Tag: GrowthMindset

Making The Most Of Lockdown

The Fullfilment Framework

“The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.”
― Robert Jordan

Challenging Times

It looks like it might be here again in England, full lockdown. We will find out this week, when Parliament debate it. At the start of this week panic buying began again, made worse by the sudden need to Christmas shop, just in case the lockdown continues into December. The fear and the loneliness. The uncertainty and the financial stress. These are challenging time.

Some might say that having a bit more time to ourselves could be used for self-development or devoted to a hobby or passion. It is not so easy if we are worrying if we can pay our bills or our rent or mortgage. However, sometimes deepening a spiritual practice or devoting time to an activity we love can heal the soul, just a little.

Can Escapism Help?

I am not saying that meditating more or finding a hobby will solve everything, but it can certainly help. These sort of things do bring a form of escapism, in some cases, and in others can bring meaning to the experiences we have, both good and bad. Much in religious literature, for example, is guidance on how to deal with suffering.

Mostly, we do not have the time to devote to such nourishing activities, because life has a way of becoming busy. We take on responsibilities in order to progress and our personal lives can be filled with family time and relationship time. Often time for personal activities is at the bottom of our priorities. The irony is often that more focus on doing what we care about or what we love brings more joy and meaning, and we become better and more productive at the other stuff in life.

Attitude Is Everything

Lockdown could be seen as forced imprisonment and restrictions, but on the flip side it can be seen as more available time, time being a resource that cannot be replaced. Even if your finances are becoming uncertain or insufficient, or you are separated from your loved ones, finding something creative or fun or spiritual can build some resilience and lift your spirits.

In life one of the few things we have control over is our attitude to our present circumstances. Something that Viktor Frankl writes about in their book Man’s Search For Meaning, which recounted their experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. Some prisoners would give up where as others would go around making sure everyone was as comfortable and reassured as they could be. They chose a mission, to take care of those around them, and it got them through the horrors they were facing.

Our attitude to our circumstances is our first line of defense against despair and depression. If we chose to take care of those around us, whether friend, family, colleague or acquaintance, we choose to make our situation and theirs better. If we choose to use our time wisely, when a lockdown provides us with more of this finite resource, our life becomes fuller and nourishing. 

Conclusion

We can find a way forward, no matter the apparent bleakness before us. So paint, draw, dance, learn, share, sing, build, pray, meditate, contemplate the meaning of things, use your time constructively and this part of your life will be the beginning of better tomorrows.

Self Knowledge: Limiting Beliefs

The Fullfilment Framework

“Happiness has to do with your mindset, not with outside circumstance.”
― Steve Marabol

Our Beliefs

One of the key things to figure out when we are aiming to get a deep knowledge and understanding of ourselves is our beliefs. Often our beliefs are subconscious, yet they will dictate our thoughts, speech and actions repeatedly. Our beliefs play a major role in our thinking and how we react to people and situations and how we handle stressful times; do we find the positive or do we crumble? There are beliefs that we have which are very beneficial, but there are also limiting beliefs that get in the way of us progressing and being happy in life. 

Strategies To Change Our Beliefs

It is important to figure out what our limiting beliefs are, so we can replace them with beliefs that will help us to thrive. There are techniques employed by Performance Coaches that get deep into our psyche and make constructive changes. For example, Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) and Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP). There is also Byron Katie’s The Work, which is on my list of things to research.


It can also be beneficial to keep a journal, to write about the good and the bad each day, what we plan to do with the day and what we have learned at the end of each day. To write down our thoughts and feelings, so we can become familiar with our thought patterns, to figure out the limiting beliefs from the empowering ones.


For example,  I have limiting beliefs around failure, which can lead me to assume I will fail, that in turn can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is unless the thoughts are spotted and corrected when they pop up. If corrected enough these thoughts stop showing up as much, and can even disappear all together. This something I am working on at the moment.


We are capable of the things we believe we can do, with hard work and many hours of practice, if we believe big. It is no different with changing our mental habits, it takes time to remove limiting beliefs at their root. Some are more deeply rooted than others. I would begin by writing a journal to get a sense of your thought processes, and to watch how you react to good and bad situations. It is also important to observe what we consider to be good and bad as well.

Fixed and Growth Mindset

Some see challenge as a prompt to try harder, where as some will think “why does this always happen to me?” The latter is from a fixed mindset, where things are fixed and not flexible; things are the way they are and we can do nothing to change them, or we are the way we are and there is nothing we can do the change ourselves. This is, of course, not true; our brains are very capable of change, they are changing all the time.

Developing a flexible growth mindset that sees adversity as an obstacle that can be navigated is a lot more beneficial. A fixed mindset will be full of limiting beliefs that create barriers where there are opportunities. For example, if our role at work begins to change, like suddenly having to work from home during a global pandemic, you can think about all the issues that you might face, or you can think about the new skills you will learn working remotely, and all the job opportunities this will open up for you in the future in other job roles.

Owning Our Own Thinking

If we are going to work at our best, live at our best and be happier and more successful, it begins with figuring out our limiting beliefs and replacing them with ones which fill our lives with potential, but as the title of Byron Katie’s website suggests, we have to do the work, no one will do it for us. So, take ownership of your own life’s journey and remold your thinking towards happiness and success, and you will start to live better and your level of fulfilment will rise to levels you may never have felt before.

Something To Think About…

What are the goals that you hope to achieve in life and what are the barriers you put in place that prevent you from starting on these goals? What are the beliefs behind the barriers? What beliefs would put you in a better position to achieve your goals, that you could replace the limiting beliefs with?

3 ways to benefit from your failures

Achieving Goals, Success, The Fullfilment Framework

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

– Winston Churchill

1. It is an opportunity to get feedback

When we are in a working environment we often have 121 sessions with our Managers or the company has a Performance Development scheme, which can be linked to the bonuses we receive, either quarterly or annually or both. Sometimes we are involved in projects or presentations. Any of these scenarios can involve getting feedback from someone higher up in the company, usually our Manager. There is a stigma in Western culture that demonises feedback, assuming that it is always negative or in some way a personal criticism.  The problem here is that some receiving the feedback can take it as a personal attack on them as a person, because their self worth and ego are very much attached to their success, or lack of success, in the job.

I rather think that any form of feedback is an opportunity to figure out how to do better and to improve. Having a fixed mindset that our success is reliant on our abilities alone will not help us improve and get better. Taking on board the feedback we are given as actions to take to do better will mean that we will steadily rise above those who simply complain about getting feedback. Complaining gets us nowhere, it only alienates those we work with, because no one wants to hear negativity all the time. Having the courage to take feedback on the chin and move forward with positivity is a sign of strength, flexibility and humility, traits that will take us far.

2. It is an opportunity to learn something new

We only progress in life when we learn new things. If we only did the same thing over and over we would never learn to walk or run or fly. Our education does not stop when we leave school or college or university. We complete training at work, we learn new roles when we move to a new position in our company or if we move to a new company for a new job. When we get a new mobile phone some of the features will be different and we will need to learn how to use our new mobile. When we move to a new area we have to learn how to use the public transport, where the shops are, etc. All of this I would class as education. Some of use like to read books to learn new things or we watch documentaries or programs like QI. All of the above are also accepted ways to learn new things, but failure is not. Failure is often classed as a weakness in a person, but I would argue that the weakness lies in if we decide not to pick ourselves up after we fail and try again.

To illustrate this I have an example from my own life. When I was looking for a new job I was filling in applications every day for a very long time and when the application for my current job came up I decided I was not going to bother, I had had enough. I felt demoralised, but my amazing Wife kicked by butt and strongly encouraged me to apply. I completed the online assessments and got through to an interview. It was then that I decided that the job was mine and I aced the interview. If I had given up then because I had failed so many times before with other applications and other interviews I would still be stuck in the job I was trying to escape from and not working in the place I do now, which I love. I decided to look at every failed interview as opportunities to learn what went well and what I could improve on. They we stepping stones of self development.

Sometimes we need the strength of others to help us rise after failure, but even this can be a lesson in humility. Even if we fail and hit rock bottom we can use it as a foundation from which to build. Failure can teach us more about ourselves and how we handle different situations. The reason we failed can become something we realise we need to master so we can succeed. There are many lessons in failure, if we are looking for them, but we have to be looking.

3. It will help develop a growth mindset

You may have heard the term ‘growth mindset’ banded about quite a lot, but you may not really know what it means. Well I am here to demystify it for you. Generally there are two types of mindset, there is the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. A fixed mindset, as I mentioned earlier in this blog, is the viewpoint that our success is reliant solely on our abilities. The problem with this is that when adversity hits, which it will at some point, the person with the fixed mindset can crumble under the slightest pressure from adversity.

The growth mindset on the other hand is the viewpoint that our success is built upon our hard work and effort as well as our abilities. When adversity hits someone with a growth mindset they are more flexible and can work around it and develop strategies to solve problems and gain personal and team success. When we fail and we consider the failure to be because of our fixed abilities it will be hard to come back from this. If we consider the failure to be because of our actions, then we can think of what actions we could have made to have been successful and make changes. It is about taking responsibility for our failures so that we can succeed.

We can use moments of failure to develop our growth mindset skills and to learn new things. If we were never to fail then we would never grow as individuals, we would never rise to the level that we may achieve if we utilise failure to our advantage. Every successful entrepreneur has failed over and over again, but they have learned from these failures and tried again. They will all have a growth mindset. If you asked Oprah Winfrey how often she has failed in her career it would probably be more than anyone in her live audience, because she did not stop at each failure, she learned from it and kept on going. You cannot succeed long term without failure, it is a necessity. The growth mindset is so important that I have chosen it as one of the Success Principles in my Fullfilment Framework.

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