5 Mindset Shifts to Change Your Life

It’s been a few weeks already that the new season of autumn has begun, I’ve always wondered why I feel so connected to the months of darkness, where leaves transform and fall and where our lives become even more hectic than usual. I think it’s the idea of new beginnings I find beautiful, beginnings that happen exactly at the same time as endings, it feels bittersweet to say goodbye to the summer warmth and hello to the autumnal cold. But you know that changes are happening, you can feel it.

Along with the changing of the seasons comes the changes that happen within us, we go from relaxing in the summer heat to working, or studying or getting our lives together come October. We change our mindsets to fit with what’s happening around us, if we need to work, we work and if we need to slow down, we slow down.

I’ve found that my mindset has changed a lot since the end of summer and some of the shifts I’ve adopted have changed me, not in the typical feeling-better-type-of-way, but in a way that I’ve accepted more of who I am, the darkness and the light that resides within me, and it’s been a difficult ride. It’s not easy to wake up one morning feeling plagued by sadness and low mood, and it’s even worse to decide to stare at it right in the face and say, you are welcome here, despite how afraid you may be of it consuming you.

But once you say those magic words, something inside you shifts, you are no loner afraid, in fact, you grow and become the bigger person. It’s not longer controlling you, you control it.

5 Mindset Shifts to Change your Life

Be gentle with yourself – so often us humans are busy in our lives, we are running from one problem to the next, frantically searching for solutions, not stopping to realise we’ve missed our lives and they’ve passed us by. We tend to live in default because that’s what everyone else does, and who are we to criticise everyone else? But there is another way to live that means less worrying, less running and more living, living intentionally and being aware of the present moment, and that is to be gentle with yourself. Treat yourself like you would a best friend, or a partner, understand that solutions don’t have to be found the moment a problem arises, give yourself time to live, to love and breathe.

You can do anything, be anything and succeed at anything, if you are your most authentic self – authenticity is a difficult thing to come by, especially in the era of the internet, fake news and a bunch of editing software. We can give ourselves our dream bodies, modify pictures of our dream holidays and showcase them to the world, waiting for the likes and comments to drop in. But soon enough, we’ll get tired of our facade and be left feeling empty inside, and that’s where being authentic comes in, without it life becomes shallow and meaningless and we can never succeed all because we tried to be something we’re not.

Self-care is not a waste of time – we’re currently in a spiritual revolution, the way we see the world and ourselves is slowly, but surely, changing, and that means we are becoming more aware of ourselves. But what does it mean to be aware? Well, it can mean lots if things, it can mean understanding your behaviours, or your thoughts and opinions and how they affect others. Yet the aspect we most often forget is ourselves, how do our thoughts, behaviours and opinions affect us? We rarely stop and think about ourselves in a world that’s constantly updating itself, but we need to. Else we’ll give and give so much away and be left with nothing. Self-care doesn’t mean to be left with nothing, it means to be so full of love and light that we leave some for ourselves, and with that, we grow.

Accept the failures – it’s all well and good to talk about self-love and being gentle, but true power comes from accepting who we are to begin with, we’re all but human, programmed to chase perfection, to embody it through our lifestyles, our habits, our routines, our partners, children and even careers, to the point where we shun imperfection as if it were a disease. To be less than, that’s what we’ve defined imperfection as, but we’re not a thing, or tools or simple objects, we’re an array of complexity, an entire universe resides within us, and with everything beautiful there is a failure. But a failure should not equate to imperfection, instead, it should be equal to learning and growing into the best versions of ourselves from everything that ever went wrong.

Spend time doing nothing – as a chronically busy person doing nothing seems like an awful thing to do, why do nothing if you could be doing something? A lot can come from doing nothing, sitting there on a chair, or a sofa, even on the ground and doing nothing forces you to do something that we all want to run away from. And that is it forces you to spend time with yourself, through nothingness comes everything else, I learnt to build a relationship with myself while doing nothing, I understood my emotions and took care of them while doing nothing, I combated my anxious thoughts and helped them have a voice before letting them go instead of pushing them away further into the depths of my mind. From stillness, you can find peace.

These are all the shifts that have made profound impacts on my life, helping me to bounce back from whenever my life felt as if it were falling apart.

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