The Complete Guide For How To Focus On Yourself (Part 3)
Psychology plays a critical role in self-development.
This is the third post in a seven-part series on how to focus on yourself.
Part 4: Psychology
How you think affects other areas of your life. Positive thinking and having a growth mindset are vital to personal development.
Negative Thinking
Negative thinking can destroy your mental health and your life. Negative thinking is a “mental attitude of anticipating the worst possible outcomes on situations, events, and circumstances… Negative thoughts are intrusive, disturbing, annoying, and unwelcome.” If you allow negative thinking to control you, you will always be stuck where you are. There are also negative thinking traits that society presents as admirable. An example of negative thinking is perfectionism.
Perfectionism is an example because you are taught that there are only right and wrong answers to test questions from grade school to the higher education system. This creates perfectionists. Perfectionism is a type of negative thinking because it connects to having low self-esteem. People with low self-esteem are more likely to need to control everything in their lives. Why? Perfectionism is a coping mechanism to hide negative feelings about themselves.
Positive Thinking
Positive thinking is the opposite of negative thinking. According to verywellmind, “Positive thinking does not necessarily mean avoiding or ignoring the bad aspects of life. Instead, it involves making the most of the potential bad situations, trying to see the best in other people, and positively viewing yourself and your abilities. Positive thinkers practice the explanatory style, which means they will give themselves credit when good things happen while blaming outside forces instead of themselves when they experience bad outcomes. Positive thinkers will see adverse events as short-term and rare.
Benefits of Positive Thinking
Many benefits come with practicing positive thinking. According to the study called Positive Psychology and Physical Health: Research and Applications, the following are the advantages of positive thinking:
Increased physical well-being
Enhanced psychological health
Increased physical well-being
Longer life span
Greater resistance to the common cold
Decreased rates of depression
Reduced rates of cardiovascular disease-related to death
Positive thinking will help you improve your overall life, from psychological to physical well-being. Positive thinking also connects to a growth mindset, and negative thinking relates to a fixed mindset. Positive thinking and a growth mindset will help you in your life journey as you build self-confidence to achieve your goals.
Mindset
Mindset is a crucial factor that will determine your success in life. If you have gone through any higher education system, as I have, then you most likely have a fixed mindset. The higher education system trains you to think there is only one way to solve a problem. The reality is that there are many ways to solve a problem. The college system makes you believe the world is black and white. If you pass or fail a test, then your life is set. You are destined for a great career if you do well in school. This type of thinking limits you and trains you in a fixed mindset.
Mindset is everything. You are your only limit. However, society trains people through the education system and other institutions that it is better to obey because our culture wants you to stay where you are rather than succeed. Society wants you to remain stuck at the job you hate, stay poor, and not become the best version of yourself by living a happy, complete, and prosperous life.
Fixed Mindset
A fixed mindset limits you to what you think you can do, and you are fixed in what you believe you can and can do in life. To do something, you must have a degree from a university or a certification from an educational institution to be proficient in a skill. If you have a fixed mindset, you will likely have low self-confidence and self-esteem and may even loathe yourself. You are complacent and obey because you think that is how you will get ahead.
If you think this way and have a fixed mindset, do not worry because you can overcome it and develop a growth mindset. You will have to identify your limiting beliefs about what you think you can’t do: learn a new skill, make money, change careers, become self-employed, improve how you look or live a life that you want to live. The institutions you went through and thought were helping you taught you the fixed mindset. However, you can work to develop a growth mindset in your life.
Growth Mindset
In contrast to the fixed mindset is the growth mindset. A growth mindset is based on the belief that you can cultivate, grow, and develop your skills and abilities over time. You can figure out how to make the most of your talents, interests, and skills by knowing what they are and then always working to hone them so that you are a master in your area of expertise. A growth mindset acknowledges that you can learn skills, grow, and develop as an individual over your lifetime. A growth mindset focuses on self-education, personal development, and improving slowly over your lifetime.
Know Yourself
It is also crucial that you know yourself. The best way to start learning about yourself is to know your strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, problems you want to solve, and things you want to improve. You can learn about yourself by asking yourself the basic questions you probably learned in elementary school in English class: who, what, where, when, why, and how. When you ask variations of those questions in your life, you will start to work towards them. The more you know yourself, the faster you can begin to find your passions in life and work to achieve your life goals.
Discover Your Life Purpose
Society wants to prevent people from being successful and happy. Society pressures people to do many things, from going to college to thinking they must be in romantic relationships to be satisfied, while neglecting to discover these four essential things. Society wants people to focus on external validation, not internal validation. All the things that lead you to find your life purpose relate to internal validation.
You will have found your life purpose when you discover the bullseye where those four things meet. Once you figure out your interests, natural skills, and a problem you want to solve and can make money from, you have found your life purpose. A visual of this is in the diagram below.
This is the end of the third post of a seven-part series on how to focus on yourself. If you want to receive the following posts in your inbox, subscribe to Secure Single’s Subtack.
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