“Success is 5% strategy and 95% mindset.”
– Bob Proctor

True and lasting success in career and in life is an inside job. To live your best life and be your best self, there’s important inner work that comes first: cultivating the right mindset. Nothing will power your success more than a mindset rooted in the unwavering belief that you have the ability to create anything you desire for your life. This involves awareness, focus and a commitment to making positive choices.

How can you show up mentally to serve your success? We got advice from tellent contributor Hina Khan, a registered psychotherapist and peak performance coach.

Create a vision for what you want in life

Picture your ideal life: what would it look like? How do you want to work? Would you make that career change you’ve been contemplating? Or launch the business you know is your true calling? What would time with your family and friends look like? What would that dream income be?

Develop your vision by allowing yourself the freedom to think big, without limitation and judgement. Too often, Hina says, people get caught up in the “how” of their goals and shut their potential down before giving themselves the chance to plant seeds of possibility.

Build your vision from the goals and desires that truly light you up. Then make the choice to accept – or reject – your vision.

Get emotionally involved with your goals

What will make your vision take shape is feeling into it. Imagine getting that job or having the work hours you want. Or travelling the world with the revenue your business has brought in. How do these thoughts feel in your body? Chances are, pretty great. Possibility feels expansive, energetic and exciting.

The challenge of mastering your mindset lies in tackling the doubt, fear and underlying beliefs that will inevitably creep in to threaten your vision. Scripts that may be running on a loop in your mind (I’m too old / too young / they don’t do that in my industry / I’m not enough / I’m not deserving) can erode those feel-good feels of possibility and keep you in your comfort zone. But Hina says, “we don’t get what we want. We get how we feel about what we want.” 

Challenge your internal naysayers – again and again

“We can always measure what we’re going to lose, but we can’t measure what we’re going to gain,” says Hina.

Keeping your mindset open to pursuing something it hasn’t before involves discomfort. But this is where personal growth happens. When you’re caught in a tug-of-war of possibility and fear, Hina suggests asking yourself: ‘If everything I believe is true, what do I want to believe?’

Instead of engaging with fear, keep your focus on the benefits of pursuing your new goals, and seek out real-world evidence that achieving them is possible. Responding with an openness to the possibility that your vision promises, instead of reacting from a place of doubt, is a practice that you’ll need to commit to actively.

What you focus on is what you will create

“Attitude really dictates so much about what we end up creating in our lives,” says Hina.

Your vision – and your emotional investment in it – serve as powerful drivers to keep your thoughts, feelings and daily actions in continual alignment with what you desire. “You want to have a worthy goal and live from the place of what you want” Hina says, “because you are trading your life for it.”

It takes time to grow something big, but there’s no better time than today to explore what small steps you can take toward creating the life you want.

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About Hina
Hina Khan has been a student of the mind, human behaviour, and human potential for over a decade. As a coach, registered psychotherapist (inactive) and entrepreneur, she helps people provoke meaningful and lasting change in their lives and careers.