Mia Hamm, the woman frequently referred to as the greatest female soccer player of all time, is often asked what the most important thing is for a soccer player to have. Her response? “Mental toughness.” It’s true for elite soccer players and it’s true of life.

Having the right mindset is essential to any endeavor. What is mindset? It is the ideas and attitudes by which an individual approaches a situation. [Dictionary.com] Your mindset describes your particular inclination toward a way of thinking and behaving.  It has the power to govern how you act, how you feel, the goals you set for yourself, your ability to change, the risks you are willing to take, how you treat others, and so much more.

One significant example of the power of having the right mindset was documented in a 1987 research article entitled “Mind-Set Matters: Exercise and the Placebo Effect," by Harvard professors Alia J. Crum and Ellen J. Langer. The article was so popular that it was included in several books, including the highly successful Switch, written by Dan and Chip Heath in 2010.

In the article, the professors described observations they made during a study of the placebo effect in a group of hotel maids. The maids were accustomed to cleaning an average of 15 rooms each per day, a job that demanded hard physical labor. Even so, the maids didn’t view their daily efforts as exercise; they were just doing their jobs. The researchers divided the maids into two groups, revealing to one of the groups that the work they performed each day was actually sufficient exercise to satisfy the Surgeon General’s definition of an active lifestyle. They withheld this information from the second group, allowing them to carry on with work as usual.

The revelation was transformative. Once the maids learned that the tasks they were doing each day—vacuuming, pushing heavy carts, making beds, and scrubbing tubs—were cheap furosemide actually burning calories, something changed in them. When the researchers returned a month later to collect results, they were surprised to see real physiological changes in the informed maids. There was a decrease in their systolic blood pressure, weight, and waist-to-hip ratio, as well as a 10 percent drop in blood pressure. They were in fact fitter than the other group of maids.

The researchers didn’t change the maids’ behavior; all they did was reveal the facts about what they were already doing. But in doing so, they changed the maids’ mindsets. This was enough to affect real physiological changes in their bodies and improve their fitness level.
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The power of a good mindset is apparent in business as well. In “Put Your Mindset to Work,” an article published in Psychology Today by Paul G. Stoltz, Ph.D., Stoltz reveals his findings from surveying thousands of top employers on the value of mindset over skills. When asked which they preferred in potential employees, the desired mindset or the perfect skills and qualifications, 98% of the surveyed employers said that they preferred mindset to skill set. The results of Stoltz’s survey clearly prove that mindset is an advantage over qualifications.

I spend a lot of time trying to be aware of my own mindset and making sure it’s a good one. I’ve learned that the key to a good mindset is focusing on the positive instead of the negative. A negative attitude doesn’t help you or anyone around you; it can be infectious and can poison an environment. Even though having a positive mindset may not get you everything you want, a negative mindset will only serve to hold you back.

So if you’re looking to make changes in your life, start with your mindset. In the words of Dr. Steve Maraboli, “Once your mindset changes, everything on the outside will change along with it.” [Goodreads]

 

Skillfully edited by Tara May

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