Shift Your Focus and Reset Your Mindset.

It’s all about mindset.
From the moment you wake up to the moment you rest your head at night, 
everything is up to you.
Your emotions, your thoughts, your perceptions, your reactions. 
Every moment. Up to you.

Right now, I doubt there is a single human who doesn’t feel somewhat discombobulated. A general state of confusion, a vague sense of being out of sorts pervades our waking—possibly sleeping—hours. Wrapped around this soggy state, is a prickly covering of distraction. You sit at your laptop and then scroll through your phone, which leads to sorting your pencil collection, while half-watching the news. You finally surface, feeling even more confused.

The news can make us feel powerless and helpless when all we crave is control. So, what do we do? We turn our attention toward the one thing we can control: ourselves.

It’s all about mindset.

From the age of eight, I have had long hair. (Well, there was that one giddy haircut when I was in my thirties, but let’s not go there.) After decades of long-&-blonde, I recently caught myself obsessing about the length of my hair. It was all wrong. It started with a British TV show where I spotted that holy grail of beauty—the perfect hairstyle for me! And so began my dark descent into websites, magazines, Insta pix, Pinterest, you name it. I scoured the internet for women with similar haircuts. 

I formed a plan of attack that ran the gamut of folders stuffed full of photographs, to a PowerPoint presentation emailed to my hairdresser, to a full-on Zoom session with every single person I’ve ever met—questionnaires to follow. How had I even functioned while curtained in all this hair? It had to be cut. My mind grabbed on to this thought, and everywhere I looked, my doubts were confirmed. I was seeking out anything that agreed with my thinking. The world was packed with women whose hair was way above their shoulders. Throughout the day, my mind circled back to this thought.

It’s all about mindset.

Does this sound familiar? Have you found yourself obsessively focused on some teeny element of your life? Maybe your day starts with you gazing in the mirror, studying that one flaw that never bothered you before, but that now blares at you like a car alarm at 3am. Pay attention to me! Even more joyous, you may have settled on something you’ve always disliked, but lived with—those extra few pounds/kilos. You can’t pass a mirror or a window without checking in to see how you look. You get hyper-focused to the point you can almost think of nothing else.

Your emotions, your thoughts, your perceptions, your reactions.

Or maybe you have reserved this scab-picking routine for something in your house? Suddenly, you realize you cannot live another second with that lamp, that wall color, and good gracious, if someone doesn’t toss that throw pillow out the window, you may just explode.

No, you are not alone, and no, you haven’t lost your mind. What you need to do is reset your mindset.

Every moment. Up to you.

Studies show that when we are stressed by things largely outside of our control, we crave to regain control of something. And that something is usually ourselves; particularly all that is wrong with us. Our current mindset guides us to focus on the problems. 

The crazy thing is the more we wallow in these negative feelings about ourselves, and overly focus on silly problems, the more it colors all of our thinking, leading us to view everything in a negative light. Sadly, this often holds us back from taking positive action to help correct what we see as wrong with the world. We have to alter our mindset.

But what does “mindset” mean? It is the collection of thoughts and beliefs that shape how we feel and what we do. Our personal mindset determines how we perceive our reality. In these the-world-is-on-fire times, our usual mindsets have gone into hyperdrive, but we can change our mindset. We need to work on it. So how do we do that?

Well, there are lists, exercises, practices, and so on, and so on, to guide us toward a healthier mindset, but we are all exhausted, so I grasped at one simple approach that was quick and easy for me to deploy.

Shift my focus and find a new focal point. In other words, a mindset reset:  create a pause, stop, and then start afresh with a new set of thoughts.

From the moment you wake up to the moment you rest your head at night, 
everything is up to you.
Your emotions, your thoughts, your perceptions, your reactions. 

As you find yourself honing in on the thing that’s bothering you, shift your focus. Stop staring at your thighs and literally move your gaze to something you love about yourself—great eyes, lovely skin, you get what I mean. I am not saying you ignore things about yourself you would like to improve but drop the laser-focused gun. Be kind—to yourself.

I have no idea why we have this tendency to pick ourselves apart, but I am sure our lack of human contact exacerbates it, as well as our stress and worry about the world and our fellow beings. But it isn’t helping anything. So, put aside that niggling issue and shift your focus onto something positive.

And about the hair saga? Let’s just say, I’ve stepped away from the Defcon 1 alert, my finger is off the red button, and the hair will remain as is. #longhairdontcare.

It’s all about mindset.
From the moment you wake up to the moment you rest your head at night, 
everything is up to you.
Your emotions, your thoughts, your perceptions, your reactions. 
Every moment. Up to you.