Frame of Mind

You can learn to be successful…

A person with the right frame of mind can do and be anything they want. If you have the drive, the attitude, the stamina and the confidence in what you have to offer the world there is nothing stopping you from achieving what you want to achieve.

In other words, if you have a success driven frame of mind, you can become a successful person. A person who is valuable to their loved ones, the marketplace and most importantly to themselves.

The right frame of mind is the key ingredient in becoming this successful being, a skill that can bring everything that is unique about you together and push your ideas and dreams into reality.

We aren’t born with all these qualities, born to be a success, we simply learn the way, the path, the behaviors of someone who will be the best that they can be. The reality of life is that we all have the capacity to control what we do, the ability to decide whether we spend the night watching TV or reading an educational book.

It’s the same when we are approaching a situation, an opportunity or a task. How we react is our own decision. Whether we decide to be positive or negative, inspired or bored, determined or fickle, it is up to us and the mindset we are in affects this choice. We all know what the best option is, but what we don’t all know is that you can learn to decide to act upon it, to behave in this way, to be in the right frame of mind. And really? It’s a lot simpler to get into the right frame of mind than you might think!

The Right Frame of Mind

This question had me, I’ll admit. There are so many qualities out there that drive success and that have driven people to beautiful places metaphorically; too many to put down on one webpage infact! But, after careful observation of the people around me, I came to the conclusion that there is actually no correct frame of mind for a person. Different mindsets, suit different people’s lifestyles and goals.

For example; If your heading into the world of business you’ll need to feel differently towards the day than someone who is trying to write a book. So rather than creating a long list of qualities that someone will need to be successful, it would be much more beneficial for you to generate a short list of qualities that YOU will need to be successful.

Are You S.P.I.R.I.T.E.D?

A spirited action shows great courage and energy. A spirited person is active, lively and confident. For me, being spirited is a great way to generalise, a good frame of mind to be in. The skeleton in which you can build your success and lifestyle around. Feel free to make your own anagram if it helps to bring further guidance. Are you…

S – Self Aware

P – Positive

I – Inspired

R – Risk-taking

I - Imaginative

T – Thick-Skinned

E – Educated & Experienced

D – Determined

Self-Awareness

By logging onto this website you are already taking a ‘positive and proactive’ step towards becoming more ‘self-aware’. That’s great! Being aware of your dreams, behaviours and interactions is like the cement that will keep all your goals and values in place and help keep you whistling as you keep adding in those building bricks for the future.

Being self-aware is a journey in two ways.

1) An outer journey; the clever, psychological knowledge of the way you come across and communicate with other people.

2) An inner journey; the spiritual ideas of knowing who you are and what you want to build your success wall around.

There are many ways in which being self-aware can be useful for getting in the right frame of mind. By knowing who you are you can gain confidence in yourself and make more accurate decisions. It can also help you to improve the quality of your communication and influential skills.

Further Reading: 6 Ways to Increase Your Self-Awareness

A Positive Mindset

“Keep your face to the sunshine, and you cannot see the shadows” – Helen Keller

Being positive isn’t simply about smiling or being happy, it’s about being proactive in the way you behave, think and communicate and being confident as you do so. It’s about seeing the past as a lesson, the present as inspiration and the future as motivation. Because in order to live a successful life with a good frame of mind, we must look for the good in what we already have, whilst seeing the opportunities around us as something even better. When your given a decision to make, an obstacle to face, it’s quite important to consider all the advantages and disadvantages of the situation.

To consider your values. But if any of the cons include ‘I don’t think your ready for change just yet’ or ‘There are people better than me’ then, in my opinion, you are the only thing that is standing in the way of you achieving. All successful people have felt that. Intimidation. Low self-esteem. Anticipation. But the reason their successful is because they took the opportunity anyway. Because they were also able to be feel Determination, Courage and Belief in themselves.

They were positive. They knew that in order to be successful, they must believe that it’s possible. The worst that can happen is that you fail and even then, it’s a learning curve, an experience and leads onto the opportunity of being able to try again!

Jim Rohn, an idol of mine, was a very positive person. In his talks he’d often ask the audience “Why? Why not? Why not me? Why not now?”  because he believed that everyone and anyone can be a someone. It was being this positive that changed his life and made him a millionaire, and such an inspirational speaker.

Further Reading: 5 Top Tips For… Positivity

Are You Inspired?

You don’t have to be an artist to be considered as inspired. Wherever your talents lie, to be someone who’s able to draw inspiration from the world will always work in your favour. We are all inspired by different things.

It could be that your mainly inspired by people, it could be that your mainly inspired by places, or objects or a particular subject like history, but we can all find inspiration in things if we look in the right places… which could be anywhere really. It could be in your best friend, on your walk to school, in the car… there is no right or wrong place to look for inspiration and to enhance your frame of mind.

Further Reading: Top Tips For… Inspiration & Inspiration & Drive

Being A Risk Taker

The Writer’s Spirit… 

Look at any successful author, J.K Rowling, J.R.R Tolkien, Anne Frank and you’ll see exactly what I mean by ‘A successful mindset, makes a successful person’. You’ll also see why it’s important to take risks once in a while. Because one thing these amazing people all have in common is the fact that they risked something to get where they did.

Whether it was giving up their precious time, energy and money. Whether it was daring to continue after repetitive rejection from publishers. Or whether it was simply ignoring everyone around them and continuing anyways. They knew that the only way they were going to gain what they needed to soar was by sacrifice, a carefully calculated gamble, a push, a risk!

Look at J.K Rowling; Divorced, struggling to survive off welfare and rejected by twelve publishers, no-one would have blamed J.K Rowling for giving up on Harry Potter… But she didn’t. She was confident in her story and excited by the opportunities it provided, so driven by the determination she had to change her and her daughter’s life; she carried on.

She didn’t let herself doubt her ability, didn’t let herself become intimidated in approaching yet another publishing house. She carried on; believing in what she had to offer and her abilities as a writer. She carried on and now she one of the richest woman in the world, the figure head for aspiring writers who have had to make their own success in hard times.

Only the people who dared to continue after repetitive rejection from publishers, distractions and de-motivators are as strong as a war outside; I mean that only the strongest can keep the pen to the paper. Writer or not, we can learn from this.

Learn from the determined and thick skinned frame of mind that these writers took to be the best of their kind… The moral to the story? Successful people, learn to thrive on their mistakes and setbacks! They stay positive, focused and become more determined to prove themselves and their talents… and they take risks!!!

As long as you believe in something. As long as you are willing to go against the tide. As long as you are aware that you may fail. Be a risk-taker, take up that opportunity because it may just provide you the knowledge and experience you need to achieve.

Being Imaginative

“Imagination is more important than knowledge”

This quote was not written by an artist. This quote was not written by an author or even a child. This quote was written by a scientist; Mister Albert Einstein. You might be wondering why a man of science and mathematics would value such a quality.

But it’s because being imaginative, thinking outside the box, is what brought many of the ideas we use everyday alive; the belief and the visualisation that a single thought, a dream could come true. Imagination makes us more inventive, more easily inspired, more creative. It helps us to see thinks from rare angles and mentally explore opportunities, the past and how we can contribute to the world of the future.

With imagination massaging our inspirations comes invention and a way in which you can approach everything you do with an open mind and a belief in every little thing that you do. It’s by channelling our imagination we can create rare work and understand what people want.

Unfortunately with our childhood, we often loose the ability to find colour and magic in people, places and situations. This is because our frame of mind adjusts to the concrete world we see everyday. We get stuck. We get stuck in a nine to five job that we hate, we get stuck in believing we deserve no more, we get stuck into believing that it is the only way.

As a child we believed everything was possible, because if we could see it we could be it. And it was true. No-one could rule out anything. Isn’t it time to get un-stuck?

Thinking Like A Child…

1) Experience life and people; to explore the world you must have great knowledge of it.
2) Be curious about everything; always ask questions.
3) Keep an open mind; picture the paths ahead when making a decision.
4) Visualise your successes.
5) Talk to creative people.
6) Learn about successful people’s creations and build from their ideas.
7) Find wonder and excitements in the dullest of people and situations.
8) Experiment by doing something new and exciting.

Are You Thick-Skinned?

Even the nicest of people, are human. And what do humans do, as natural as we breath? We judge other people. As long as the world is full of people, there will always be someone who doesn’t believe in you or what you do.

There will always be someone who doubts your ideal, your product, or your service. But so what? It’s not worth getting upset or heated about, just another thing to learn from. Every time someone gives you some feedback ask yourself this:

1) Is this person knowledgable on this subject?
2) Are they biased in anyway?

If they are justified in giving the feedback then try not to take it personally. It’s not you that they are doubting, or your ability, it’s what you have produced. They are telling you, that you can be and do much better than this. So learn from it. Take their ideas on board.

If they are unjustified in their feedback then so what! We’ve all been there, when someone unjustifiably tackles something we care about and it’s difficult to move on from sometimes, especially when it’s coming from someone we deeply care about impressing. But it’s important to work with yourself in mind.

Being ‘S.P.I.R.I.T.E.D’ is rare to find, considered different, not expected, so some people shy away from it but the thing is that to be successful you have to learn, you have to live, you have to voice what you want and take risks. Don’t let their frame of mind adjust yours… prove them wrong!

Education

“Untutored courage is useless in the face of educated bullets” – George S. Patton

I’m a great believer that it’s what we learn outside the classroom that counts, so by ‘Educated & Experienced’ I don’t mean academically.

“Formal education will make you a living, Self-education will make you a fortune”

I mean educated within a field specific to our own interests, being able to learn from your mistakes and, of coarse, not just taking someone’s word for something; having your own independent ideas.

Being educated and experienced in a field, makes you valuable in that field, wanted in that field. There’s no point in dreaming of being a marine biologist if you make no attempt to be aware of what’s going on in that world and the opportunities you could take to broaden your experiences of this area. Remember that it’s great to know what you want, great to be opinionated, great to be a risk-taker but… if you don’t know what your talking about, you won’t get very far.

Remember this; If you care about something, learn about it, talk about it and most importantly experience it because no-one will remember twenty years after your death that you knew loads about New York City, they’ll remember that you saved up all your pennies to go and eventually moved there.

Being educated is also about recording what you see. Making those experiences, quality. Learning from them. It’s great to read, and I recommend you do so. But the best way to learn? It’s to live. To go out there and see it for yourself and take up every opportunity to better yourself and learn more. You may be surprised by just how strange a source of knowledge could come from too.

I know, personally, that talking to my grandparents has taught me more about anything than any teacher ever has. I guess ‘taking a chance’ isn’t really a phrase often linked with ‘educate yourself’ and I’m not saying you shouldn’t focus on achieving grades, but really? It’s experience that makes us especially educated. So learn from other peoples experiences and share your own. Talk to people you wouldn’t normally talk to! Often it’s the spontaneous moments in life that can really shape who we are…

Determination 

“People of mediocre ability sometimes achieve outstanding success because they don’t know when to quit. Most men succeed because they are determined to” – George Allen.

Have You Ever Been Described as Pushy?

‘Pushy’ and ‘Determined’ are the same, just perceived by two different mindsets. The latter, understand that we have to push to succeed. So why do we generally view this quality as a criticism? To get anywhere you have to push, it’s what separates the strong from the weak; ‘survival of the fittest’ if you’d like. In the U.K. particularly, society is modest by nature and it’s definitely changed the way we think.

Being described as opinionated is no longer a favorable quality, generally, we view being ‘Bossy’ or ‘Opinionated’ or ‘Pushy’ as a criticism of the way we communicate with others but it’s not; it’s simply a statement and it’s a unique quality of a persons frame of mind.

It’s so rare to find someone with confidence and passion in what they do these days, so everyone’s life style is adjusted around a frame of mind that accepts rather than aims… but how can we expect to reach the top of the ladder, when we’re aiming for average with everyone else?

If your confident in what you have to offer… so will be who ever your offering it to; whether that’s an employer, publisher or mother-in-law. After all, you yourself are a product, you wouldn’t expect a publisher to pay good money into funding a book that the writer himself didn’t seem all that confident in would you… so why would you expect to be given the great opportunities out there in the world if you don’t look for them? If your don’t want to be given them?

Further Reading: Top Tips For… Determination

What Frame of Mind Do You Have Today?

1) In the PDF Blueprint there’s a list of qualities, check off all the qualities you feel that you will need to be successful.

2) In another colour check off all the qualities you feel that you already have.

3) Generate a list of all the qualities you feel you need, but don’t yet have. These are elements to your mindset in which you should try to enhance and eventually learn; the stepping stones to your success.

Remember that the right frame of mind and the right planning are the ingredients for success. The potential for greatness. So don’t let anyone or anything stand in your way. If you believe you can do it, then you can!

But in times of negativity or stress remember that challenge is part of being human. Take yourself away from the situation and come to terms with the fact that a poor outcome is not the end of the world, simply something to learn from and improve.

Good luck!

Next Page: Talent & Potential

Wrote by Aimee Hall