How to shape your mindset

Written for Quora: How did you change your attitude towards people, yourself and life?

7 min readDec 24, 2017

There were times when I was thinking that the whole world is against me. I thought that my life is falling apart.

It wasn’t. I was.

It took a lot of pain of learning the life lessons the hard way in order to understand how to become an effective human being in this world.

I want to save your time and share my ideas on the topic with you.

Sort the things out.

The ultimate driving force for any person is a desire to be happy, an aspiration to live a joyful and meaningful life so the first step towards rewiring the whole system of your beliefs is understanding that there are things that bring you closer to your dream life and those that do not i.e. effective mindsets and poor.

It is very easy to distinguish the former from the latter.

An effective mindset opens up opportunities. It serves as a prerequisite for the actions that lead to growth and improvement of certain aspects of your life. Effective mindsets build up to comprise your personal coherent model of the world.

A limiting mindset is “closing the doors” for you. It is depriving you of the opportunities to make a change in your life. Intuitively you already know what are the things inside your head that just don’t work. Don’t keep them there, spit them out on the paper. Examine them under the microscope of your rapt attention. You need to regress these mindsets to their initial point.

Examining your mindset ask yourself these questions:

Where did I learn this knowledge?
Who do I know it from?
Is that an objective truth?

You need to dive deep and investigate whether your belief has an objective truth as the foundation and is guided by first principles of thinking or it was just thoughtlessly absorbed by you such a long time ago that you can’t even find the roots of it.

Let’s get more practical and take a look at some examples of effective and destructive mindsets:

Attitude towards people.

Mindset A:
All people are egoists. Everyone just wants to get rich and make their life better using others. Everyone wants to stab me in the back. The world is a cruel place.

You could have gotten some negative experience with people. Maybe a lot of it. But it leads to one question only:

Does this mindset create opportunities? Does it open you towards the world of possibilities? Do you feel the energy to create and be proactive thinking this way? Stop rotating the dirty laundry of old beliefs in the washing machine of your head. There are certain perspectives that will help you to reset.

Let’s take a look at the second mindset.

Mindset B:
All people are beautiful souls. Everyone I meet has something to teach me. Everybody I meet has his gifts of knowledge, skills and unique life experience that can add up value to my life. The world gives me problems in order to give me a lesson. When I learn it gets easier.

If you think about it objectively you will see that both mindsets do not reflect objective reality, but Mindset B unfolds you towards the change. You are willing to learn and to act. Your doors become open and you are ready to let something beautiful in your life.

Attitude towards yourself

Mindset A:
I am ugly and nobody likes me. I am worthless and have no skills. I don’t love myself. I don’t like myself. I don’ respect myself. I am a loser.

Same question all over.

Ok, so what?

What is changing in your life while you so thoughtfully nurse your negative self-talk? This mindset automatically assigns the status of a victim to you. It cuts off all the internal channels of energy that can be used for change. You feel weak and uninspired.

Mindset B:
I am not the most good-looking person in the world, but I am willing to work hard to get the best of what nature gifted me. I am not talented at anything in particular, but I can forge a talent of hard work.

I will work hard and challenge myself. I will earn my respect. I will start liking myself if I get the things I once thought were impossible and I wish one day I will wake up to find a Shine of Love inside my heart. I don’t need people to love me. I will become a host of Love that I will share with the world.

What will happen if you change A with B? Can you see a sudden opening for possibilities? Which mindset of these two sets the course for the personal growth?

Attitude towards life

Mindset A:
This planet is a prison. Life is hard and we are here to get our punishment. Life is pain and a struggle. We need to fight our way up climbing the ladder of success.

Mindset B:
This planet is a school. The curriculum is odd and lessons are tough but as I learn the application of my knowledge gets easier. Life is hard indeed, then isn’t that the reason not to overcomplicate things? Life is hard enough by itself, we have to help each other to get through it.

I think these 3 examples give you the idea of the main principles:

Effective mindsets create “the doors” of opportunities. Ineffective ones look like walls.
Effective mindsets open the valve of internal creative energy. Ineffective mindsets cut the energy off.
Effective mindsets lead to actions and help to gain momentum. Ineffective mindsets lead to idleness and leave you lingering in inertia.

Last but the most important, your mindset is shaping your reality. The Law of attraction states:

What you are — you attract.

Rich people become richer. Success serves as a magnet for further success. Health attracts more health. And vice versa.

If your body is your temple, then your mind is a garden. Watch carefully what you plant there and regularly root out the “weeds”.

2 questions that will change your life

There is an extremely efficient trance exercise that resolves a lot of inner pain if done right. We don’t need to fall into trance in order to get a good use of it. It uses two simple questions that you have to ask yourself a countless number of times:

What is annoying?
What is important?

That’s it.

All personal transformation can be done using these two simple questions, all you have to do is just to constantly filter your actions and establish stable movement from the former towards the latter.

Identify the things that have true importance in your life. Those things are universal for most of the people:

Family and friends
Love and relationship
Health
Creating value and making money by doing what you love
Leaving a legacy

Here are some things that annoyed me:

Losing my health and feeling like shit because of smoking and drinking
Feeling weak because of lack of physical activity. Dissatisfaction with my body.
Relationships with people who dragged me down, slowed me down on the way to my goals and didn’t help my growth.
Collecting stuff that doesn’t add up value to my life.
Wasting time on useless activities. Not being wise with my time.
Chronic depression.

I eliminated all of them. The process of purifying my life was painful. The struggle was real. Things like toxic relationships with my “friends” I had to cut off my life like a cancer tumor leaving scars of not so pleasant memories. Giving up negative habits led me to the sublimation into extremes of the healthy lifestyle I never ever regretted about.

Will the thing that you are about to do will be a step forward towards your values or a step back towards your weakness?

Will this thing contribute to your life or will it subtract the value and waste your time?

Every time you are about to do something you ask yourself these two questions. These questions will liberate you. They will set you free.

Transurfing of reality.

Do you want to become a magician?

Not the “Harry Potter” style but a real one.

Do you want to learn the art of materializing your wishes?

There is a model called Transurfing of reality. Briefly, Transurfing is the model of the world that allows you to shape your reality and materialize your wishes. It is not perfect but extremely practical. The whole model is described in the series of the books “The Transurfing of Reality” by Vadim Zeland.

If you want to learn more please read the books. If you think that you don’t have time I spent mine to summarize them. Look up my essay — 12 golden rules of the Transurfing.

Final words.

Building up your mindset is not an easy task and it shouldn’t be. Take your time and learn what beliefs make you the most efficient and importantly the happiest human being.

Doing new things — that’s what causes the change of the mind. Only real life experience leads to the internalizing of the knowledge.

Cherish the garden of your mind.
I hope this essay will fall into it as a little fruitful seed.
Water it, please.