Mindfulness
fromFast Company
18 hours agoThe simple mental habit every high-performer shares
Mindset shapes decisions and resilience; nearly all successful leaders have a personal mantra they rely on during challenges.
Many mistakes move us forward more than backward. Conscientious people often experience a springboard effect following mistakes, whereby fixing the mistakes accelerates growth faster than if they'd never made any missteps.
The money was supposed to feel like something. You work your whole life thinking about the payoff. The day you can finally relax. The moment you don't have to worry about making payroll or whether that big invoice will come through.
For my sons, those experiences proved incredibly valuable. Both of them learned to value their athletic experiences not so much for the awards they won or accolades they received but for what participating in those events did for them on the inside. In comparing their childhood experiences to my long-distance running, I realized that many of my own fondest running memories did not come from the buckles or plaques I received but rather from the internal gratification I enjoyed in completing something really difficult.
Here's something that might sound counterintuitive: people who achieve their goals don't actually take them that seriously. Wait, what? Let me explain. While goal-setters treat their objectives like sacred vows they can't break (and then feel crushed when they fail), achievers approach them more like scientists in a lab. They're curious about what will happen, not attached to a specific outcome.
If you ever felt your motivation drain away under a micromanaging boss, he gave you the language for what was happening to you. If you ever sensed that grades and gold stars were somehow diminishing the very learning they were supposed to enhance, he explained why. And in doing so, he helped liberate psychology from one of its most limiting assumptions. The Black Box of Behaviorism For much of the 20th century, the dominant paradigm in psychological research, behaviorism, treated humans as input-output machines.