Why Changing Your Mindset Is the First Step to Changing Your Life

You’ve heard it a thousand times: “Change your mindset, change your life.”

It’s plastered on motivational posters, quoted over and over in self-help books, and repeated endlessly on social media. And if you are like most other people, you’ve likely rolled your eyes at it at least once.

When you’re trapped in a job you despise, failing in relationships that deplete your energy, or feeling like you’re always running in place while the rest of you are moving ahead, the thought of “just change your mindset” rings so loudly and frankly just to me.

It is like someone draping a Band-Aid on when you need surgery.

But what if I explained to you that changing your mindset isn’t some fluffy, feel-good idea? What if it is truly the most practical, tangible thing you can do to really change your life in terms of what change is?

What a Mindset Actually Is

Mindset is the way you see the world. It's the beliefs, assumptions, and attitudes formed from the collective experiences that come into play that influence your interpretation of every situation and experience, every situation and each challenge, and every opportunity.

It operates like this: you get two people who see the same occasion and come away from it with completely different experiences and stories.

One loses their job and interprets it as a catastrophic failure. The other lost his job and is viewing it as an opportunity to pivot toward something better.

Same event.

Different mindset.

Different outcome. Whether you see obstacles as roadblocks or hurdles to go through depends on your mindset. It determines whether you think you can change, and if so, what you think you can. It decides if you act or are frozen in fear. Here’s the fun part: most of us are working with mindsets that we didn’t consciously select.

We got them from our parents; they became embedded in us and built them into our culture as a psychological form of defense. We haven't asked ourselves whether such a mental program is worth running over in the past and ever again.

Yet when I talk about changing your thoughts, I am not asking you to throw on a fake smile and pretend it's okay. That is what my cousin did, and we lost him to suicide years ago because nobody knew he was suffering.

I ask you to explore the stories you’ve got as part of your life and determine whether they’re helping you to develop or hindering you. There are two mindsets that you’ve been taught.

Psychologist Carol Dweck changed the way people take their minds to be changed when she defined two basic strategies humans are taught to approach life: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. One who has a fixed mindset is thinking with one's intelligence, ability, and potential, but it is set in stone. People with fixed mindsets say, “I’m not good at math,” or "I'm not confident enough," or “I’m too late for jobs now.”

They regard failure as evidence of their own limitations. They shy away from challenges because they’re fearful of being seen as weak. They quit too fast because if you lack natural talent, effort is really useless.

Whereas a mind of growth has the perception that potential is a skill, something that we can work on, pick up through learning and experience, and that will improve over time.

Those with growth mindsets say, “I’m not good at it yet, but I can learn,” or “Failure is not a summation of results but feedback,” or “If others succeed in this, I can figure it out too.”

They embrace challenges.

They view failure as a chance to build on themselves. They know that mastery takes time.

The truth is that you’re likely operating from a combination of both mindsets. You may think you can learn new skills, but also think you will never be comfortable in situations around you. The goal isn't perfection. The goal is awareness. Once you identify where your rigid frame of reference is constraining your mindset, you can begin to change it.

Why Changing Your Mindset Is So HARD

Why isn’t everybody changing their mindset? Because your current mindset has been solidified for years — quite possibly decades. When you told yourself, "I can't do that," your brain put it in a box of "truth" (something you can't help but hold onto).

Every time you backed away from a challenge, you deepened the belief that you are not fit. Every time one reads feedback as criticism and not guidance, they are strengthening the narrative that you’re not good enough. Your brain loves patterns. It loves predictability.

Even if those patterns are leaving you miserable, they are familiar. And to your brain, familiar means safe. Changing the way you view things means breaking those patterns.

It means challenging the beliefs that you have held as true. It means sitting with the uneasiness of not knowing who you’ll be on the other side of the change. That is why mindset work isn’t a one-off decision. It's a daily practice. It is catching yourself mid-thought and saying,

“Is this belief serving me?” It’s selecting a new understanding of events. It’s making progress when your old mentality is yelling at you to get small.

How to Actually Change Your Mindset

So how do you do it? How do you rewire years of conditioning and begin to look at the world — and yourself — differently?

1. Start with awareness.

What you deny life, you don’t change. Pay attention to what you’re thinking internally. Pay attention to the stories that you tell yourself about life. Write them down. Take them out of your head and onto a piece of paper where you can look at them objectively.

Challenge your own limiting beliefs. After you’ve pinpointed a limiting belief, ask yourself: "Is this actually true, or is it just a story I’ve been telling myself?" "Where did this belief come from?" "Does it have evidence that contradicts it?" "What would be possible if I no longer believed this?" You have to reframe failure as feedback.

2. Stop interpreting errors as evidence.

Stop interpreting errors as evidence that you are not good enough. Begin treating them as data. Every failure teaches you something. Every setback reveals something you need to adjust. Transitioning from “I failed” to “I learned” unlocks the door to growth.

3 . Surround yourself with growth-minded people.

You become who you are based on the people you spend the most time with. If you hang around people who complain and make excuses and stay stuck in your shoes, that energy will rub off on you. Seek out individuals who challenge you, who inspire you, who believe in possibility. Take small, consistent action.

Mindset change is not just about thinking differently but also about acting differently.

You can’t think your way to a new mindset. You must act your way into it. Start small. Pick one thing you do today, according to the person you want to become. Then do it again tomorrow.

Be patient with yourself. The mindset won’t change for all of you overnight. You will fall into old patterns on some days. That's normal. That's human. The goal is not perfection. The goal is progress.

The Ripple Effect of Mindset Change

Here’s what I’ve witnessed again and again in coaching: when a person alters his or her mindset, everything changes. The one who considers themselves to be self-assured starts raising their voice in meetings. The person who believed they were “just not creative” launches the business they’ve been dreaming of.

The person who was sure they would never find love begins setting boundaries and attracting healthier relationships. It's not magic, nor rocket science.

You get to a place when you begin believing something can change. When you start taking action, you start seeing results. Mindset helps you decide to believe change is possible. This means that when you believe in the possibility of change, it creates trust, so you begin to move. This constant inner thought becomes more firmly rooted as you see the results start to happen, so that belief builds over time.

And again comes the cycle. Your thinking is the building block to everything you do in life. And if that foundation is shaky — if it’s based on limiting beliefs and fear and fixed ways of thinking — all of the things you attempt to build on top of it are fragile.

But when you reinforce that foundation, as well as belief systems like “I am capable of growth,” “I can handle challenges,” and “My past does not dictate my future," and so on, is when it all changes.

Your Next Step

Shifting your mindset does not mean becoming another person. It’s about emerging as who you’ve always been able to be before fear, doubt, and limiting beliefs inhibited.

My challenge to you, therefore, is to pick one limiting belief that’s been holding you back.

Just one. Write it down. Then ask:

"What if I didn’t believe this anymore? How would I act differently?" And then do that thing. Because the life you want is on the other side of the mindset you are willing to build.