4 Secrets To a Mindset That Moves Mountains

Sitting in my meditation this morning, I observed random negative thoughts and struggled to stay present and focused. Although it sometimes frustrates me when my morning practice turns into an inner chaos of old recycled and negative thoughts, it always forces me to become more conscious and eventually centered. 

It also reminds me of all the lessons I’ve learned about the mind and its fluctuating and unpredictable nature. 

As the old saying goes, the mind is a great servant but a terrible master. Therefore, reshaping your mindset while effectively working with your thoughts is where you want to focus most of the time. 

There is more than enough proof that people can heal, manifest things they never thought possible, find the love of their lives, and turn their lives around by simply changing their mindset and how they perceive themselves and the world around them. 

Once I was done with my practice, I stayed seated on my mat while contemplating some of the biggest mindset lessons I learned throughout my journey. These lessons weren’t so obvious at first. In fact, they felt like secrets I was lucky to discover that shaped me into a more resilient and joyful human being. 

These four secrets came to mind this morning. 

Secret #1 Be intentional and practice paying attention 

The average human attention span is 8.25 seconds. This means that after just a few seconds, you lose attention and move to something else. Now imagine that your mind does this every day during your waking hours. No surprise that some of us feel exhausted from all that mental traffic. 

Although meditation is a great tool to practice extending the length of your attention span and be more intentional about what you focus on, there are other mundane and simple tasks you can practice throughout the day. 

Whether you wash the dishes, drive, talk to someone, or perform other tasks, be intentional and practice paying more attention to what you are doing. 

This conscious attention will push the mind chatter in the background and help you to focus on the present moment. 

Secret #2 Don’t discriminate 

How often do you label things as good or bad, negative or positive, nice or not nice, and so on? 

We do this because that’s the nature of our discriminatory mind. However, this constant discrimination creates lots of emotional upheaval and downhill. If you like something, you are happy. If you don’t like something, you are unhappy. 

But when you learn to see things for what they are without inputting your personal agenda into the space, you experience more balance and inner stability. 

Let me give you an example. Let’s say that your coworker came to you and said that she doesn’t like your hair. How you receive it, look at it, and respond to it will largely depend on how you discriminate (judge) the situation or IF you choose to judge it. You can either focus on the truth (a coworker came and made a comment about your hair – that’s a fact) and stop there. Or you can start creating opinions, stories, and perceptions about what she meant by it, judge her for what she said, and more. 

Less discrimination (less judgment about people and situations) equals more balance and happiness since you aren’t caught up in your inner drama and assumptions. 

Secret #3 Question your thoughts 

With the amount of thoughts we think daily, it is quite hard to manage all of them. The good news is that you don’t have to. 

Start by dissecting the obvious ones, like recurring limiting beliefs, fears about the future, or negative perceptions about something or someone. 

Then, question them. It’s okay if you feel threatened by this exercise. The nature of the mind is such that it wants to be right. That’s ego in play. Therefore, it’s important to remind yourself that most of your thoughts are repetitive and then use this question, “Does this thought serve me, or do I hold on to it because it feels familiar?” 

Secret #4 Positive anticipation without attachment 

I learned that the basis of successful manifestation is to do two things. First, completely focus on what you want and then expect the best-case scenario. 

Expecting the best-case scenario doesn’t mean obsessing over the outcome. It’s more like seeing the glass half full instead of half empty mentality. 

Focusing on a desirable outcome helps you maintain a positive outlook on a situation while being hopeful. This helps attract more positive things into your life. Eventually, it creates a ripple effect where more positive expectations create more positive results which breed gratitude. And the cycle continues. 

You may be thinking, “But what if things don’t go the way I want, as they often didn’t?” 

Then you go back to secret #2 and don’t discriminate the outcome, but rather trust the process or analyze the situation and see if you can do something differently next time. 

Instead of seeing it as something you don’t want and don’t like, you see it for what it is and accept it since what already happened can’t be changed. 

As you see, I am not trying to sell you sunshine and rainbows. I am offering you these practical secrets as a way to build yourself into a person who, no matter what she faces, her inner world stays intact.