September 23, 2026
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
What if the life you are living today is largely a reflection of the way you have trained your mind to think?
It’s an interesting question because you can spend years changing what is happening around you without ever stopping to examine what is happening inside you. You can change your job, move house, start a business, make more money, join a gym, take up a new hobby, travel somewhere different or meet new people. Yet if you take the same mindset with you on your new journey, you will eventually find yourself creating very similar experiences, just in a completely different environment.
This is why mindset matters.
Your lifestyle isn’t created by one big decision, it’s formulated through thousands of small decisions, responses, interpretations and behaviours. Beneath many of those decisions is a way of thinking that you may never have consciously chosen. You may have learned it from your family, school or from your cultural environment. Previous experiences shape your thinking, as do the people you admire and respect. The things you have been told about yourself over the years, also contribute to your mental landscape. In fact, you may have picked up a great deal of your belief systems from the world around you without questioning whether those beliefs actually belong to you. The modern social landscape makes this particularly interesting.
You have never had access to so much information, opportunity and choice as you have today. Modern day connectivity means that you can easily learn from experts across the world. Just this month I delivered an Advanced Clinical Hypnosis Training to a group of Hypnotherapists in Australia from my office in Oldham. Today, you can connect with people you would never have met in another era at the click of a mouse button.
At the same time, you are surrounded by other people's opinions. Social media tells you what success looks like and indeed, what you should look like! Advertising shows you what you need to make your life more complete, clever AI algorithms learn what captures your attention and controls what you see and other people's achievements are constantly placed right in front of you. No wonder it becomes very easy to confuse what is popular with what is right for you.
Successful functioning in the modern era means embracing individuality. It’s important to know that you don’t have to want what everyone else wants or build the career everyone else thinks you should build. Success isn’t measured by a direct comparison with somebody else's income, lifestyle, possessions or achievements and you certainly don’t have to follow the herd simply because the herd is moving in a particular direction.
Creating a lifestyle that works for you requires something far more valuable than conformity to the masses, it requires you to think for yourself, critical thinking. This is one of the reasons why understanding your mindset is so important.
Neuro Linguistic Programming, or NLP, provides a practical way of exploring the relationship between your thoughts, language, emotions, physiology and behaviour. It can help you become more aware of the patterns that influence your responses and, importantly, give you more choice about how you respond and act. In reality, whilst you can’t control everything in your world, you can influence how you respond and what happens next.
Imagine that you are presented with an opportunity that could significantly change your life. Perhaps a new business venture, a promotion, an investment in yourself, a new relationship or even the decision to pursue something you have wanted to do for years. Now how do you perceive that opportunity? Do you see possibility or risk? The circumstances are the same and the internal experience is different. That difference matters because your thinking influences your behaviour. If you consistently expect things to go wrong, you may hesitate, avoid opportunities or abandon ideas before they have had the chance to develop. If you develop a resourceful mindset, you are more likely to ask better questions, consider alternatives, learn from experience and keep moving forward.
Let’s be clear here, adopting a resourceful mindset isn’t about pretending that risk does not exist. The process of accepting risk means that you can move towards your desired outcomes without allowing fear to be at the root of every decision. The same principle applies to money.
Making money is not simply about working harder, your mindset influences how you perceive value, opportunity, investment, learning and possibility. You may have skills that could earn considerably more than they currently do, yet your internal beliefs may place a ceiling on what you are prepared to ask for them. However, you interpret the concept of money dictates how much of it you will attract into your life. Once you begin to recognise the difference between a fact and a belief, you create space to think differently.
To begin to change the direction of your thinking, take a quiet moment to ask yourself these key questions:
"What would I do if I believed there were more opportunities available to me?"
"What skills could I develop that would increase my value?"
"Who is already achieving what I want to achieve, and what could I learn from them?"
"What would I stop doing if I stopped believing that I have to work harder to earn more?"
Now you are beginning to build internal resilience where being disappointed that something didn’t quite work out as you would have wanted ceases to be how you identify yourself. Resilience makes forward momentum and continuous improvement possible. If you believe ability is fixed, difficulty can become evidence that you are not good enough. On the other hand, if you believe ability can develop, difficulty becomes part of the process. Making simple distinctions like this can transform the way you behave.
Consider your relationships for a moment. Did you know that you do not experience other people directly, you experience your interpretation of them. For example, if someone does not answer your message, you decide they are ignoring you. Perhaps someone challenges your opinion and you automatically decide they do not respect you. When someone makes a suggestion, do you hear criticism? When a person behaves differently from you, it doesn’t mean that they are being difficult, they are being different. The event and the meaning you give to the event are not necessarily the same thing. So how can you bypass your automatic reactions and transform them into something more resourceful? Learning to pause between what happens and what you make it mean can create enormous freedom.
In NLP, we ask, "What else could this mean?" In NLP jargon, this is exploring the Complex Equivalence. The premise here is that your first interpretation is not always the only possible interpretation and more choices in your thinking can create more choices in your behaviour. Choice sits at the core of personal freedom.
The paradox here is that choice can be one of the biggest challenges of modern life. You have more choice than ever and yet, at the same time, you can also be exposed to more pressure to conform than ever. After enough exposure, you can start measuring your life against an imaginary standard that you never consciously chose. So we come to the value of knowing yourself and what success means to you.
Ask yourself this question:
What do you want your ordinary Tuesday to look like?
When you look at your lifestyle, you often focus on creating the extraordinary moments like holidays, your dream house, a successful business, your dream promotion or reaching a desired financial milestone. The reality is that your life is primarily made up of ordinary Tuesdays. Your lifestyle is what happens between the milestones. If your version of success creates a life you do not enjoy living, perhaps it is time to reconsider the definition. A resourceful mindset is about becoming more intentional about what you are creating.
Your mind is a remarkable learning system that has spent your entire life making sense of the world and keeping you safe within it. The system is like anything that develops through time, it requires frequent updates to bring it in line with the world as it changes. A way of thinking that worked in one chapter of your life may need updating for the next and here’s the thing, you are allowed to change your mind!
The ability to change your mind is one of the most valuable skills you can develop, creating the flexibility to think differently when the situation requires it.
Here’s a quick exercise for you to implement today:
Choose one area of your life where you want a different result.
Write down the result you currently have.
Then complete these three sentences:
I currently believe...
I currently tell myself...
If I approached this with greater resourcefulness and resilience, I would...
Am I thinking for myself, or am I thinking in the same way as everyone else?
Do not rush to answer.
Give yourself time to consider and reflect.
Then choose one small action that reflects the person and lifestyle you genuinely want to create.
Your future is created by changing how you think, the action you take and what you repeatedly choose. Your mindset is where it begins and every day gives you another opportunity to decide what comes next.
%20-%20RGB%20-%20web.jpg)