When we think of a winning mindset or mentality, we typically begin to associate it with people who are very competitive and want to beat everyone else.

But, rather than viewing a winning mindset as something to do with greed, we instead must broaden our perspective of what it means to be a winner.

So, when broadening our perspective, a winning mindset is more appropriately to do with not giving up and striving towards achieving our personal goals.

This means that a winning mindset is a mindset that sees past excuses and always seeks to grow and develop further by pushing beyond the comfort zone.

Unconsciously Giving Up On Our Goals

Unfortunately, as humans we like to deceive ourselves without consciously acknowledging that we are doing so.
We typically see this in theories such as the Cognitive Dissonance Theory.

Cognitive Dissonance is where we experience conflicting thoughts, emotions, or behaviours.

These ultimately cause mental discomfort (or imbalance/dissonance).
So, to reduce this mental discomfort we need to change our behaviour.

For example, you may know that doughnuts are unhealthy , but you eat them anyway because you like the taste of them.
Or you know that attending training sessions for your football team will help you improve and get selected for matches.
But, you don’t go to training because you find it boring and just want to play matches.

So these both provide examples of where our actions and desires are drawn towards pursuing short-term satisfaction which cause us to make these irrational decisions.
These small obstacles that you inflict upon yourself are a decisive barrier to overcome in order to adopt a winning mindset and mentality.

Developing a Winning Mindset

In order to have a productive and growth mindset it is vital to identify our negative habits.
Then, we should remove these negative habits by replacing them with good habits that aid our personal growth and development.

Here are some of the key ways to identify and replace bad habits in order to develop a winning mindset:

1. Identify Your Main Goals and Life Objectives

Firstly, we need to understand and acknowledge what our main goals are in life or in a particular area or discipline that we feel that we need to improve in.

An effective way to do this by writing down a list of potential goals, then leave yourself with no more than 4 or 5 by crossing out the ones that you deem to be of lesser importance.

Therefore, this helps us to acknowledge our priorities and further improve our understanding of where we want to strategically develop the most on a long-term perceptive.

2. Recognize The Excuses That You Make

Secondly, developing a winning mindset is only possible if we initially combat our actions, thoughts, and feelings that are preventing us from making progress in life.

Therefore ,we need to identify areas of cognitive dissonance in our lives and then changing the attitude that is holding us back.

This may not be the most straightforward of things, but by simply being more accountable and responsive for your actions, you significantly improve your ability to develop in to a stronger and more successful person.

3. Step Out Of Your Comfort Zone

Stepping out of the comfort zone helps us to make good progress and positively strive towards our goals.

However, it certainly isn't all sunshine and rainbows!

Most often than not, it puts us in to more stressful and fearful situations.

Yet if we want to truly develop a winning mindset, then we need to keep pushing ourselves forward by escaping the confinements of our comfort zone.

Moreover, it is equally as important to avoid procrastination which in order to step out of the comfort zone.

Procrastination is where we keep on putting things off by postponing or delaying them in order to avoid doing them.

We typically procrastinate when we fear that we may fail a task, or if we have certain characteristics that are associated with a greater fear of failure like a low self-esteem or low-confidence.

However, there are plenty of ways that we can strive to overcome procrastination .

Ways That You Can Overcome Procrastination Can Include:

Minimizing your distractions
Use incentives through rewarding yourself when you complete the task
Set goals that are manageable
Realize that nothing can be perfect
Break your work down in to smaller steps
Make yourself accountable by telling others about your goals
Don't over complicate the situation
Make a start

4. Adopting And Maintaining Good Habits

Once we acknowledge our bad habits, it is important to act upon them in order to improve our ability to adopt a winning mindset.

In order to effectively do this, we need to start on a small scale by tackling one bad habit at a time.

This therefore makes it easier to overcome bad habits by breaking each challenge down in to smaller and more achievable processes.

Then, over time these incremental changes become more significant and can overall massively improve our mindset and mentality.

Once we have replaced our restrictive habits, we find that making effective progress is much more smooth and straightforward.

Yet, it is always important that we continue our good habits through seeing the bigger picture.

So, we need to regularly re-evaluate our habits and keep a tight control upon maintaining the good habits.

Conclusion

Building and maintaining a winning mindset allows us to overcome our excuses.

It does so by helping us to break out of our comfort zone, thereby focusing upon the long-term and ultimately leading to a more fulfilling, purposeful and meaningful life.

This is why adopting a winning mindset as a part of our everyday lives will have a very positive impact upon our lives and the satisfaction that we gain from our everyday actions.

FocusEthos

How to Develop a Winning Mindset