After half a year of synthesizing the research, having conversations with people I trust, and sharing the process of it all on my blog, today I’m releasing the first draft of my mindset thesis.
To recap, this is not a thesis for a personal development book, meant to be commercialized and widely shared. It’s not a recipe for others to copy. It’s not even a list of what I feel are the most important aspects of building a healthy mindset. Instead, it’s an attempt to find the things I’ve been missing, the pieces of my own mindset that I need to improve actively and intentionally to continue to become a person I’ll be proud of. These are the things that are crucially important to me, but that don’t come easy. Anyone reading my series of posts on developing a mindset thesis can use this as a framework for assessing their own blind spots and weaknesses. I believe that everyone’s mindset thesis should look a little different.
Before the end of the year, I’d like to write out a complete mindset manifesto that fully encapsulates the vision I’ve been crafting, but for the first draft I’ll share the five key principles that I’ve decided are the most important aspects of my own healthy mindset:
Choose goodness
Be present
Take responsibility
Seek opportunities
Stay curious
And here’s why:
Choose goodness
In general, I tend to be more negative than positive. Sometimes I say this and it surprises people, like “Oh Casey! But you’re so bubbly and smiley and blonde, you couldn’t possibly be negative!” but just ask my mom or my best friends, and they know, because they’ve seen it.
I try to hide it, but the people who really know me know the ridiculous level of grumpiness that only I can achieve. My fiancé calls it the “gremlin” because that’s what I tend to resemble when I’m feeling irritated or worried about something: picture me with my arms crossed and shoulders slumped, eyebrows scrunched together and kind of muttering angrily to myself in a corner somewhere, and that’s the gremlin.
Negativity comes naturally to me, much more so than putting a smile on and grinning through adversity. But I don’t want to be a little curmudgeon in the world, so that means constantly, continually choosing goodness for myself and for those around me.
Choosing goodness means seeing the best in the people and situations around me, believing in good intentions, and reacting in a positive way even during stressful situations. It means resolving conflict quickly and then moving on, not wallowing in my own anger or hurt. And it means doing the right thing, even when it isn’t easy or comfortable, and always bringing myself back to my ultimate purpose to be good and do good.
Be present
Being present is my way of living intentionally. It’s my way of becoming more in touch with myself, and not letting my life be dictated by the world around me. So often I find myself doing something just because someone else told me I “should” (remember that time I worked for a bank? Like, what the hell?), or when I’m doing the things that I want to do I’m filled with doubt, worried that it’s what I “shouldn’t” do (have you ever sat down to watch a TV show and been racked with anxiety, convinced you’re wasting time and therefore your life, and instead of enjoying the show you just sit there in kind of a panicked state of self-loathing for thirty minutes?).
But being present is about being bold, and being willing to make changes to better match my reality to my expectation instead of the other way around. It’s also full of grace. It allows me to stop being so hard on myself and instead to trust in my own intuition and the fact that I know what’s best for myself, and using that to encourage me towards brave choices.
I believe that all moments are worthy of being experienced fully, whether it’s running my first marathon or watching that episode of Friends for the twelfth time. For me, a well-lived life is one where I actually lived all of it to the best of my ability. So I won’t cram every minute with tasks in the name of productivity and self-improvement, but I also won’t use the excuse of “being present” to take a three hour nap instead of doing my taxes because I don’t feel like it. I’ll seek to live in accordance with my values in every instance, and not stray from that by getting distracted or getting sucked up into other people’s expectations for my own life.
Take responsibility
Responsibility has always been an incredibly boring character trait in my opinion. When I was an elementary school teacher I saw plenty of classrooms ruled by responsibility, but I stayed away from it. I thought there were so many other more important characteristics to focus on, and I still believe that. I’d rather have hard-working, empathetic, resilient, inquisitive ten-year-old’s than responsible ones. And yet the more I researched this facet of mindset, the more I realized that the reason I balked at the concept of responsibility is also the reason I need to focus on it most. To me, responsibility has always been like box-checking. What I mean is, it’s the bare minimum of what’s required. And I never wanted to just check boxes.
But responsibility, or what some people call radical responsibility, actually pushes people to do more than just be dependable. Radical responsibility forces you to accept that you are in control of your own life, and all aspects of your life. So you can choose to just check the box, or you can choose to complete something to the best of your ability. If a friend asks you to help them move on a Saturday morning, you can grudgingly show up hungover and resentful because you want to keep your promise, or you can get there early with coffee and make the experience fun and stress-free for you both.
Being responsible means never whining, never complaining, and never making excuses. If you are radically responsible for your own life, you can’t blame others, it’s always always always on you. I find that in a lot of arguments I have with other people I’m able to weasel my way out of taking responsibility by explaining (read: blaming) my behavior on something else, someone else, etc. If instead I’m willing to take full ownership of my own life and my own actions, I’m so excited to see where it will take me.
Seek opportunities
This part of mindset thesis didn’t come from a book or podcast. Instead it came from a conversation with my (super sexy) fiancé, so I’ll give credit where it’s due. I asked Bobby this: if I could pick one thing to change about my mindset that would have the most impact, what do you think it would be? And after fearfully deflecting the question because he knows I occasionally respond poorly to criticism (remember the gremlin from above), he told me that he thinks I could react better when things don’t go my way.
When things don’t go according to my carefully laid plans, I tend to wig out a little, sometimes even a lot. The worst is when things happen that I wasn’t planning for (some people also call this life). I don’t want to be wigged out by life. I want to be energized by it, motivated by it, inspired by it, in love with it. Bobby reminded me that everything that happens is always an opportunity. Whether it’s what I expected or intended or not, I can see life as a series of opportunities to make me better. The Stoics, who I suppose had this idea before Bobby did, phrase this as amor fati, or love of fate. Nietzsche said his formula for a great human was “That one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backwards, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it….but love it.” That’s what I think I’m going for here.
When I’m overly attached to my own plans what I’m really doing is appealing to my own ego, the voice in my head that tells me I’ve got to have everything under control in order to be worthy. But this chokehold I’ve had on my life for the sake of control ends up limiting my experiences, keeping me fearful and trapped inside these self-imposed boundaries of what I “expected” to happen. It makes me see change as a bad thing. Instead, I want to see change as a chance for an even better outcome than I had planned for, and I want to accept life and all of its events without having to keep everything under a label of “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong”; it’s all just another opportunity.
Stay curious
I fully believe that curiosity is the key to a happy and successful life. Curious people ask questions. They dig in and try to understand. They have empathy. They bring up interesting points. They constantly learn, and learning has always been one of my core values.
But learning to me has always been more of a solitary activity. It’s reading books, listening to podcasts, staying sequestered in my own safe world with my own safe ideas. Being curious pushes me to take advantage of every moment, every conversation, every interaction. It reminds me to speak up in the meeting and ask the question, even though I’m afraid people will think I’m dumb. It gives me permission to try new things and not have to be good at it, or enjoy it, to get something out of it.
Staying curious also keeps me from my bad habit of being judgmental, of myself and of others. I think I’ve started to get too comfortable with my own understanding of the world around me, and it’s about time I explore that a bit more.
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So there you have it! I’ve got these written up and posted in the places where I’ll see them most, and I’ve got five months left in the year to test them out and hone them in. Interestingly, this isn’t where I thought I’d land in this exercise, but I’m glad that I did. It’s brought me to a place where I feel more grounded in my own values and more confident in myself and all the things I’m already good at, so that I can focus without being overly critical on the areas where I still need a lot of work. And as the goddess Sophia Bush says, we’re all, always, just works in progress.