Prove Me Wrong: The 10-Minute Mindset Challenge

Change your old mindset, habits, attitude, opinion, mentality — in 10 minutes a day

How the Mindset Is Formed?

By sensory data inputs — everything you see, hear smell, touch and taste forms your mindset (I’ll call it also personal philosophy in this answer) in some degree.

Why in some degree? Because you have the watchdog in your brain — RAS. It filters everything, so you won’t go crazy. It’s working at a very low level; you literally don’t see things and don’t hear them. You have also a belief system, which many think are connected with RAS. And you subconsciously avoid everything which is not compatible with it.

I call it your internal interpretation. It can work subconsciously like RAS and filters anything not agreeable with your belief system. Then you don’t hear, don’t see. It also works half-consciously, when you can register your thoughts: “Yeah, bastards, you just want my credit card number, not to make my life better.”, “Yeah, look for a loser somewhere else, I won’t give you my email address, so you can spam me with success tips.”

To say the true, that’s all. You get input, you interpret it and it in the results shifts your mindset a bit. But I also assigned the 3rd factor to my guide of developing your own personal philosophy:

People

People are unpredictable. I’ve never heard about a dog that turned his life around by a single destiny-defining decision. People deserve to be a separate category of factors that influence your personal philosophy. People are simply important. They can affect you on so many levels that are still incalculable.

And the more I study personal development, philosophy and spirituality, the more I am convinced that we are interconnected. On an invisible level we mimic those whom we are around. Skeptics may say its hormones or subconscious body language signals. They may be even right. Whatever it is, it works. The saying about being an average of the five people closest to you is a good approximation of reality.

People can be both your data sources and your interpretation. Most likely your parents are responsible for majority of beliefs you’ve gained in your childhood. You personal philosophy was also affected by your peers, teachers and neighborhood.

People often delivered you information and emotions mingled with that information: “Those bastard Democrats did it again!“, “Those tunnel-visioned Republicans said it again!” “It”, whatever it is, conveys the information, invectives (less often praises) are the emotions.

When is your mindset formed?

Some says that the basics of your personality are determined in your early childhood, up to 2 years old. I very much doubt it. I experienced a major shift in my personal philosophy at the age of 33.

Aristotle claimed that a man is able to shift his philosophy up to the age of 54. He hadn’t a sophisticated scientific method to determine this threshold very precisely; he just used his sharp mind to estimate it.

Tom Butler-Bowdown, the author of “Never Too Late to be Great” found many examples of people who were older than that when they shifted their philosophy. An Iron Nun was 54 when she decided to participate in an Ironman competition (and she started any physical exercises at all at the age of 48).

The right answers then seems to be: a personal philosophy is in constant process of alignment. It can be changed, it is changing all the time. That’s its nature. A system for conduct in life can’t be stale, because life is dynamic in its nature.

How to adjust your mindset consciously?

I’m sure there are hundreds, if not billions of factors which affects shaping human’s personal philosophy. Sensory inputs, emotions, past experiences, knowledge, and interpretation attached to all of the above, your family life, your failures and successes, the kind of books you read or shows you watch.

Whether or not you were bullied at school or whether or not you attended the single-sex school. Whether or not there was a death or serious illness in your close family. And so on.

But all you need to amend your mindset is generalization and simplifying — concepts human mind is so fond of. Just focus on the 3 factors I mentioned earlier: data sources, internal interpretation and people.

It will take care of 80% of forming your right personal philosophy. The rest? It will take care of itself or you will study it when the main bulk of work will be done.

Where to start?

Start from data sources. It’s the easiest and most tangible part.

Read books. Jeff Olson in The Slight Edge recommends reading at least 10 pages of a good book every day. If you stick to this discipline, it will translate to 8–10 books read within one year.

If it seems daunting to you, because you don’t like to read, start from 2 pages a day. The worst thing you can do is to ignore this advice and not read at all.

You are lucky to live in the Internet era. There is a multitude of blogs on every subject imaginable. You can learn about parenting, healthy eating, starting a new business, becoming an author and thousand other things.

Carefully select 2 or 3 blogs in an interesting area and follow them closely. Find someone close to your level, which has some successes, but still have time and desire to interact with his audience.

This kind of interaction on the global Net touches a bit another pillar of rebuilding mindset — meeting new people. Not only the blog owner, but also his audience. The comment section is a great place to start new acquaintances. You get two advantages at one stroke.

I personally hate learning from videos. But your preference may be the opposite. There are a lot of valuable video materials on the Internet including a multitude of specialized YT channels.

For expanding your horizon I recommend TED talks. If you prefer to consume content offline (as I do) there are free tools which allow you downloading videos from most of the sites, including YT. I recommend Flash Video Downloader or HD Transform.

Audio is another way to get new ideas and knowledge. I don’t find it very useful for the learning purposes, the data are hard to extract for me just from listening.

But you can utilize a lot of opportunities to listen to audio materials which are unavailable with reading or watching. You can listen while doing household chores, exercising, and commuting, driving, going for shopping… the list goes on and on.

Find something which will work for you. Pick carefully a couple of new inputs and develop new habits of plugging into them. Some useful ideas: – read 10 pages of a good book a day – listen to one podcast episode a day – Watch one TED talk a day – read a single specialized blog post a day – listen to educational/motivational audio materials for 15 minutes a day – read a single random blog post a day (just type an interesting topic in Google)

Approach those activities like any other serious habit-building activity. Design the process. Find your cue, like leaving a book on your bedside cabinet, so every time when you lie in your bed you read 10 pages of it. Set alarms or reminders. Track a new habit, make it a point of honor to do both the tracking and habit itself every day.

For how long?

Forever. At least set your mind for such time horizon. It shouldn’t take you forever to change your life, but if you negotiate with your subconscious whether or not do your new data-input habit, it will crush your determination. It’s bigger and stronger than you. Be consistent.

Every sustained action brings results.

Stick to your small discipline for days, weeks and months and one day you won’t recognize yourself.

How much?

There are experts who advise to start very small. If you had problems with staying consistent it’s definitely a viable option.

But Jim Rohn advised to read even half of the night if you found yourself in dramatic circumstances, with very lousy personal philosophy.

When I started my transformation I set myself for at least 45 minutes of exposing my mind to the new data sources. But I did more than a minimum. In the few first months I read about dozen books and a couple hundreds of blog posts.

So do as much as possible. No less. No more.

The challenge

I bet your life will change if you start even a single 10-minute discipline of this kind and stick with it for one year.

C’mon, prove me wrong! Start a new habit, build 365-day long streak and we will see if (in my opinion — how) your life will change.

Originally published on ExpandBeyondYourself.com