10 Mindsets to Shape Who You Become
Embody these 10 mindsets as though they were identities; you'll navigate life with clarity and intention.
By Murphy's Law, the world out there will throw challenges at you. You'll have an initial reaction in here, and what you do next is vote for who you want to be.
You can't control the world, but you can control the mindset you bring to it. And mindset is identity.
You become what you give your attention to.
~ Epictetus
Luckily, you can choose mindsets that serve you instead of harming you. In this guide, I'll share 10 productive mindsets and how you can embody them.
The Essentialist
The Essentialist focuses on what truly matters and eliminates everything that doesn't.
Less, but better.
~ Greg McKeown
The Minimalist
The Minimalist creates meaning my removing excess and honoring what remains.
Where essentialism focuses on prioritizing direction, minimalism focuses on reducing things. It's about reducing clutter and noise. It's also about ensuring that the things you reduce down to are truly valuable to you, so be sure to appreciate them.
The Observer
The Observer sees reality clearly without reacting prematurely.
The Reflector
The Reflector understands experiences by turning honest attention inward.
Curiosity helps tremendously here.
The Reframer
The Reframer transforms meaning by seeing challenges through a more useful lens.
How can you reframe a something bad just happened event into a what can I learn from this response? That's the key to reframing: being a creator of the future rather than a victim of the past.
The Steady Builder
The Steady Builder starts before feeling ready and creates progress through small, consistent actions.
Often, getting started is the hardest part. We feel like we need to gather enough information, enough expertise, enough emotional support to be ready. But ready rarely ever comes, unless we make a conscious effort to start.
If you can dedicate just 10 minutes to starting something before you feel ready, you'll create actual momentum. Often, you'll keep going beyond the initial 10 minutes, and find at the end that you've created something. This is much better than over-planning.
The Systems Builder
The Systems Builder structures life so important things happen reliably with low friction.
Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.
~ The Phoenix Project
Once you've started building and creating things, you'll find they can be improved. And some of the best things to improve are the systems—the people, process, and technology—around them. Finding ways to automate, do things better, or remove friction help you focus more on creating and less on doing tasks.
The effects of building system compound, as each layer of the systems you build supports the layer above it. Over time, you'll end up with a machine that can run on its own with little input from you.
The Calibrator
The Calibrator refines direction and energy through reflection and subtle adjustments.
Not all progress is good progress, and sometimes you'll need to pause, take a step back, zoom out, and look at the big picture. You may find that a choice you made somewhere along the way isn't serving you the way you thought. Accept that, make an adjustment, and move on. Don't let sunk cost fallacy hold you back from continuing to improve.
The Synthesizer
The Synthesizer integrates seemingly disconnected ideas and patterns for a deeper understanding.
The Storyteller
The Storyteller expresses meaning fully in a way that can be shared and felt.
Now, allow me to be a Synthesizer for you.
When the world changes out there, you are confronted with an event. You react in here. How you respond is shaped by the identities you choose for yourself. Each time you do this, you're reinforcing who you want to be. This result in your personal growth over the long term.
In short:
- Choose what matters (Essentialist, Minimalist)
- Perceive and process reality (Observer, Reflector, Reframer)
- Act and shape reality (Steady Builder, Systems Builder, Calibrator)
- Integrate and express ideas (Synthesizer, Storyteller)
So, if you chose one of these identities to embody this week, which will it be?