The 1 Mindset Trick You Need

Welcome to Navigating Your Career, the only podcast that blends personal development, professional skills and psychology to help you get happy at work and live the life you want. If you want to stop feeling stuck and start feeling better, this is the place for you. I’m your host, Melissa Lawrence.

Let’s get started.

Hello and welcome to this week’s episode. This week, I want to share with you a mindset trick. In fact, probably the most important mindset trick that you need. Now, why do you think that you even need to care about this? You could be thinking, where are those tangible skills and let’s talk about professional development. Mindset is just what it is. It’s how I was born. What is this woo you are speaking of? So just bear with me.

Your mindset is really the key to you achieving your goals and feeling how you want to feel. Believe me, I see it time and time again. It’s what I help people with day in and day out. When it comes to anything that you want to achieve, you are a lot of the time really chasing a feeling. If you get a new house, if you get that promotion, if you lose that last 10 pounds, if you change careers, you think that you will feel a certain way when you do and that you can’t feel that way without it.

And what I help you do is to feel how you want to feel right now. Not only the professional skills and tangible steps to discovering your ideal career, moving to management, improving your leadership or communication skills, negotiating a higher salary or finding a new job. Yes, I do all of those things as well. But I also help you understand your brain and train it to align with what you want. I am a career and life coach, which means I not only help you with your career development, but I also help you with your life, which includes your mindset, because you can bet that if you aren’t happy at work that is flowing into your life and your unhappiness is tied to your belief system and your mindset.

So when you learn to master your mindset and develop professionally at the same time, you become unstoppable. That is why what I do is so unique. It’s not one or the other. It’s both. And I blend them in a way that no one else does, which is why my clients get such incredible results and say working with me changes their life and is the best investment they’ve ever made in themselves. Half of my clients call me their life coach.

Half of them call me their career coach because it’s both and it’s just dependent on what we end up working on the most. People always come to me for career. But there’s always a layer of life in there and mindset work and personal development that when the client is willing to do that work opens up so many more opportunities for them. So you can come to me for career, but we’re also going to work on your mindset. So today, I want to give you a simple little mindset trick that will help you right now.

It’s so simple that you are going to be like what? Huh? Really? OK, here it is, it is to ask yourself why. Yeah, now there is a much more in-depth model that I teach my clients that helps them understand their brain and connect their thoughts to their behavior and rewire their thinking. I’m like a brain based coach. But for today, if you start by just asking yourself why you will see a shift. It is simple and so simple that I think a lot of people just dismiss it as something they don’t need to do or they think they already know.

But I want you to really think about this. Next time that you’re ticked off at your boss, ask yourself why you are so upset and your first thought will likely be something with blame. Like they threw me under the bus in that meeting. But then I want you to ask yourself why that bothers you. What are you making that mean about you, about them, about your job? Keep asking yourself why until you get below the blame and logic and surface level responses. Let’s say that you are passed over for a promotion and you’re furious.

Why? You worked so hard for it. Dig deeper. What does it mean? Why did you work so hard for it? Why is this so important to you? Chances are you’re making it mean something about you, something about your worth. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t care about promotions or crappy bosses, that you don’t deserve respect, but I am saying get to the root of why these things bother you and what you make it mean when they happen.

I had a client who was furious they weren’t promoted from manager to senior manager with a five percent salary increase. They thought it meant that they weren’t good enough. And asking some of these questions helped them realize that they were comparing themselves to others, that not getting that promotion meant that they weren’t as good as their peers, that they were doing something wrong, that they were less worthy as a person. For a manager to senior manager, one word missing in their title, senior and five percent, that’s a whole lot of pooh-poohing all over yourself for that.

But I get that it’s important and I understand that promotions are a way to mark your progress and your success. And when you are working in an environment where people are celebrated through promotion and you are working hard, it’s justifiable that you would want to earn that for yourself. But I want you to think about how wanting that and not getting it could be negatively impacting your life. Because you can work toward that, you can want that, you can be deserving of that and also be happy at the same time, instead of building resentment and having a lot of negative thoughts about your boss or the people making these decisions and then letting yourself fall into this spiral or you start self sabotaging or all of these other things.

Once you know why it matters, you can decide what you want to do about it. If it truly matters to you and you aren’t getting it where you are and you cannot be happy without it, then it’s time to move on. It’s simple. But it’s possible it doesn’t matter to you, really, that you just think it should or you just want it because it’s what you’ve been taught to want or what you think is the best next step.

When you’re upset with your partner you can also use this and just ask why. If they worked late and didn’t tell you and that ticked you off, why? Did you feel disrespected? Why? Does it mean that they don’t care about you or aren’t considering you? Why? Where does that come from? Let me tell you a story, when I was younger, I had some experiences that led me to believe that I wasn’t considered, that I didn’t matter, that my feelings didn’t matter.

I grew up with this being reinforced. So I discovered later in my life that this had bled into my relationships. I would get irritated or hurt by small things, like not informing me of something before it happens or not letting me know if plans changed. It seemed very logical to me. You tell people if plans change. You tell your partner if you’ll be late because it impacts dinner or the evening and so on, all the things that we tell ourselves.

But when I did this work for myself a long time ago, I discovered that this really boiled down to me not feeling considered, which was triggering to me because of some experiences I had when I was younger. Once you know the why, you can show yourself some compassion. You can heal. You can communicate what you need without things coming out sideways. So then for me, for example, I could go back and say, I don’t feel considered when you change plans without telling me or come late without a heads up.

I know it can seem silly, but this is how my brain processes this information. I’ll do better at being aware of this and try to be more flexible. And can you please be aware of this and consider informing me more often when things change and then we work together to meet my need. It’s not about silencing one or the other. It’s not about who’s right or wrong. It’s about working together. But you have to solve the right problem.

We are all human and we are all very dynamic. And every single one of us has had experiences that influence the way that we show up in the world. And our brains are just, they’re like egomaniacs. So they’re always going to be looking out for our own best interests. We’re always going to have a filter and a lens that leans things towards our advantage and makes the wrongdoer seem very wrong and our perspective seem very right. And so we have to do some work on our brain and on our mindset to really understand how things are influencing us and what our perspective really is and to question those things that are making us unhappy or holding ourselves back or sabotaging ourselves or preventing us from really living the life that we want to have instead of just deciding it’s someone else’s problem.

So if I had kept the situation that I had explained high level with something like, you just have to tell me every time you leave work. Well, that sounds a little rigid and it doesn’t address the root cause. So when other things happen that also have to do with timing or plans and you have the same triggering response, then it’s confusing and you end up getting into a laundry list of dos and don’ts with the people in your life.

And that is not healthy either. So whether it’s at work or at home, ask yourself why. It’s the one mindset trick that is so simple but will help you not only understand yourself better, but communicate what you really need and reframe some situations that are stressful or upsetting to you. You could start feeling better right away instead of sitting and dwelling on how you were wronged or how something didn’t go in your favor or you were disrespected in some way.

Get to the bottom. Ask yourself why it bothers you and what you make it mean. Let me know how it goes. You can always email me or connect with me on social media to let me know how this works for you. Head to my website to get all the links for the different ways that you can connect with me at www.melissamlawrence.com. There’s a link in the show notes and have an amazing week.

I get asked all of the time, how do I know if I’m in the right career? Now, you can find out. I created a free quiz using my criteria for what makes a great job fit. You can take the quiz at my website www.melissamlawrence.com.

And in less than three minutes, you’ll know the answer so you can stop guessing and take some action. And as a bonus, if your job isn’t a great fit, you’ll get some resources to help you decide what to do about it. Head there now.