Everything You Know About Mindset is Wrong

You don't have a growth mindset. You don't have a fixed mindset. They're not real. They're on a spectrum. You can shift them and shape them. Doing daily personal development, daily mental conditioning is so important because it's very easy for your mindset to go off the rails. Your mindset is malleable. It means it can change. When we think about mindset, what are we perceiving today? Going to talk about your mindset as a dynamic lens. Your first mindset shift is you need to understand it's a dynamic lens. You don't have a growth mindset. You don't have a fixed mindset. Those are concepts, but they're dynamic even they're not real. Right? You can adjust them. They're on a spectrum. You can shift them and shape them. They're not forever types of things. They can be developed and there's a bigger spectrum than just those things. Often people think it's just one thing. I'm like, it's not. There's a dynamic lens to which you perceive the world. So let's let. What are we perceiving? Let's draw out your lens. I want you to do this in your notes. I need you to have this forever. Okay? So we're just gonna. We're gonna, like, put you here, and this is you looking out through your lens. Okay. Hopefully, you know, it's happy, but it might be sad. I don't know. I don't know. But I can tell you it's going to be affected by three simple things. And then I'm gonna break down how those perceptions can really shift your life. So stick with me. This is the biggest part of the training. And if I get you to understand this concept and these concepts from here, we will work right through how you interpret things, right through your negative thinking, right through your relationships. We'll work right through your skill development. We'll work right through your achievements. We'll work right through your stre and the bad days and your health, like, all through one simple picture. So draw it out. Do the work with me. Okay? Okay. So you're gonna have a lens. This lens is dynamic, right? It's always being shaped. But what are we seeing is the question when we think about mindset. What are we perceiving? What is the thing we are seeing through this lens? I'm gonna draw this out with you. Please draw it out with me on your sheets. And then we're gonna work through it. The first thing that we are perceiving is our self okay, how do I perceive myself? My mindset is my set of beliefs and attitudes and assumptions about myself. Right? That's one lens that we have. Right? I am seeing who I am, and it is developing for me a belief about who I am. I am perceiving the world and how I move within it, but I'm perceiving myself like I am knowing who I am, and it is setting up for me an attitude about myself and the world. It is setting up a set of assumptions about who I am and how I operate, what I prefer and how I progress in the world. So it's a lens. It's dynamic. It's day by day, right? Isn't it true a couple weeks ago you felt pretty good about yourself, but then you found, like, maybe two days later, you felt really low about yourself. Why? Because mindset and our perception about ourself, it's a dynamic lens. One day you look in the mirror, you feel pretty good about yourself. You're having a good day. The next day, I'm fat, I'm ugly. What's wrong with me? I'm old. Look at the wrinkles. You're terrible to yourself. Why it's dynamic. That is why doing daily personal development, daily mental conditioning is so important, because it's very easy for your mindset to go off the rails. Your mindset is malleable. It means it can change. There are a lot of forces that can change it, but you got the concept right. It's like, oh, wait, my perception of myself can change. And we believe, or we've been told, that mindset is more structured than that. Like, it will last longer than we think. It actually takes a lot of caretaking. It takes a lot of caretaking. The good news is when you make a fundamental mindset shift as you learn today, like one fundamental mindset shift can actually improve people's performance, grades in school, promotability, work quality. We can see those improvements, and they last. Like a fundamental mindset shift. From your first set of fixed mindsets to as an example, to a growth mindset that can last three years in the research. Like, it's fundamental, it can last, but it needs a lot of caretaking. Like that pet, if you want to be actually happy, if you actually want to feel good, if you actually want to progress through life. Because remember, my job is not to teach you baseline. I'll let the you know those fundamental concepts or that generalization. I'll leave that to philosophy or to academic psychology. My job is to interfere in your life as a coach. I need to get you to longer term success and improve your wellbeing and your relationships while we get there. That's the work of high performance before. Okay, now let's back all the way up. Why is it so important? Your view of yourself is very dynamic. This is why the work of personal development, why the work of reading, why the work of journaling, why the work of self, introspection, meditation, therapy, coaching, the stuff of know thyself. You don't know thyself forever, right? It's not like one day you have an epiphany and you know yourself forever. Know Thyself is an active teaching and you have to continually think about how you perceive yourself, but more importantly, not reflect on it, not ruminate it, condition it. How should I view myself if I want to move through my world toward my aims successfully? We're going to start with again the idea. Here's you. You have a lens through which you view the world. You view yourself in such a way it sets up your beliefs of self, your attitude of self, your perception of self, and your belief in your capabilities in the world. Okay? You do the same thing though, for your social relationships. Your mindset affects the beliefs, the assumptions, the perceptions, and your sense of relatability with other people. And you have to really think about that. It's like, oh, okay, my mindset is making my marriage happy or not. My mindset is raising good kids or not. My mindset is helping me develop a team or not. And this is so important because think about how easy it is today that this dynamic lens has gotten super scratched by judgment, comparison and division. Just think about how profound that is that so many of us view the other, the other political party, the other preference, the other style, the other personality, the other enneagrams. We view these other things as enemies. And if you view this, if you view yourself positively and you view other people negatively, is that gonna have a certain result in your life? Of course it will. Gauge where you are not only just in terms of like mindset conceptually, but your actual mental health and outcomes in life. It's very important to pay attention to this. You have a dynamic lens and you have to shape this dynamic lens on your social reality. As an example, a lot of people, when they perceive their spouse, they're perceiving a person 15 years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago. They haven't dynamically updated their perception, their belief, their assumptions, their connection with the person who's here. Now. Your spouse, your partner, your kids, they change. And as they change, have you Changed perception with them, or have you held them to one thought, one pattern, one expectation that doesn't even exist anymore? That's not fair anymore. And this is why I keep using. I'm going to keep coming back to this word dynamic. A dynamic, adaptive mindset is so vital for real world consequences. Okay, so what else do we view? Well, obviously, we view the world outside of self and social. There's circumstances, there's how the universe works. There's nature, there's situations, there's opportunities and threats and challenges that we perceive the world in, not just our immediate social environment, but the world overall. Right? The world, where it's at, where it's going, how do we feel about it? This is all related to our mindset. Okay, so when someone says mindset, you're gonna think, oh, it's a dynamic lens of how I interpret, see, perceive and feel and move through the world. Related to myself, social, and the world. Okay, that's the biggest picture I can paint for everybody. And now we can get into the work of. Let's bust these things down. What is it? What are the common elements that we are actually looking for? Perceiving and sensing, like in here, where all this relates. So let's draw this out, and I'm gonna teach you a simple little framework. If you're ever trying to, like, tune up your mindset. Here's what you're actually looking for. Here's what you're interpreting and sensing within these things. As we move through these, this little picture we're about to draw is gonna explain how you feel. It's gonna explain where you've been going. It's gonna explain so much about your psychology that you probably never had someone break down before. So I really want you to do the work with me today and stick with me. So IC3, what does it stand for? Okay. When we are looking out, our mindset is always active. It's dynamic, right? It's moving through. And as we look through this, I call it IC3, the first thing that we don't even know, that we look for in each of these areas. And we gauge our happiness, our energy, our actions is intent, is actual intent. So, for example, if I think other people's intent towards me is negative, how does that shape my feeling that day? Let me give you an example. You have a big meeting coming up. You gotta go in the boardroom, there's gonna be six people there. They're all in position above you, right? They're your managers, they're your bosses, they're the VPs they're the C seat suite. They might be above you in your job. Just imagine that. And if before I go into that meeting, I think they all think that I'm an idiot, how do you think that's going to make me feel as I walk through the doors of the boardroom? That's mindset. We gauge intent. So when I am making assumptions about others, one of the assumptions or beliefs I'm casting or thinking is like what? What do they want? And that shapes my mindset about them and now it shapes my level of ambition for that meeting. See how it all flows through people when they think about the world. Does the world have positive intent for you or negative? If the world is for you, you move through the world differently. If the world is against you, you're in defense or threat all the time. Where is that coming from? Your mental conditioning, your beliefs, your assumptions, your thought patterns and how you think the world really works. And all of a sudden it changes your entire position. See, your mindset changes your position. Your mindset sets you in a certain position. Does that make sense? Your mindset sets you in a certain position. Approach, avoid, fight, flee, flow, feel. Right. Your mindset is shaping that and a huge piece of it is based on intent. Same thing with yourself. If you know that you are a mean, snide, jerky, hateful person. How do you feel about yourself? Obviously you perceive yourself low and that's actual research into self esteem. Our mindset has positive or negative consequences on our actual self esteem, how we perceive and feel about ourself. Same thing with our friends, same things with the greater opportunities of the world. So what's the intent? See, and this is not. I don't want you to think about this just as like some psychology or coach guy talking about. I love Einstein's entire perspective about the world. Einstein said the most important decision that you have is whether or not you live in a friendly universe. Let that seep for a minute. The most important choice or decision or frame you could ever have is do you live in a friendly universe? Is the universe for you or against you? And I know as I'm going to draw this out here for you, the dominant frame here is is it positive or negative? Just as you're thinking about, I see three today. It's positive or it's negative. Right? I either positively perceive these things, which gives me optimism. If I believe the intent that I have that others have for me, that the world universe divine God has for me is positive. If I believe the intent of these are in Harmony and positive. Guess what? I'm optimistic. I take more agency. You know, this is a continual strange controversy in the world. But how you perceive intelligence, how much intelligence you have, how much intelligence other people have is the universe or nature or God. Is there an intelligent design as an example, really shapes your mindset in the world. You know this from childhood studies from the 40s and 50s. If a kid thinks they're smart or is acknowledged for intelligence, they perform better. The way that we hold somebody's intelligence can really dynamically shape how they perceive their self, right? And many people, they have only ever perceived their intelligence on, for example, one plane. Like, did I do good on my scores, my SATs? So they have an academic intelligence or a memorization intelligence or a test intelligence. But often intelligence is so much more well rounded or holistic than we think about, right? Because there's musical intelligence, there's biological intelligence, there's physical movement like dance intelligence. Like, there's intelligence of how I move my body, like dance or workout or you know, balance, speed, stamina. Those are like a certain kind of intelligence, aren't they? So there's a physical type of intelligence, there's like an IQ type of intelligence. It's like some tests that they made, which by the way is very important. A lot of people don't understand. IQ is a correlate to tons of positive life outcomes. Right? But a lot of the IQ tests are really at a genetic level, not that malleable. Right. You might be able to move it up a little bit. However, all the other forms of intelligence, and there's a lot, there's social intelligence, emotional intelligence, physical intelligence, academic intelligence, you get the idea. As we think through multiple ways in which we are intelligent and we move through the world, well, that's important again to our positive or negative aim, affect, achievements and agency. So let me give you an example. Intelligence, how intelligent do you view yourself? Are you smart? Are you capable? Which domain are you intelligent in? If I think I am good at something and I can measure that I am good at it and I believe that I'm capable at it, or I have competency enough in it, that really shapes, that really shapes how I engage with the thing. If I feel like I'm dumb in an area, I'm more likely to be silent, I'm more likely to be embarrassed, I'm less likely to literally raise my hand and ask a question. Do you know, a lot of people go throughout their life scared to ask the critical questions they need to ask to have progress, intent, intelligence and this is important. Interaction is the interaction I have with other people. Positive, negative. The more positive interactions you have with other people, guess what? Your mindset is better with other people. Your sense of what self determination theory would talk about like relatedness improves. And if we improve your sense of relatedness, we can literally see that you do better work. We can literally see that you're happier. We can literally know that you move through the world differently, right? And so if your interaction with other people and you perceive it, your mindset is, I'm good with other people, I like other people. If that interaction is there. Oh, let me tell you something. Everything changes if you're not out with other people in a positive way. There's a mindset thing. Who said it for you? Who conditioned it for you? Did you do it consciously? Asking, what should my mindset be? How should I take care of my mindset or condition my mindset to achieve the outcomes I want? Well, my outcomes were, well, I'd read a lot of books on personal development and business and they all said the same thing. Your net worth is tied to your network. Your level of skill and capability in life is tied to your mentors. I was like, well, if I want high skill in life and I want high earning in life, I'm going to have to deal with those people. So I've got to train my mind to put myself on the field, don't I? I had to train myself to think. My interaction with other people. It's gonna be awesome when you start applying it to these and you start doing a little bit of genuine journaling or self reflection on these. Now you're starting to see where your mindset is a worldview, isn't it? It's not just like, how do I feel? It's like, wow, this explains a lot of my life, how I perceive these specific things and each one is different. How you, your level of, how you perceive your intent, your intelligence, your interactions, this is all shaping up into a pretty big worldview. Now we're going to go into the Cs. The first one is your sense of control. Your sense of control. This is huge in psychology, right? Your sense of control here and your need for control here is a very strong determinant of your mindset and the way you move through the world. This is so important, right? I don't even know how to emphasize this one enough. You've seen a lot of research in this. I'm sure you've heard of the locus of control. Do you have an internal sense of control of Life, I can shape things. I have high agency or do I have an external sense of control? I'm at victim to the world. The world just happens to me. And I want you to think about, if you could just take a minute and think about your last six months of life, in your last six months of life, where was the control for your daily life experience? When you sense the world is controlling you, when you feel like genuinely compelled to to people, please do everything for everybody else that the world has imposed unfair strict limits on you, that's not called a happy life. When you feel like your spouse or your parents or your peers or your boss are unfairly controlling you in such a way, it's actually diminishing your own self control, your self regulation, your feeling about self or your life or your day that feels terrible. That's how big this one is. And our job, our job is to move up your sense of personal agency in life. That's a way of saying what is your perspective or your assumptions about how much control you have. Now I want you to understand this is definitely a spectrum here because if you want too much control and everything's not perfect, don't towards the way you wanted to control it. And you think you can control your kids 24,7 you can control your spouse 24,7 you can control your boss 247 you can control your customers 24,7 you can control the code 24,7 life is going to hurt because if you think it can control everything, we're in trouble. This is why one of the principal orientations of literally all of personal development landed in the 12 step program. To say please grant me the serenity to know what I can control and not and the wisdom to know the difference. Let's shift your power into your intention. Not do you control everything in life, but let's set clear intentions and have positive intentions for the world. Let's put my power starting there. A lot of people, they base their power based on can they control it. But see, sometimes what you need to have is a positive purpose or intent and you need to be moving into the world with that positive purpose intent. And sometimes the outcomes will just happen. Your sense of control over others is so important. The more I can allow myself not to want to control everybody else. I can allow them to be themselves, move through the world in their way, not try to control every decision. I tend to be happier, but more importantly I tend to have grace. And for me at a spiritual level, granting grace is the opposite of trying to control. Often people get confused on this, when they're like, what's the difference between intelligence, capability, capability? I want you to think of more of like a broader competency and efficacy. What does that mean? It means can you do the thing? Can the thing be done efficiently, effectively? Can it be done? Can it be seen through? Are you capable? Like, do you have the knowledge, skill and ability to see it through? Do you have the knowledge, skill and ability to see it through? For the dorks out there, that means competency plus efficacy, right? Knowledge, skill, ability, talent, right? A lot of people are competent, but they don't do the thing. Efficacy, get it done, right. We want competency and effectiveness. Another way to say it, we want you to know the thing, learn the thing, understand the thing and do the thing. And if you believe you are capable, we know from basic stuff on self efficacy, you move through the world differently, you engage challenges differently, you try harder. It's like a whole different movement. So your capability, are other people capable? Not just are they intelligent, are they capable? I believe a lot of people are intelligent. But do I believe they're capable of the thing I needed them to do? Probably not. So I'm going to delegate it over here. Same thing with the world. Is the world capable of setting you up? Is your government capable of setting you up? Is God capable of setting you up for success? If you think everybody else around you is a blundering buffoon incapable of helping you or asserting themselves or achieving anything, great, then we're in trouble. I like to use this word. Psychologists like to use the word malleability. Another way of saying adaptability, dynamic. Malleable is just changeability. Can you change you if you believe you can change you and you can learn and you can grow and you can get better? That's what they mean by a growth mindset in the sense of self, but also with other people. Can your kids get better? Can your spouse get better? Can your students get better? Can your audience get better? I know I work with a lot of coaches who fail in the first three years because the truth is they actually don't have the belief and the assumption that the people they're coaching can really level up their life. They're just trying to get them to improve. A limiting in belief versus transformation. And I'll tell you what, if you're working with a coach who only wants to repair a few limiting beliefs versus a coach who believes you can transform, these are completely different human beings to work with, isn't it? See your mindset in that specific instant of how you perceive people's changeability. I know how much people can transform their lives because I've actually measured it as a career. I know it's more dramatic than you think. And because I know that when I'm with people, I have so much hope for them, so much faith for them, so much intent for them, because I know how much they can change. I know how much the world can change. So when it sucks on a Monday, I know next Monday can be completely different. There's so much chaos and change in the world. It's, like, great. You know what? This down period, this down economy, this difficult time. You know what? There might be another season of sowing coming up. Right now, it's just like, it's difficult. It's a bad time, it's a bad season. I can see the world getting better. Number one mindset shift you must have in your life is that your mindset is a lens, right? And this lens right here, this lens is something that you must condition and care for. Just like a pet, just like your sunglasses. This lens that you have is shaping how you perceive yourself, the social environment and relationships you are, and the greater world. How so? Well, you are judging these things and perceiving these things based on intent, intelligence, interaction, control, capability and changeability. How so? It's positive or it's negative. Now you have the total math for understanding your mindset.