Cultivating a Winning Mindset

What is a winning mindset? For some, it conjures up an idea of ultra-successful athletes or top tier businessmen. However, I suggest that a winning mindset is achievable by all of us. The difficulty is how we define a winning mindset. In looking at what constitutes a winning mindset, we have to look at the alternative, that is, a losing mindset.

A losing mindset is very pessimistic, negative and fails to see opportunities. The winning mindset is optimistic, positive and sees potential in everything. The only difference between the winning mindset and the losing mindset is your personal perspective.

Your perspective is your window to the world. Often, as we go through hard times we get somewhat jaded by what's going on and this is completely understandable. For some, they never return to their formal self as they dwell in the pain and hurt caused by a negative/hurtful experience. They feel anchored to those feelings inside of them that are painful and listen to that voice inside their head which constantly feeds them thoughts and ideas of failure. This is a bad place to be and in some cases leads to depression.

Depression is beyond the scope of this article but if you exhibit signs and/or symptoms of depression you should seek professional help. There is no reason to suffer through depression alone, especially given the effectiveness of cognitive behavior therapy and medications if required. I am not advocating for one treatment or the other, but I do want you to recognize that there is a way to get back to your old self.

Now, in order to cultivate a winning mindset you will need to focus on one thing first and you may find this hard. The one thing you need to focus on is you. Your winning mindset needs to be internally focused. You cannot let your external environment drive your mindset no more than a horse should be in the Indy 500 car race.

The purpose of focusing internally is that depending on where you are in a given negative situation, your level of functioning may be hampered by many external variables. However, by keeping the focus internal, you take control from the environment and own your mindset.

In order to start cultivating a winning mindset, here are some principles:

Identify your goals/wins – What do you want to accomplish? What would you consider a win? For instance, if you were recently laid off, a win for you may be setting up a schedule for yourself to network on a daily basis with past colleagues. Or, maybe you decide now is the time to start that business of your dreams and you start writing a business plan. As you can see, both of these will give you a sense of accomplishment for achieving a “win” and it’s based on your internal efforts, not on someone else’s.

Learn From Others But Do Not Try To Be Like Them – As I said earlier, the focus needs to be internal as you foster a winning mindset. However, you should look at what others have done to become successful in their chosen endeavors and borrow some of their techniques for your own mental toolkit. For example, if I am aiming to improve my golf game I will never try to be a PGA Golfer, but I can borrow some of their techniques to improve my game.

Even In failure, You Learn – In maintaining the internal focus, it is important that so called failures are not viewed as failures, rather they should be viewed as learning opportunities. Why? Because with a failure, you learn what did not work and will not repeat it again. This approach keeps you from thinking in negative terms when things do not turn out in your favor.

Forgive Yourself – Similar to above, always forgive yourself. For the most part, we do the best we can with what we knew at a given time so if we are unsuccessful at a particular task, we were doing the best we could at that time with the skill/competencies that we had at that time. So, forgive yourself and do not dwell on failure or missed opportunity when you were doing your best to accomplish the task.

Life can be very challenging at times, but it’s much easier when you foster a winning mindset. Additionally, when you carry yourself with this winning mindset, those around you can learn to model your positive behavior and thread it into their life.

Dave