How to Strengthen Your Mindset Muscle

If you have ever tried to build muscle at the gym, then you know that only lifting weights once in a while simply won’t cut it if you want to get stronger. It’s through consistency and repetition that you begin to build your muscles and feel stronger over time. The same is true for building your mental muscles related to your mindset and creating the opportunity to change your own patterns.

Think of building your mindset as if it’s strengthening your mental muscles. Each time you practice strengthening your mindset you become stronger. If you take a long break from this practice, most likely you will have to start small and rebuild one repetition at a time in order to regain your strength.

Mindset is what you focus on with determination coupled with consistently following through. Mindset is the muscle you strengthen that supports the process of change through taking consistent action. Each time you practice engaging your mindset, you become far more likely to follow through on the action steps needed to create the change you desire.

When you have a strong and focused mindset you are able to work through the mental noise and take control of the mental gymnastics that can derail you. We all have an inner self-saboteur. When your mindset muscle is strong, you’re ready to deal with that saboteur part of yourself. Through strengthening your mindset, you are prepared to remain strong in the face of the internal saboteur—usually experienced as convincing excuses— that usually arise from fear or shame.

Fear and shame are two emotions that can keep you living small, keep you feeling stuck and out of alignment with your vision for your life. The trick is that you must experience and understand these emotions, allowing you to feel and recognize the fear and/or shame and get curious about why it’s there. The shame plays off of the fear by way of reminding yourself how you maybe didn’t follow through in the past. The shame will then try to convince you that you won’t follow through based on these perceived failures from the past. This inevitably makes you feel so crummy about yourself so that you feel safer feeling the fear of change rather than taking the action YOU KNOW would move you closer to your vision. The mind is so tricky to conquer. The good news is that with consistency and practice you can have a greater understanding of your patterns and where the fear and shame are just an old narrative that you DO have the power to change.

Setting the foundation to build your mindset and strengthen your mindset muscle begins with knowing what you want and why you want it. When you can connect to your vision for your life and set goals, you have your future self to route for you and support you through the change process. The process from there really comes down to putting in the effort and using the energy of your hope for and belief in your future self to create a plan and then to take decisive action—consistently.

As always, it’s most effective for long-term sustainable change when you start small and develop your own inner trust muscle. You have to trust yourself; you have to believe in yourself. That is where you have to face—and at times wrestle with—the discomfort of any lingering experience of fear or shame. If you haven’t believed in or trusted your own abilities in the past, then it will try to come back and convince you that it won’t now either.

Setting up your plan based on your vision for your life and the goals that support your vision with action steps gives you a roadmap to follow. You want your goals and action steps to be simple, specific, doable and desirable. You build on these steps over time as you begin to trust yourself and believe that you not only can, but that you WILL follow through. For example, if you want to move more, you might begin with putting on the clothes you want to move in and wearing them for the time you want to move. The next time, wear the clothes and move for 5-10 minutes. Plan each detail such as the days you will do this and specifics of what you will do for the week. Review at the end of the week and check in with what happened when you did follow through and what happened when you didn’t. Understanding your own pitfalls, blocks and inner saboteur as well as what motivates you gives you valuable information about how to move forward. Self-reflection and self-awareness will guide your process. You can apply this process to anything you’d like to integrate, change or do.

When you do this consistently, week to week, you will be strengthening your mindset muscle, which will draw you closer to your vision for your life. If you are someone who prefers step-by-step specifics, try the going through these steps below to begin strengthening your mindset today.

1.    What do you want?

2.    Why do you want this?

3.    What will allow you to get what you want?

4.    When will you do the action that allows you get what you want?

5.    What fear or shame comes up for you around taking this action?

6.    Where can you start small and put these actions into place?

7.    Now create your plan.

8.    Now reflect on how it goes and learn from your struggles and from what motivates you.

9.    Practice, be consistent!

10. Re-evaluate.

If you go through these steps to strengthen your mindset muscle so you can align yourself with your vision for your best life, I would love to hear how it goes. If you’d like a refresher on the 10 steps to create a life you love, you can revisit the full overview HERE or go to the blog and read about each step in depth. Change is challenging and yet necessary for growth. The stronger your mindset is through the change process, the more alignment you will experience with your vision for a life you love. Practice strengthening your mindset muscle and you will feel the impact within your life in so many positive ways.

Step NINE to Create a Life You Love: Making Adjustments to the Change Process Through Self-Reflection

“But there is a corollary to freedom and that's personal responsibility, and the real challenge is how you generate that personal responsibility without imposing it.” —Esther Dyson

Step 9 to creating a life that you love is about understanding how new learning can be integrated throughout your personal change process and how you can apply it to all areas of your life. Most likely you will need to make adjustments, and these will be based on constant self-reflection. Fine tuning your change process by taking personal responsibility for your life is a big part of this step. You continue to deepen your self-reflection and self-awareness in order to stay motivated and connected to your vision. This process ensures that you continue to feel good about the person you are growing into on a daily basis. You will also give yourself space to celebrate all of the shifts and changes you have created up to this point in the process.

As humans we are driven by and respond to rewards. Rewarding, celebrating and staying focused on what is going well throughout your change process helps to create this subtle shift in growing in the direction of who you want to be and how you want to live. As you celebrate and apply your new learning it is helpful to share those insights and skills with others. When you share with others you solidify and strengthen what you have learned. This sharing process makes it more real, more solid and more grounded within you.

Taking personal responsibility for your life is closing the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. As you have formed new habits, focused on what’s going well and accessed your support team as needed, living within the ability to make choices based on your vision is essential. This demonstrates the ability to take personal responsibility for your life. This is where many people get stuck. They struggle to keep going, to stick with the practices that work once they feel good and complacency can start to creep in… complacency can destroy your vision.

When you take personal responsibility for your life, you essentially ask yourself before each choice, decision and undertaking you make, “does this choice support my vision?” If the answer is no, then is it worth it? Ultimately, you have to decide this, often multiple times a day. This is where reviewing and staying true to the process of change is essential. The thing is, you don’t just go through the steps once and create a life you love. You have to review, redo and keep moving forward by taking personal responsibility for your life every single day. When things go awry it’s easy to look outside yourself for where to place the blame. This is not taking personal responsibility. When you can look within and reflect on your own blind spots, your shadow and patterns, you have the ability to continue to fine-tune them. 

While self-awareness is the heart of step 1, it’s necessary throughout each and every step to build on your self-awareness through constant self-reflection. This is how you can make the necessary adjustments. One way to do this is through integrating rewards and celebrating what is going well. Step 9 is really about constantly reintegrating all of the previous steps so that you don’t find yourself in a state of complacency, that where you’ve made it to is good enough even though your vision is much greater. In step 9 you remind yourself not to settle, to keep moving towards what you want and remaining aligned with why you want it.

When you engage in regular self-reflection, make the necessary adjustments and celebrate your wins, you will find yourself closer to living in alignment with your vision. When you take personal responsibility for your life, stay in alignment with your greater vision and reward yourself for your shifts no matter how small, you will find yourself creating a life that you love.

Step SEVEN to Creating a Life You Love: Moving Forward & Creating True Self-Leadership

“Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple and it is also that difficult.” -Warren Bennis

Step 7 of the 10 steps to create a life you love is about creating a deeper understanding of how to continue to lead yourself through the change process at a steady, manageable pace. This step offers opportunities to evaluate and adjust your plan as needed, to continue to forge through any residual resistance and personalize your change process. Witnessing the transition from planning and following action steps into internalized habits is a primary focus of this step. Understanding leadership skills and becoming a strong leader for yourself is emphasized—so that you can maintain the progress you’ve made and feel the impact of the new habits you’re creating. We are often used to either being led or leading others, however, leading yourself is where your true internal power lies.

With the earlier steps all about reflection, awareness, creation and action, this step is more about witnessing and making choices. Here you will witness your progress, the new action steps that are turning into behaviors and transforming into habits. The integration of these new habits sparks a need to witness these changes and continue to look inward at your change process in order to feel as though you are leading yourself. When an action step was first created as a part of the goal that supported your vision, you had to really plan, work at it, convince yourself, deal with resistance and build resilience. Once all of that hard work is done, the action step turns into a behavior and then into a habit. Once this new habit is formed, it becomes automatic.

When you no longer have to work at it or try really hard or force yourself to do this action step, you know that you’ve integrated this behavior as a habit. When you keep your pace steady, it is more likely to deeply integrate and you can experience how automatic it feels. When working in my practice, one of the first areas that many people struggle with when it comes to emotional eating is fear that they won’t be able to eat what they want to eat. They fear that they will have to give up the foods that brings them pleasure. They recognize the struggle, but fear the change. If the vision is having a healthy relationship with food, we break it down and start with goals.

One example of goal, would be to get adequate nourishment. No matter what else they choose to put in their mouths, start with increasing vegetable intake, preferably leafy greens by one serving per day. This change is often met with resistance, they bought it but it went bad, they don’t know how to prepare it, they don’t like it… Once we work through the resistance and find tasty recipes and the vegetables that they find satisfying, they have to work at it. They have to create plans for when they are going to eat their leafy greens. They have to do some preparation to ensure they eat it and keep a log to ensure this happens. Then they notice changes they are experiencing within their bodies such as improved digestion, more energy, or feeling inspired to make other healthy choices. Through this evaluation they feel empowered and also notice certain general food cravings diminishing. Then one day it happens, they just do it. It becomes part of the routine, part of meal prepping, part of what they purchase at the store. Eating a leafy green every day has become a habit.

Once increased nourishment has integrated in this automatic way, we celebrate! The steady pace, practice and ultimate change happens and then they are leading themselves. They are making the choices, doing the inner focus and making decisions based on what they know their body needs to feel nourished and healthy and this translates to feeling strong, empowered and hopeful. While this small change does not heal emotional eating, it does create a shift, it is a step towards self-leadership and healthy habit forming that they desire, yet initially feared. When you break down change into doable, actionable steps, the change happens over time and it feels really good.

Here are some primary leadership skills and how to apply them to self-leadership as you continue to assess your progress and move forward:

Communication: how you talk to yourself is important, it is essential to be kind in your self-talk and focus on your strengths.

Motivation: giving yourself a reason to do the work and finding what inspires you to do is vital.

Be positive: giving yourself reasons to move forward with a positive and healthy mindset.

Being creative: finding solutions to tricky problems, (like charring broccoli and using a delicious sauce and making it taste AMAZING rather than mushy steamed broccoli) is extremely useful.

Giving feedback: doing this in a diplomatic way is essential as a leader, so being able to get real with yourself, or access the support person who will!

Responsibility: this is where you close the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it.

When you lead yourself to the next place to begin and how to get there, you open yourself to these powerful shifts and new automatic habits that are healthy and desirable. When you rush, force or use punishment and deprivation as a strategy for change, you most likely won’t get very far. When you lead yourself with focus, determination and access any helpful support, you open yourself to living a life that you love.