Where one step is light years away

In this article: In over twelve years of mindset coaching in one form or another, there is one question which has consistently tripped me up. How to illustrate, not even prove, the relationship between mindset and the results we experience, and mindset and our psychological well-being -- by that I mean the quality of our inner experience of life.

I don't know a person who doesn't know this, and yet I know only a handful who actually get it ... 'as I believe, so I think and experience the world. As I think and experience the world so I behave, and as I behave so I influence and am responsible for crafting (in part) the results I (and all of us) experience'.

This is mindset. The sum total of all we believe and assume to be the truth. Thousands if not millions of tiny and big fixed ideas / beliefs clumping together, in loose and dynamic alliance, to form narratives about not only the possibilities of the next moment, but also rationalising the past and interpreting the present.

Some of these beliefs are individual in nature, some cultural. Some are created by fear and ignorance and others through experience, education and occasionally trauma. Some are the consequences of our psychological level of maturity [world-view], some by our state of consciousness and others formed by our temperament and personality.

An introvert lives in a very different world to an extrovert. They have different assumptions and beliefs about what is right and wrong, how one should behave and treat others. For example, extroverts thrive in a competitive environment... they perceive competitors as warmly as collaborators. Whereas introverts thrive on cooperation and are turned off and even repulsed by competitive behaviour.

Think for a moment how this would affect the problem solving potentials of colleagues, managers and couples. One perceiving the other as disengaged and fragile while the other seeing anger, dominance and intolerance. Where neither is in fact true.

Mindset is the lens through which we see and understand not only the world, but our partners, children, staff and clients ... ourselves. And it's this perception which guides our response and the logic of those responses. And it's our mindset that determines what systems and structures we create.

But mindset is one step removed from working directly on the thing itself, and it's that one single step that might as well make it light-years away.