It’s all in the mind

You need to develop a mindset to face difficult challenges. Jayanthi Madhukar explains

All through her 10-year career in IT, Marina Paul was greatly anxious about the proverbial sword hanging over her neck, about not knowing ‘when’ she would be fired from her company.

Currently on a hiatus from her career, she feels she could have handled the anxiety differently. “I let the anxiety rule me and affect my mental health,” she said. “I let it tell on my family as well.” Today, she wishes she had had a different mindset. “I wish I had dealt the situation differently.”

Marina is one of the few people who came together for a workshop which reinforced the power of a healthy mindset. Karthik K, another participant of the workshop, is an aspiring drummer who has not been practising for some time.

“During the pandemic, I had a lot of time to practice but I never did because I felt I was not good enough,” he said. After the workshop, he realized that his mindset had stopped him from practising.

“Earlier, whenever I practised, I was aiming for perfection and would not accept anything else. That stopped me from playing the drums completely. Now, my mindset has had a transformation which is, if I am perfect then what is the need to practice. It is not necessary to be perfect during practice. I just need to get better, that’s the aim of practising.”

Dictionaries define mindset to be a person’s way of thinking and their opinions. Psychologists define mindset as a series of self-perceptions or beliefs people hold about themselves. These determine behaviour, outlook, and mental attitude that determines how you will interpret and respond to situations.

Carol Dweck, Professor of Psychology, Stanford University, conducted a study on how we look at mistakes and failures. In her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she listed two kinds of mindsets. One is the fixed mindset, and these people don’t believe in their abilities and that their personalities cannot change and evolve. They look at mistakes as signs of stupidity and give up. Those with the other kind of mindset, the growth mindset, see obstacles and failures as necessary to get better at something. They are more resilient. According to Dweck, most of us have both mindsets, but it is up to us to reinforce the growth mindset. In order to change the mindset to deal better with situations, experts suggest certain adjustments that need to be made consciously.

Here are a few:

Review your self-talk

Suppose you have been anxious about not failing in your exams and that anxiety is keeping you awake at nights. Focus on the preparations you have done and how much you have studied so far. Tell yourself that you have prepared for most of the exam portions so it will be difficult for you to fail. Instead of vanilla positive thinking, rationally explain to yourself the reasons why you can accomplish something.

Face your fears

If you have always feared making a fool of yourself in front of someone, then ask yourself what would you do if someone makes a fool of themselves in front of you. Would you be kind about it or laugh? Tell yourself that people will be empathetic and mistakes happen. If your fear is failure, ask yourself what else you can do if you fail at one thing. Maybe the alternatives are not as bad as you imagined. Some of your belief systems are shaped from a place of fear. Overcoming the fear is challenge, not the future which has limitless possibilities. If the fear of failing is debilitating, it is best to face the fear and look at the options you have if you actually fail.

Focus on learning process

Just because something is difficult to achieve, don’t quit thinking you won’t ever be good at it. Instead of focusing on the final goal or product, focus on the process of learning. Be it a hobby or a skill, the process of learning should be an incentive.

Doing the same thing in the same way over and over again isn’t enough. You have to come up with new skills, strategies and, if need be, take inputs from others to figure out how to better yourself. Shift your perspective, however small, to see the change in your mindset.