Our minds are powerful things and to me, having a positive mindset is key to living a fulfilled, happy and balanced life, both personally and professionally.

I have spent a lot of my own personal development time as a coach understanding how our minds work, and what makes people tick. This curiosity in people and psychology led me to study NLP and eventually qualify a few years ago as an NLP Practitioner and then later as a Master NLP Practitioner. I also did diplomas in CBT and psychology and lots of other things as I’m just so interested in human behaviours!

Through the coaching side of Inspire Excellence, I now focus on helping others develop their confidence to live the life that they truly want, and that starts with working on the right mindset.

When it comes to developing a growth mindset the first step is recognising what is holding you back, this requires working on your inner voice and understanding where those negative thoughts stem from. By identifying them, you can then work back to what happened when you first believed it to be your truth and start the inner work to change those thought processes.

Secondly, you’ll need to start to get comfortable being uncomfortable as the famous saying goes; – all the good things happen outside of you comfort zone! This is like it was written for this process. Growth isn’t a comfortable process, it challenges us, it forces us to evaluate everything we think about and how we form those thoughts. It might not be comfortable going through it, but it’s worth it when you come out the other side!

Feedback and failure are also a large part of growth. Opening up to accept both as a natural part of the process is essential to your journey’s success. Remember, even the most successful of people have experienced their fair share of setbacks along the way and have had to pick themselves up and bounce back time after time. When we look at feedback, opening yourself up to not only receive feedback but learning to take it on board and take lessons from it is really key – remember it’s the constructive feedback that actually helps us improve. It’s great when people have nothing but positive things to say and can totally indicate things are where they need to be, however, when we get that piece of constructive feedback… well, that’s often where the opportunity to grow and get even better is!

The final thing I’m passionate about with my clients is remembering to reward yourself. A lot of the time in our journeys it’s not always big leaps forward, in fact quite often, the most successful path is that made up of lots of small little wins along the way. Recognising these wins and celebrating them is such an important step for me, it helps keep you motivated along the way, so don’t underestimate the power of reflection.

Nurturing our minds, thought processes and being open to life’s challenges as opportunities will lead to a more fulfilled and successful life. How’s your mindset doing?