a personal choice, for you to decide and define what you want to feel going forward. I’m using ‘positive mindset’ as a catch-all term, and you may want to go for something more like calm, or growth. Either way, what helps me is to have an emotive vision of how I want to feel during this time, that I can build my mindset around.
In the first episode of this series I spoke about having a master goal or vision to draw on for your new goals or activities. Similarly here, we want a vision for how you want to feel. In an ideal world, these two visions would be the same - but we’re not currently in an ideal world. So, my vision for my business goals at this time, ‘have something on the other side of this’, is a little more survivalist than how I really want to feel at this time - which is peaceful. But, they go together enough to not be contradictory - I can still cultivate peacefulness in the way I do the actions that will help my business survive.
But, it is this vision of calmly and peacefully sitting in the garden that I am holding onto throughout the waves of emotion and news cycles. This forms the basis of my mindset - if this is how I want to feel, how do I build my thinking patterns to support that? Personally, this means that I am constantly checking in - if I start to feel not-calm, what in my thinking is causing this and how can I unravel it? I am thinking more about breathing, ensuring I have really slow mornings, focusing on doing just enough rather than maximum output.
Make the choice
In times of great uncertainty, finding ways to have agency, control and make choices is game-changing. So much can feel out of our control, in many ways so much is, but there is still plenty that we have agency over. Choosing to feel a certain way, choosing to shift your goals, choosing your routine, choosing to change that routine or those goals, choosing to do y not x - they’re all ways in which you can assert your will on the world. This helps with your mindset because it helps you to remember you are not a feather blown around wherever the wind fancies; you are a bird, buffeted but strong and going where it wants to go.
This isn’t just a placebo effect, you really do have the choice. You can choose to give up, or you can choose to keep going. No matter what is going on outside the window in the wider world, that is really the ultimate choice.
Competence and achievement
Buttress your mindset with proof of your competence and ability. Even in normal times, this is a really good practice to stave off the self-confidence wobbles. I often advise clients to build a bank or a library, either in their head or literally on paper, of evidence to prove they can do this - whatever ‘this’ is to them. Build up proof of your abilities, examples of times where things went well, where you got wanted - but also times where things didn’t go quite as you wanted but you still survived. This means that when you’re wavering, you can use this evidence to support the positive mindset.
You can also be pro-active about building this bank, in small ways. Last week I told you how a helpful routine meets the essential human need for competence, and this need will also help your mindset. I love to do a chore like laundry on days where I’m feeling disjointed because I feel a sense of achievement of getting something done; you also know how much better and positive you feel after a day where you’ve ticked off your whole to do list right? Give yourself opportunities every day to achieve, even it’s ticking three things of a list or loading the dishwasher. This will build that proof that you are a competent, in control human being and help your mindset stay positive.
Self-trust
A huge part of creating a positive mindset is trusting yourself. How much easier it is for your way of thinking to be positive when you are operating from an attitude where you trust your own abilities and and energies. Self-trust is, for sure, a journey and not something you can sort out in an afternoon.
This is the un-doing of so many great men and women – they doubt their capabilities and, worse, their right to do this thing. While I was reviewing my year I realised that somewhere in 2019 I started to lose trust in myself, which triggered an avalanche of faulty decisions, lack of confidence and the feeling of free falling backwards through the air. That’s why building back of that trust, listening to my intuition and working from the inside out is such a focus for me this year.
“But how do I know I can trust myself?” you might be asking. You don’t. You don’t know, for absolutely 100% sure, that you can do this. Just like for absolute 100% sure that you don’t know that your ceiling won’t fall down – you just trust that it won’t. We trust so many things in our lives – the bus timetable, the postman with our packages – but we tend not to trust the one thing in our lives we can control; ourselves. We decide what we do, so we have more cause to trust that we will do the thing than whether the bus will turn up on time.
Because action is the partner to trust. If you trust yourself, you take more action; if you take more action, you have more cause to trust yourself. Every time I’ve had to draw on trust, I was also doing the paperwork, or at my computer writing. Even if you don’t quite trust yourself yet, do something. Change your Instagram bio, write a sales page that may never see the light of day, send that email. Do something tiny to show yourself you can trust yourself. Then do something else. And something else. And then you’ll just be doing it. That’s all there is.
How the mindset is helping me stay the course
Here’s what I’m finding: by knowing how I want to feel and how I want to navigate these times, I am better able to mentally cope, dare I say, thrive. Using the methods I’ve talked about here, I am able to keep grounded and objective around my feelings so they don’t overrun me, check myself and stay in tune with what I really need and not overly worry, or push myself to be mega productive. I am able to maintain trust in myself and my competence in small ways every day. I feel more in control over my life by making choices and decisions. Doing these things helps to override the unhelpful attitudes within me so that my thought processes are coming from the more positive places, more of the time.
In this Staying The Course worksheet I have prompts for you to explore the questions here and come up with your own mindset. You can get it, and the other worksheets, by signing up at simpleandseason.com/stayingthe course.