One’s mindsets play a big part of the cause and effect of our reactions and actions ttowards our success. Christopher Connor, an emotional intelligence speaker and author of The First Step Toward Success Is Defining Ssuccess For Yourself, demonstrates why success should only be ones opinionated definition. On From Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck a psychology professor at Stanford and one of the leading experts in the field of motivation, ffocuses on how our mindsets impact our success and life. In the article Scholarship Boy by the journalist Richard Rodriguez, Rodriguez discusses his personal experience of the extreme cultural opposition between his uneducated family and the academic world. Success can be reached by having the right mindset and applying the lessons learned from our difficult times.
How do people reach success? Well, first people need to understand that success is opinionated by one’s self own reached goals. We may not realize it at the moment or know the definition of success while it is happening, but success begins when we are infants mastering our firsts. The first day we learned to roll over, our first claps, our first crawl, our first steps, so on and so forward. You see the satisfaction infants get when reaching their milestones, their faces light up with a smile and for those infants that learned to clap, clap for their own success. For us that have reached our milestones, we now look forward on reaching our goals. As we get older, unlike infants, we understand the importance of setting goals and working towards achieving them. Establishing a goal is important in life because it gives us a purpose and a sense of direction in our lives.
In case you’re wondering how you would even begin to establish a goal. You must know that we need to set minor goals to reach our major goals taking one step at a time because just like infants, we all need to learn to crawl before we walk before we run. Setting major goals without having minor goals that would help us reach that major goal, will only leave you frustrated and unmotivated to continue. Let’s begin with five simple steps for setting your goals.
First, you begin by thinking of something you want to do or work towards to. It does not need to be something huge it could something as simple as eating healthier. Second, write it down. Writing it down will help you remember what is it that you are trying to achieve. Third, break it down. Breaking it down would be the minor goals and or steps that would help you reach your major goal. Fourth, stick to your goals! There will be times that our goals may not run smoothly as planned but sticking to them will make you grow and become a happier successful person. Fifth, tell somebody your goals so that during your struggle times you can have someone to give you a friendly hand or even to remind you that, you can do it!
Likewise, in order for us to succeed we also need to set our minds with the right attitude. Our attitudes have a huge impact on achieving our goals. Like Connor states “success is attitude. Success requires maximum effort.” (Paragraph 4). When we are willing to put all of our effort and we stay positive regardless of the circumstances, great thing start happening. Our dreams and goals start falling into place. We set the tone to our attitudes and depending on how much you want your dreams to come true it is how much effort you will be putting towards achieving your goals.
Sometimes in life we will encounter difficult times, or have drastic changes on our everyday life’s. Some, may take those difficult moments and dwell on how it is affecting them. While dwelling on their setbacks, they start seeing obstacles that is obtaining them from achieving their goals. They start creating a negative mindset putting every excuse on why they cannot follow along with their goal. Their negative and pessimism attitude is the one that stops them from continuing what they were looking forward to. It stops them from fulfilling those dreams, those goals. Other reasons why people may not fulfill their dreams or goals are because they get lazy, to fit in or it was a goal made for them by someone else.
Positive thinkers in the contrary to those who have a negative and pessimistic mind, find ways for filling their goals. Positive thinkers would learn from the difficult times and apply those lessons learned to avoid making the same mistakes. In one if the scenes from the movie Lion King, Rafiki shows Simba–the king his tribe thought died as a cub but now is all grown up, a perfect example for applying the lessons learned into our life. Rafiki begins by hitting Simba’s head with his stick, then hits him again, the third time Rafiki was going to hit Simba, Simba ducked. Rafiki trying to teach Simba to apply the lessons he learned from his past to his future. He needed to step it up and become the king he was, he needed to face his uncle to defend what he had once left behind. Rafiki made Simba realized that he needed to face his past, fears and challenges. Like grown Simba, positive thinkers face their own challenges finding ways to achieve their goals even if it means changing their paths or steps. Sometimes humans feel embarrassed asking for help because some believe or feel is a sign of weakness, they feel dumb and hopeless. An optimistic, positive, strong minded person would suck up that pride and know that everyone needs help at one point of their lives and if asking for help is what would make them acquire their goals, then they see it as a step to their success. Having a strong positive mindset helps reinforce our beliefs, attitudes and feelings about ourselves giving us the strength and energy to reach owns success. A positive mindset embraces their mistakes seeing failure as a leaning opportunity. Dweck stated “I was determined to figure it out- to understand the kind of mindset that could turn failure into a gift.” (596). Dweck could not understand how an obstacle could make a person see the pleasure of finding different ways to complete the challenge given.
Positive Minded people also surround themselves with positive thinkers as themselves and know when to remove themselves from any person or thing that is trying to drain their energy. Rodriguez states “A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I could not forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before I became hey student” (26). Rodriguez would go and hide in bedroom all by himself and felt as if his family was not being supported or understanding for his love for books and education. He was removing himself from the laughs or jokes his family used to make about him. Rodriguez had a goal and he needed to achieve it even if he felt like he was getting distant from his family. With his positive way of thinking he knew that the reasons his family did not fully understand him was due to their lack of education. If Rodriguez would have had a negative way of thinking he would not had fulfill his goals and more likely would have dropped out from school.
Setting a strong positive mind to reach our success gives us personal satisfaction and growth each time a goal is a reached. Celebrating each goal even when they are minor, gives us motivation, energy and power to continue our journey on achieving our major goals. Growing as an individual make us a better understanding person, we would develop maturity, success and happiness which are some of the foundations of ones own emotional, physical, intellectual and spiritual health.
As a conclusion, we need to understand that one’s success is each one’s own reached goals. Challenges will always come our way and it is up to us to see them as a learning experiences that would help us grow. The way we react to our fears, failures and challenges is up to us. So, “instead of worrying about what you cannot control, shift your energy to what you can create”—Roy T. Bennett.
