Upgrade Your Mindset

You need to upgrade your mindset if you want to get better results. Your current mindset has brought the results you are experiencing today. If you notice that you are not growing financially and in other areas, it means you have reached the plateau. Your current mindset has brought you to its final bus stop. The driver has switched off the engine of the bus. He is not going any further. You simply have to come down from the bus and join the next bus heading towards your next destination, in this case, your financial goals.

In everyday life, we do that naturally. If you see a friend sitting pretty inside a bus going nowhere with engines off, you stop by to ask if everything is ok. It does not look normal. The driver will ask you to come down. However, when it comes to issues of life and our finances, we ride all the way to the last bus stop and stay put. We then start wondering why things seem to be stagnant and we are not progressing to the next level. Our mindset is due for an upgrade.

If you are familiar with computers, you will be familiar with operating systems. Your operating system determines what programs you can run on your computer. If you are a fan of Microsoft, you will be familiar with Windows 95, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and whatever is coming next. Each is an improvement of the one before it. It has more features, runs more programs, and has bigger capabilities. It is taking it to the next level. There are programs you can run on Windows 7 that if you try it on Windows 95, will go to sleep on you.

The financial advice or idea you can run with depends on your current mindset. People come to me for financial advice and after expending my precious time and energy, they go do something else. Their mindset could not process the advice. For a lot of people, the drive is instant gratification and the pleasure of spending. If you show them another way, they hear you in their head but their heart is somewhere else. Some make a half-hearted attempt to implement the advice, and when they get a corresponding half-hearted result, they turn back to blame you.

I have since stopped dishing out financial advice until I know where you are mentally so that I speak the language you can connect with emotionally. Financial advice is situation-specific and not one size fits all. Again, two people with identical situations and different mindsets need different solutions as readiness and commitment to action are different. I have come to realize the truism in the saying – a truth declared before its time will fall on deaf ears. There is a time for everything, including advice of the financial kind.

When it comes to upgrading your mind, I have found no better way than continuous learning – reading good books, listening to audio tapes, watching video programs, and attending seminars. Basically, you need to expose your mind to new input. Naturally, we think we know everything we need to know on any subject. Nothing if further from the truth… We also think we see the world as it is. The reality is that we see the world as we are. If you are good with the hammer, you tend to view everything as a nail. There are other valid points of view. More often than not, we do not see the complete picture. Sometimes, we are totally wrong. It is easy to fall into the trap that we are the smart ones while others are dummies.

As we upgrade our mindsets, we come to the sobering awareness that the more we learn, the more we discover our ignorance, and the more we discover that we don’t know. We become aware of how dumb and ignorant we were, while feeling cool we were on top of our game. Ignorance is deadly. What you don’t know can hurt you big time. The masses that get slaughtered in market crashes got hit by what they did not see coming at them, while the knowledgeable ones had left the market before the hurricane made landfall.

The level you operate determines what advice makes sense to you and what does not. The best solution for your situation is the one you come up with yourself after having upgraded your mindset. If you look for answers from the outside, you may end up with advice you cannot run with, and since it is not from you, you will develop a dependence on the advice giver. Anytime you run into a challenge, you will not be able to work out solutions to overcome the challenge. You will always run back to where the advice came from, and if it does not work out the way you hoped, you learn nothing, as you will gladly package the blame and post it to your adviser. Hence rather than be in control of your affairs, you depend on others. Rather than learn how to fish, you look for ready-to-eat packaged fish.

Upgrading your mindset is not something you do once and for all. It is a continuous process. It is at the core of continuous improvement, of being in the upward cycle of growth. The change can happen in a moment, when a light bulb comes up in your head, there is an explosion of light (understanding) and something makes sense all of a sudden. It is also known as the Aha! Moment. The scales drop from your eyes and you see clearly at a new level.

There is this feeling of “Now I know! Other times, the upgrade happens very slowly you hardly notice, like becoming aware your child is growing taller. You don’t catch them red-handed but after a while, you notice that their clothes start to jump. You start to notice that you think differently and begin to act differently, giving more thought to your actions. One thing you will notice as you keep upgrading is that you start to think in the long term. As you start to think in the long term, you become increasingly aware of the consequences of your short-term actions.

As you get ready to polish up your wish list for next year, remember that if your goals belong at your next level, you need to get there first before you can achieve reach goals. You have to reach out to them. That entails stepping out of your comfort zone. If you are stuck in a bus that has reached its final destination, hoping you will get to the destination that is in the route of another bus without stepping off the current bus, you are indulging in mere wishful thinking. Upgrade your mindset. Get off this bus and join the next.
Compliments of the season…