Fundamentals of MindSet

Mindset Defines Attitude

Ever since I started teaching “English Conversation Clubs” I  have met a lot of new people of differenet ages, social status and with different standings in life. However the main trait that sets all of those people apart the most is their attitude towards life and their surroundings. Some are happy and aspire to share that happiness with the world, while others are sad and pretend to want happiness in their life while actually enjoying their sadness and victim mentality. I have met very unstable people, who can be happy one second and the next just explode with a bouquet of emotions. I have met people who are very insecure with their self image and try to hide it under kilograms of make up and high heels but when the night comes and they are all alone with no makeup and no pretty dress to hide their body the time of true despair comes for them. I have met people who have strong internalized principles in life and follow them. I have met people who are going through changes in their life and it is unclear who will emerge out of the metamorphosis. Despite their differences all of those peple are capable of being happy and productive, I strongly believe that all of those people can improve and become stronger. The only thing standing in the way of their happiness is their mindset. Those people have created elaborate scemes in their minds to avoid taking any responsibility and action. In this post I will outline three important principles to follow if you want to trully better your life.

The Three Important Rules

The First Rule to follow and probably the hardest one to adapt is believe in abundance. Human beings are so small and the world is so large that we tend to put our life into a small box in order to define it. We create even smaller boxes for our friends, our relationships, our job etc. And we are so afraid to lose something because we think that we will never be able to replace it. Even if that something causes pain we tend to keep it because we do not want the box to be empty. This behaviour is caused by mixture of different factors but the most important ones are low self-esteem and scarcity mentality. Some people just stay at the same boring job because they think that they can not do any better, others stay with the same partner because they think that they will not find anybody better. But once you realize your own self-worth you understand that there are 8 billion people in this world, there are millions of different jobs in this world, there is no person or position in your life that is not replacable. So always strive to be better than the day before and believe that there is abundance.

The Second Rule comes as the result of the first one, adapt attitude of not caring too much. I have discussed this in my classes with some of my students, our primary cause of unhappiness is our past. The chain of events that has happened in the past and lead up to our current position as the result is what makes us unhappy however it is the most unproductive action to dwell on the past and contemplate of what could be different. Instead focus on current situation in your life. And starting from this point on do everything in your power to do better. Stop caring about what other people say, what other people think, about how somebody might dislike your actions etc. Once you let go of external factors you will feel way more peaceful within yourself. The real reason you care for others is because you want to appear to them in a way that will fullfil your need for aproval. Believe it or not this will hold you back. You always wanted to do sky-diving but your parents tell you it is too dangerous, you always wanted to do martial arts but your friends made fun of you, you always wanted to learn horse-riding but your grandma said you can break your back etc. Whatever it might be, if you care about others’ opinions and about the past, it will hold you back on your way to brighter future.

The Third Rule is to be independent of whatever happens. I know a lot of guys who are afraid to approach girls that hey like because of the fear of rejection, I know a lot of people who don’t even start sports because they think that they will fail anyway. People only care about results disregarding all the knowledge and experience aquired in the process. One thing that you have to keep in mind is that no matter what you do in your life, everything is an experience and everything teaches you something new. So instead of focusing on only the result focus on the process. When I go into fight I do not care if I beat the guy or lose miserably, I know that I will learn something from the fight so even if I lose I do not feel embarassed unlike my teammates. The indepence of outcome is what sets me apart and skyrockets my progress because I am always willing to try something new without regard for end result.

Wake Up

The Awakening

One day, you wake up realizing that you are lying in the burning ruins of what used to be your perfect world, ashes and smoke everywhere. Your vision is clouded, you feel fear, regret, anger and confusion is upon you. You have so many questions, and almost no answers. Rejoice, for this is the worst day of your life yet, but at the same time it is the day that will change who you are, that will define you as a man. It is the day that you wake up. It is better to be awake in the world that is burning, rather than dream in the perfect world.  Because when you are truly awake you can rebuild everything around you, make it stronger and bigger and take responsibility for your life, but the ones who sleep will keep burning until there is nothing left.

The Enemy

 

Upon waking up from your happy slumber you will encounter the strongest enemy that you have ever faced. That enemy is you. Your world is not burning because somebody set it on fire, your world is burning because you felt asleep and lost control. It might seem tempting to blame others because it is easy, it releases you from any responsibility for what is happening around you and most importantly it lets you go back to sleep because in your head you did nothing wrong, you were just sleeping while others did you wrong. This is your fear, your laziness, your incompetence telling you to give up and go back to sleep, to stop fighting. Because as human beings we hate change, we are scared of it and our brain will do everything to try and prevent any drastic change from happening. It is your responsibility to recognize this and fight it. Fight yourself, your habits, your fears until you prevail. In the empty battlefield of burning ruins you are the only one standing and you have only one enemy, either you emerge victorious from the battle, or let the enemy defeat you and put you down to sleep again.

The Weapons

Unlike your enemy you have the upper hand in this fight because you have two very powerful weapons at your disposal. A shield and a sword. First weapon is your sword which is your anger, it will give you the needed motivation for the change. Anger is a dangerous weapon, it is like a nuclear bomb; very powerful but one slight misuse and the results will be catastrophic, so you have to direct your anger very carefully. Direct it only to improve yourself, never to hurt the others. The second weapon is discipline. In order to make permanent changes a man needs time to improve, to become stronger and to rebuild his empire. This period of time will not be easy, and the progress might not always be obvious, it is at this period that your enemy will be the strongest and you will need a shield which is your discipline. Discipline will keep you going, even if you do not see the end of the road, even if the attacks of your enemy are getting stronger it will protect you from them until you make it. If you know that you are doing the right thing, if you know that it will bring you to the place where you want to be engrave it on your shield and don’t stop no matter what.

The Battle

The battle that I am describing is completely internal. We go through our daily lives passing people by and never noticing their struggle. Some of them have already lost the battle and probably will never make it, some are still fighting and some have never even woken up from their dream, but I guarantee you that winning this battle is the most beautiful and powerful feeling ever. It is this time, that all the burning stops and you regain yourself. Defeating that enemy you stand alone victorious. It is winning this internal battle that brings true change and defines you as a man. So if you are awake, don’t you dare to ever go back to sleep, keep going until you make it, keep fighting until you win.

Who We Want to Be

The Final Destination.

Life is a journey. I guess starting my first post with such a cliche may seem like a bold move, but I prefer to be honest with my beliefs. And even though every person might consider life as a journey, only few actually wonder what the final destination is and how to get there. We reached an age where information is so abundant and overwhelming that it is easy to get lost in your journey and take wrong turns, listen to wrong advice, I speak from my own experience when I say this. However I do believe that it is when we take that wrong turn and overcome the challenge we are presented with, we emerge as a stronger and more complete person. And every time that happens to us we get one step closer to “Who we want to be” which is our final destination.

The Reason.

Every action that I have taken so far, every moment of my life has brought me here, to the point where I sit and type my thoughts out of the need to share them in hope of finding solace by reflecting upon them. I will not pretend that I have some ultimate qoal of changing people’s lives and being the saint to save them all. Truth is people can not be saved unless they want to be. However it will bring me great joy if somebody does find these writing useful.

My Journey to Liberation.

While usage of word liberation may seem banal, I am not able to find any other word to describe the freedom that I have attained from recent realizations I had in my life. You know that moment when you suddenly turn on lights in the dark room and your eyes hurt but at the same time you are happy that you can finally see, this is exactly what I felt like after spending last 4 years of my life in the dark. I will expand on details in some other post but I feel obligated to briefly describe what darkness was for me in order to explain what liberation is. The darkness was letting other people to control my life, my feelings and basing my emotional state and self-esteem upon other people’s opinions and actions. In the past years I have let people, to interfere with what I want, I have stopped pursuing my goals and dreams in order to please others. This sounds like I am blaming others for my failures, but I am not, the fault is entirely mine, and the liberation was finally seeing that I am to blame for every wrong turn that I took, I am to blame for every single moment that put me down, and the final phase of liberation was to understand that I am the only one who can fix everything. If you are reading this and this makes sense to you then here are initial steps you must take in order to be a liberated man.

• Be completely honest with yourself regarding your insecurities, problems and internal struggle. Write them down, as the 12 step program says, the first step to solving a problem is admitting that you have one.

• If you think about it every problem comes from the lack of information. We did not want to do a mistake, we just did not know better. So start researching, reading, gathering information and identify the solution for your problem.

• The hardest part of it all is finding solution, once you have it all that you need to do is start applying it and developing a routine for it. If you develop a routine your brain will rewrite itself and you will start finding pleasure in your activities

By using this simple method I have achieved more success in past 2 month than I have in past 2 years. A basic example would be, during the past 2 years I have gained a lot of weight which made me uncomfortable. For long period of time I chose to stay in the dark about it by thinking that I am what I am and people should accept me and love me just the way I am, but I forgot, I forgot the biggest question of them all is this “Who I want to Be?”. And people around you sense it, they can feel that it is not really you, if you feel uncomfortable in your body, that prevents you from being well…you. So after I identified this problem I developed a solution that best suits my needs. First, I imagined an ideal body that I would be the most comfortable in. Second was going past the looks and actually think about abilities that I would want it to have. I always wanted to learn how to fight properly, be more flexible and have better stamina. So now that I have chosen the looks and the properties that I want to obtain I researched ways of obtaining them. For looks I need to go to the gym and do bodybuilding using appropriate program, nutrition and supplementation. For flexibility, stamina and fighting I need to pick up a fighting course and attend it regularly. As I write this and re-read it myself I realize how simple this all seems and yet a lot of people find this so difficult because it takes time, energy and dedication to do all this research. The most difficult part is starting, after that it all became a routine to me, going to the gym and attending my martial arts classes.  The beauty of it is once I developed routine my brain stopped rewarding my destructive behavior like playing video games all day and I stopped being interested in that . Instead I now feel the need to go to the gym and to my classes and feel extremely bad if I skip them.

Who we Want to Be

Above was a greatly simplified example which demonstrated steps of how you can approach anything that you identify as problem. I could go into great detail about if it is worth identifying something as a problem or what if we deem something as a problem when in reality it is not, however I feel like that should be a topic for another post. The main point is my liberation was realizing that majority of problems that I thought were coming from outside sources was actually my internal struggle with my ignorance and laziness. I looked in the mirror every day and every time I hated the reflection that was staring back at me with greater passion until one day I decided to change that reflection and be complete. Just being yourself is the worst advice anybody will ever give you. Don’t just be yourself, be the best possible version of yourself, the one that you have in your mind. It is the most beautiful and liberating feeling when you look in the mirror and see the man that you want to become.