NTM006: How to Improve Your Mindset – A Quick Start Guide

Jul 28


Mindset - what is it and what can we do to improve our mindset? That's the subject of this week's show, following on from Rachel's interview in NTM005. We'll be looking at a definition of mindset, the two different types of mindset and follow up with my top five tips to improve your mindset (along with a couple of resources for further reading).

Mindset is defined as the established set of attitudes held by someone. The idea of mindset was discovered by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck who had completed decades of research on achievement and success.

woman thinking

A fixed mindset is one where the person believes that basic qualities like intelligence are fixed and cannot be improved. As a result, they do not spend time trying to develop their talent or intelligence as they think that they are inherent and fixed. This mindset also believes that success is borne from talent alone and is not a result of any effort imparted by the person receiving that success.

A growth mindset is essentially the opposite of this. It embraces the idea of continual improvement, a love of learning and that success can be achieved by dedication and hard work. This love of learning encourages resilience as the learning is the desired result.

Five practical tips to improve your mindset

As always I have some top tips for improving mindset. It's a subject that is impossible to fit into one podcast episode, so I have five quick start tips to get you started on this.

1) Feel the fear and do it anyway. You need to develop bravery in order to push yourself beyond your usual limits as this stretch zone is where your best learning will take place. Listen for the little voice in your head telling you that you cannot do something as the appearance of this voice is a strong indicator that you are on the right track. A great resource for this 'The Big Leap' by Gay Hendricks.

2) Surround yourself with people who are better than you. If you want to learn quickly, find people who are further along than you to learn from. Also have people around who encourage you to push yourself to achieve. This can be via a group or mastermind, in person or online. Come and join the free Notice to Move Podcast group on Facebook!

3) Fail fast and often. Reframe failure as a feedback loop rather than an end state. If you aren't failing, you aren't learning and the state of continual learning is what we are trying to achieve to get that growth mindset. Taking action and failing is better than not starting at all because you are too afraid.

4) Develop an attitude of gratitude. Rachel mentioned The Secret and The Law of Attraction in her interview and how if you put positive thoughts out there then positive things come back to you and vice versa. This is all well and good, but maintaining positivity can be challenging at times. As a quick exercise daily to help with this, think of three things you are grateful for that day, as when you are feeling grateful it is difficult to feel negative emotions.

5) Stop comparing yourself to others. This is the biggest mindset suck and mojo killer known to man. We all do it, and the time you are most likely to do so is when you approach that stretch zone as you're being brave, and our gremlin friend arrives with a sack of reasons why you should not bother doing something or aren't good enough. You don't see the backstory or the years of work that got that person triple back somersaulting off the 10m diving board when it took all your effort to belly flop into the pool off the side. Or the million belly flops that other person did to get to that place. Compare yourself only to yesterday's you. Rachel brings up the review in the Leonie Dawson planner she uses as a good resource for this.

That's all for this week, if you have any good gen or tips for improving mindset, please do send them through to Full show notes and links available at