By Dr Nozi Mjoli
Everything you want to achieve in your life starts in your mind. Your mindset is responsible for determining your ability to be successful. If you are dissatisfied with the quality of your life, the first place to look for causes of your problem is your mindset.
The mindset can be defined as a collection of thoughts and beliefs that shape your dominant thought habits. It reflects your dominant way of thinking about life with special reference to the lens through which you view the world.
It has an impact on how you make sense of the world, your general expectations from life and how you make sense of yourself. Your mindset has an impact on everything in your life from what you think and how you feel to what you do and how you respond to the world and the people around you.
People can be divided into two groups based on their dominant mindset, namely, abundance mindset and scarcity mindset. When people with an abundance mindset are presented with a half glass of water, they see a half full glass of water (optimists).
They focus on being grateful for all the positive things they have in their lives. They strongly believe that there are plenty of opportunities for them to achieve personal and professional success. The universe rewards them with more things to be grateful for.
On the other hand people with a scarcity mindset when presented with a half glass of water, they see a half empty glass of water (pessimists) because of their focus on what is missing or lacking in their lives. This group of people are likely to blame external factors for their problems because they believe that they are victims of circumstances.
The universe responds to them by manifesting more evidence of lack in their life experiences. They are likely to believe that they have bad luck because they are not aware of the impact of their scarcity mindset on the quality of their lives.
It is important to understand that the universe does not discriminate against anyone, it responds to your dominant mindset only, by manifesting experiences that match your beliefs and thoughts. If you want to change your life for the better, the first step is to focus on changing your scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset.
This can be achieved by shifting your focus on things that are missing in your life to focusing on being grateful for the good things that you have in your life. The universe will respond by giving you more good things to grateful for and your life will start changing for the better.
The quality of your life is determined by the dominant mindset which is influenced by the programming that children receive from parents from the day they are born.
Further programming comes from extended family members, peers, community, education, religion, culture and media. People tend to accept beliefs learnt from others as the truth without challenging them; the beliefs shape their mindset and determine the quality of their lives.
How your life ultimately turns out, whether you are successful or unsuccessful, rich or poor, is not an accident. If you grew up in a poor family surrounded by other poor families in your poor community, you are likely to expect poverty to be part of your life experience throughout your adulthood.
On the other hand if you grow up in a wealthy family surrounded by other wealthy families, you are likely to have high expectations of continuing to enjoy an affluent lifestyle in adulthood.
Every human being has power to adopt an abundance mindset by eliminating scarcity-based thinking patterns in different areas of life such as finances, relationships, career and so on. When you focus on appreciating all the positive things and experiences that are part of your life, you will start to attract more positive things to be grateful for.
Achievement of success is possible for anyone who is willing to adopt an abundance mindset by focusing on opportunities and being grateful for the positive things they have. The power to change your scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset is under your control. A positive change in your mindset will lead to positive changes in your personal and professional life.
To make a major shift in your mindset, you need to take control of your mind by only allowing positive thoughts and empowering beliefs to dominate in your mind. Your thoughts are very powerful because they act as instructions to your subconscious mind to manifest outcomes that match your thoughts and your beliefs.
If your predominant thoughts are negative and focused on things that you lack in your life such as money, poor health and bad relationships, coupled with the negative beliefs you hold on all these things, you will manifest more negative experiences into your life.
You can use affirmations to entrench empowering beliefs that support what you want to achieve in your life. You must be vigilant in preventing negative thoughts and limiting beliefs from invading your mind because they will block you from achieving success.
You have power to become a deliberate co-creator of your reality by taking full control of your mindset and directing it to focus on positive things that you want to attract into your life.
*Mjoli is a personal development coach
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of IOL and Independent Media.