At the end of September, I am running my first Mindset for Business course for the Aspiring Women’s Group in Newark. A few people have asked me what this is all about: will I be teaching people about positive affirmations or how to set goals and achieve them?
Actually, no, that won’t be in my workshop/presentation at all. Although positive thinking does have its value and place where it can be utilised, it can also be very limiting.
We’ve all been on a course or listened to someone speak or read a book, that is very inspirational and motivational, telling us how all we have to do is say positive affirmations every day, often looking at ourselves in the mirror and hey presto we will all be living the life of our dreams!
We might come out buzzing and all fired up for the next day, possibly the next week, I very much doubt we will still be buzzing a month later…..we will have forgotten all about it and continue to live our lives EXACTLY as we did before!
I am not against positive affirmations, however for most of us, they work on your conscious mind and not your subconscious mind, and for any real sustainable success, we need to change our subconscious mind, otherwise positive affirmations simply do not work.
So, you might be wondering what on earth I have against goal setting, as we all do this all the time – what’s New Year’s Eve about after all?!
Again, I’m not against goal setting, I just think we need to think about it a bit more.
If you set a goal – I’ll use a business example of say wanting 10 new clients a month – you really have to think about where that number comes from, remember influences often create goals for us. The Gym down the road gets 10 new clients a month, therefore I need to do that to be successful. Is that goal what YOU really want or is it someone else’s goal? If your subconscious mind does not believe YOU really want to achieve that goal, it will be almost impossible to achieve. We often goal set from our conscious mind!
Remember, think of the subconscious mind as the powerful one – it wins EVER time against the conscious mind!
But, that’s not the only issue here, as we’ve put a number on our goal – 10 new clients per month – is that your ceiling or your floor? Is that the minimum you want to achieve or the maximum?
What happens if you hit that target? If that ‘s your ceiling, how will you feel when you achieve it? Does it then subconsciously make you stop doing whatever you were doing to attract your clients as you’ve achieved that goal?
Can you see the problem with putting numbers/dates etc on goals……? It’s quite rigid, isn’t it? If we have a ‘dynamic’ mindset, surely we don’t want to be rigid? Could it not work better if we thought about goal setting as GROWTH setting? Not setting a specific goal but setting an intention to growing to the maximum capacity that day/week/month?
Think about this concept in relation to weight loss: what happens when you reach your desired weight?? 9/10 times the weight goes back on again! If instead of setting a rigid gaol for your weight loss, you’re less specific but set the intention to be fitter, healthier, leaner, live a more balanced lifestyle and start to make small changes to do this, you will end up with a sustainable change that works! Maybe we should be more GROWTH centric than GOAL centric??
I truly believe there is no such thing as a quick fix – positive affirmations and goal setting might be ‘tools’ that help you BUT only after you’ve done the work in changing your MINDSET.
Mindset really does Matter Most!
That’s what I will be talking about at our Mindset for Business Workshop 🙂