Mindset, Schmindset! Get on with it already!
Mary Schiller argues that obsessing over your mindset wastes energy. Thoughts flicker constantly and can't be controlled, she says, and you can act regardless of what you're thinking. Stop trying to engineer the right frame of mind and just do the work.
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Hello, hello. This is Mary Schiller, author and coach of MarySchiller.com, coming to you from inside my apartment today in Paris, France. It is very cold out. The feels-like temperature, as they say with the wind chill, is in the high 20s. I just went out to run a quick errand at the supermarket, and I thought to myself, I don't think I'm gonna be able to stand or sit in one place out here for 5 minutes minutes or so to do a Facebook Live, so I'll do it from inside today. The topic of today's brief talk is Mindset, Shmindset, Get On With It Already. And the reason why I'm talking with you about this today is because I was prompted by something I heard this morning. I decided to listen to a talk given by someone who is very well known in the online marketing, online product space. In fact, he's one of the biggest names out there. I'm not going to mention who it is. I had access to a series of talks that he had recorded. I listened to the first one while I was doing some other things around the apartment. It was over an hour long, and the entire hour was spent talking about how you basically have to get your mindset correct before you can be successful in making money on your own. Hi, Simone, good to see you, thank you. And I listened to this talk just kind of with my mouth hanging open the whole time because it just, seemed so preposterous to me. And what's even funnier about it is that I used to see things that way. I used to think that the reason why I had trouble creating my own business was because my money mindset was all screwed up. You know, I had bad thinking about money, or I had unhelpful thinking about money, or I had some kind of deep-seated something or other related to money and business and that I just wasn't cut out for it. And so I really thought at that time that I had to do something about my so-called mindset in order to have any success in business or to make money on my own or to do anything like that. What I have happily discovered over the last couple of years in particular is the whole mindset thing looks like complete baloney to me because for one thing, your mind is never set. You can't ever look at someone's mind and the thoughts that go through our mind and say that they are ever set because that's just not how human beings operate. If you could ever show me that someone's mind sort of stays in one state for more than about half a second. I would really love to see that because I just don't buy it. Even if someone, let's say, has a predominant feeling, and remember in our talks we're talking about the fact that feeling comes from thought, nothing comes from out there, or a person, or a circumstance, or anything. Everything we feel is generated from within. Certainly someone can have a particular feeling overriding a lot of their other feelings. However, even someone who you might say is depressed or has a lot of depressed thinking has moments all the time when they are not seeing life that way. And so even in those situations, there's no possible way that someone's mind can ever be set. So that's the first thing that seems really nonsensical in this whole mindset thing. Then the other piece, of course, is why would I ever need to have a certain type of thinking in order to do something that I want to do? I mean, that seems really bizarre to me now because our thoughts have nothing to do with what we are capable of doing or the actions that we take. I've talked about this in a couple of Facebook Lives as well, that our actions are not, I repeat, our actions are not controlled by what we think. That would, it's just not possible that that is true. So if we are trying to manipulate our thinking, we're really looking down the wrong road here. Another piece of this, of course, which I've spoken about at length, is that no matter what anybody tells you, you cannot manipulate your thinking. You can't choose what thought you're going to have next and the one after that and the one after that. It's not possible. If you also could show me anyone who can actually choose their thoughts. I would love to meet that person because they don't exist. You know, there's a beautiful video on YouTube by someone named Rupert Spira, S-P-I-R-A. And I believe the title is We Can't Choose Our Thoughts, something like that. And what he is alluding to there is that thought happens. We don't really understand how it happens, but it happens. And we are not those thoughts. And I believe the way he phrases it, which I really love, is that we are the space in between thoughts. We are the space in between thoughts. If you see yourself as this beautifully open, creative, capable space, then why in the world would you ever need a certain set of thoughts to come in in order for you to do something. So if you are waiting for something like that to happen, if you're waiting for the supposedly correct frame of mind or the correct mindset, or you're desperately trying to create that, you will be very frustrated forever. Yeah, oh, you get it intellectually, Simone. Well, that's an interesting comment because Whether we get something intellectually or we don't get it at all or we never see this doesn't change the fact. The fact is the fact. The fact is thought comes into our mind. We don't have control of it. It doesn't have control of us. We don't have to concern ourselves with whatever those thoughts are. We can still take action and go do the thing that we want to do. So whether I understand intellectually or any other way, for example, how gravity works, doesn't mean that gravity isn't happening. I don't understand how gravity works. I haven't studied that. I have no comprehension of it. And yet it's keeping me sitting in this chair right now. So whether we get this, whether we see it, whether we ever have a conversation about it with someone who's trying to explain this to us, Matters not at all. But if we are continually trying to wrestle with something like thought, we are wrestling with air. We're wrestling with air and we're wasting our time and our energy 'cause it's just not going to get us anywhere. So I think what I'd like to leave you with as I wrap up this talk, thank you for that comment, Simone, I appreciate it. Let me know if that was at all helpful to you. Is that if you are in that particular, if you're looking in that particular direction, believing that you have to change something about the way you think, believing that you have to do something with your mind, if you have to, that you have to change your mindset or change your frame of mind in order to create something or have your own business or be more successful or change your money situation or improve your relationship or anything in life, You can just stop now. Just stop now. Don't worry about whatever thoughts are in your mind because they aren't you. You are much bigger than that. And your capabilities are limitless and far beyond any thoughts which are made of nothing. So you don't have to worry about that anymore. Oh, you're welcome, Simone. If you can take that piece off of this whole equation, just think how much energy you will have. To actually go do the thing already that you want to be doing. It's amazing how much time gets freed up when we stop worrying about whatever thoughts we're having. And we instead access this infinite well of creativity that's available to us 24/7 to help us do whatever it is that we want to do. So I hope that this talk has been helpful to you. I'd love to hear what you think. So please post your comments wherever you happen to be watching this video, and I hope you have a wonderful day today. Thanks for joining me. I'll talk to you again soon. Bye now.
