Winning Mindset: 4 steps to build your success

How do you stay away from excuses and focus 100% on your goals?

When we talk about winning mentality, it is easy to imagine an individualistic person whose main goal is to be more competitive than the rest. However, we can also understand this concept in a way that has nothing to do with greed: being a winner can simply mean not giving up on achieving those personal goals that, if you put in the effort, can be attained..

In other words, having a winning mentality means not being seduced by the many excuses we often give ourselves for not getting out of our comfort zone.

Unconsciously giving up on our goals

We have known for many years now to what extent human beings are prone to deceive themselves without realizing it. Phenomena such as cognitive dissonance, for example, cause us to embrace unreasonable beliefs simply because they allow us to reduce the discomfort that appears when we notice contradictions in our way of thinking: I could have studied for the exam but I have not done so even though I want to pass, but in the end it doesn't matter because that teacher was going to fail me anyway.

In the same way, heuristics, or mental shortcuts in our mind, make us "fabricate" reasons in a matter of seconds to make a decision that does not seem very rational. For example, we want to lose body fat but are seduced by the packaging of a bakery product full of refined sugar, we may believe that eating it will give us the energy we need to work our muscles in the gym and improve our ability to burn fat afterwards.

These are examples in which obedience to impulses and desires linked to the pursuit of short-term pleasure are camouflaged under a layer of apparent rationality. Believe it or not, human beings can become very creative when it comes to giving up our long-term objectives in favor of short-term goals. These little traps that we set for ourselves are the main obstacle that a winning mentality has to deal with.Many of the goals that will bring us the greatest benefits can only be achieved with persistence and effort, and we will never reach them without training ourselves in a certain amount of self-discipline.

Building a winning mentality

In order to get used to maintaining a productive mindset, it is necessary to adopt new habits and customs. Here are some of them.

1. Locating your goals

First of all, it is necessary to know what our main goals in life are, it is necessary to know what our main goals in life are. or in a specific area in which we feel we are not making progress. To do this it is good to write down a list of possible goals, so that we do not forget them after thinking about them for the first time, and then go through a filtering exercise, crossing out the less important ones until we leave no more than 4 or 5. This will allow us to know our priorities and to know better where we want to aim our development strategies in the medium and long term.

2. Detecting excuses

The second step to building a winning mindset is to examining one's own thoughts and learning to locate the excuses that keep us stuck.. It is convenient to do this without pretending to be too lenient with ourselves and, if we have doubts, we can always ask the opinion of people we trust to get a second opinion.

3. Get out of the comfort zone

This is the most difficult step, since it involves exposing ourselves to situations that are somewhat stressful but that bring us closer to our goals. For this it is good to find strategies to "force" ourselves to follow a sequence of very clear and specific actions; in this way we will not be able to justify ourselves with convenient excuses, because the guidelines of what we must do are so clear that there is no room for doubt as to whether we have done them or not.

Procrastination, or "I'll do it tomorrow syndrome" is also a very common refuge among people who are stuck in their projects, and that is why it is necessary to prevent its appearance by making it so that all that matters for a moment is to do what we feel we must do. Similarly, analysis paralysis (discussed in this article) is often used to disguise inaction as productive activity.

4. Maintaining the habit

Once we have broken with the dynamic of immobility, it is much easier to continue moving forward.But it is also necessary to watch what we do so as not to give up on the project.

For that it is good to think about the satisfaction that comes from having overcome the previous difficulties, those that once made us so lazy or afraid, and to think that many small prizes like these await us. It is also necessary to continue programming action plans sequenced in very short and concrete stages, so that at all times we know what has to be done and we use all our energies in executing those actions.

Concluding

Keeping a winning mentality will allow us to be forewarned against the excuses we use to avoid leaving the comfort zone and, at the same time, to see how the goals we fantasized about in the past are getting closer or being achieved, as long as they depend only on us.

That is why adopting this way of thinking and making it part of our daily life will have a very positive impact both on our self-esteem and on the satisfaction generated through our efforts. will have a very positive impact both on our self-esteem and on the satisfaction generated through the effort we make..