How to Overcome Common Mindset Traps

Some of the biggest traps in self-development are mindset traps, usually because they’re invisible to us. We get ourselves into a mindset box but can’t see the walls.

What if the mindset box you’re in doesn’t contain any solutions to your biggest problems? What if those answers exist only outside the box?

Recognizing Mindset Traps

A common symptom of this trap is when you think you’ve tried just about everything and still aren’t getting results in a particular area. This is often true of financial, career, relationship, and health challenges.

What you’ve really done is tried many solutions that are accessible within the same mindset box. None of them have worked for you because the mindset box itself is the problem.

For instance, one mindset box is the self-absorption box. When you’re in this box, you frame your problems self-referentially, as if the whole world revolves around you.

While that can be an empowering frame for some types of problems, it’s especially weak for overcoming financial and relationship challenges. Consequently, you’ll often find self-absorbed people struggling with their finances and relationships. And they’re usually blind to how much the self-absorption mindset is limiting them.

Would you want to be in a relationship with someone who’s highly self-absorbed and has a hard time considering other people’s perspectives? Would you want to do business with such a person? When you look at this mindset box from the outside, its limitations become apparent, but when you’re inside the box, you probably won’t realize that the mindset itself is the problem.

This is a key point to understand. You’re in your own mindset box right now, and it’s limiting you.

Moreover, you can’t even see how it’s limiting you. What you can see, however, is your frustrating lack of results in a particular area.

Consider some area of your life that stubbornly refuses to progress towards greater results, no matter how much you work on it.

Now ask yourself this:

How could your own mindset box be preventing you from making progress?

Ask yourself what other mindsets people use to get results in this area. Consider how someone with a different mindset might approach this problem.

Most importantly, test different behaviors that conflict or disagree with your current mindset. Play with them by taking actions that you’d only take if you adopted an opposing mindset. You don’t have to agree with a mindset to test its behaviors.

New behaviors can generate new results for you, even if you still vehemently disagree with the mindset behind that behavior.

Which behaviors have you rejected because they don’t agree with your current mindset box? Try some of those behaviors, and see where they lead. This is how you can start exploring beyond your mindset box.

A key limiting belief to overcome here is that you can only test actions and behaviors that align with your current mindset box. That isn’t true at all.

You’re free to test behaviors that conflict with your mindset. Your ability to take action isn’t beholden to obey any particular mindset. Behaviors stem from thoughts, and mindsets stem from thoughts, and those thoughts needn’t agree with each other. Your brain is plenty big enough to hold space for opposing thoughts.

So be deliberately disagreeable with the mindset that’s generating behaviors that aren’t getting results for you. Be disobedient. Be willing to explore in direct violation of that mindset.

New behaviors will crack your old mindsets that didn’t work, eventually leading you to new mindsets that align with the new behavior. And now you’re outside of the old box, and your new mindset will generate still more behaviors, and some of those behaviors will help you get better results.

Quite often you won’t figure out the new mindset though till you explore the behaviors that lead you to it.

So it’s not always true that your first behavioral exploration outside your old mindset will create breakthrough results, but by cracking the old mindset, you’ll gain access to even more behaviors.

You’ll expand the possibility space by tearing down the old walls.

This gives you a much better chance of finding and adopting behaviors that generate better results than your old mindset box ever could.

Probe the limitations of your current mindset. Look for behaviors that your current mindset says you can’t possibly do. Then explore those behaviors anyway.

Smash the walls of your old mindset box, and you’ll surely discover more empowering mindsets and behaviors. And don’t stop. Keep smashing!

The best part is that it’s actually fun to do this kind of smashing, once you get used to it. Sometimes it’s fun just to see other people’s reactions. Sometimes it’s exciting thinking about how different life will be for a while.

I challenge you to violate a mindset box that limits you. Commit yourself to a course of action that the old mindset box tells you is out of bounds. If the old mindset isn’t generating the results you want anyway, throw that back in its face when it objects. Don’t blame yourself for the lack of results. Blame your old mindset.

When you do this often enough, you’ll start to trust the process more. I know it’s scary the first few times, but that fear is just one more mindset box to blow up. So many awesome results in life can be found on the other side of fear… the other side of worry… the other side of playing small.

(Originally published on StevePavlina.com)