GROW

Change your mindset, change your life - a practical guide to thinking on purpose

Jackie Beere

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781785830112
• eBook ISBN: 9781785830495
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Personal Success
• Index: Psychology

In GROW, Jackie Beere demonstrates how we can all change our mindsets, learn to learn and chose to think on purpose. Our thoughts and beliefs lead us to develop habits that can predict our success or failure. We can all choose to grow and coach our loved ones to do the same by fostering and sustaining a mindset that will keep us healthy and happy in future years. Jackie Beere believes the key to this is thinking on purpose and metacognition. Jackie shows you how you can understand yourself and others so that you can be flexible, fearless and happy.

Chapter 1

Why we need to grow

‘Once you stop learning, you may as well stop living.’

Derrick Beere1

‘We must continually remind ourselves that there is a difference between what is natural and what is actually good for us.’

Sam Harris2

GROW: Produce, mature, expand, sprout, cultivate, flourish, thrive, develop, raise, nurture

I have discovered that the most important strategy for being happy and successful in work and in life is to consciously decide to be open-minded and flexible enough to grow through learning. In this book I use the term ‘grow’ to mean developing a mindset3 (attitude, outlook, way of thinking) that will help you navigate through the trials and tribulations of life, and still maintain your desire and ability to keep learning.

Choosing to grow is learning, in the widest sense of the word. It means developing new skills and knowledge, but also finding out about yourself and how you can communicate more effectively and manage your emotions. By doing this, I suggest, you are far more likely to feel happy and contented, achieve your potential and do things you never thought possible.

Choosing to grow ensures that everything we learn makes us stronger, wiser, more emotionally intelligent, and happier, healthier members of society. What’s not to like?

If we are good at learning, we can be more capable and comfortable with change – which, in our uncertain world, seems like a no-brainer. However, it is a lifelong challenge to keep learning from your good and bad experiences and then adapt your behaviour when you need to. Too often, we end up repeating the same mistakes, or find ourselves in a spiral of unhelpful habits that holds us back. For example, you may have a habit of arriving late wherever you go. You want to get there on time, but somehow there is always a last-minute distraction, phone call, email to check, or mascara that gets smudged. You promise yourself you will change and allow yourself more time, but at the same time there is another part of you that thinks, ‘Oh well, that’s just me – I’m a “late” person – everyone knows that and understands.’ So you get later and later until, one day, you miss a plane, interview or date – one that really matters.

To change unhelpful habits and beliefs takes hard work – but doing the work becomes increasingly satisfying. To choose to work out why you are stuck and how to better move forward with the big, important stuff as well as the minutiae of life – that is part of the process of growing. It is not a once-and-for-all thing, but a lifelong challenge in which you constantly learn from your mistakes and change behaviours that are not working.

Learning applies across the board: at work, in relationships, in families – wherever we encounter frustrations and difficulties which, unattended, can gnaw away at and undermine our contentment. When all our instincts, beliefs and emotions are urging us to do what we have always done, to stick to what feels safe and familiar, then we can find ourselves trapped by those bad habits or limiting beliefs. We know from looking around us that, despite our material wealth, many of us aren’t very happy or mentally healthy – and this starts when we are young.

Figure 1.1: What are our schools teaching?

I’ve shown the snippets of newspaper headlines in Figure 1.1 many times when I’ve been training teachers and leaders, to encourage discussion about the need to develop a culture for growth in our schools and organisations. It seems obvious to me that our success is linked to our ability to continue learning and growing our social and emotional skills, so why isn’t it absolutely endemic in our society or taught in our schools? What is stopping us from fulfilling our potential? Why are so many people unhappy, mentally ill, see threats everywhere, or are just plain scared of what might happen next?

Our world seems to be full of stories of children who self-harm by cutting, using drugs or starving themselves. There are adults who drink, eat and smoke too much. There are people and groups who hate others, who maintain old enmities over decades – even centuries. It is no wonder that our view of the world can be somewhat depressing.

Yet I remain an unrelenting optimist. Despite all the evidence that suggests human beings are wretched, I believe that things will turn out well. I know that awful things are happening, but I am also familiar with the other side: the children who work tirelessly to raise money for good causes, the people who survive appalling abuse or injury and are determined to lead productive lives, and the groups who cooperate and collaborate to build their communities. Seeing the good in other people and the world is part of my habitual, unconscious outlook, so it’s not too difficult for me to wake up in the morning, pull the curtains back with a cheery smile, and feel happy about the day ahead. Most of the time this is a virtuous circle, and I get my positive outlook reflected back to me.

One of the most important challenges I ever had was given to me at a training event when I was in my early twenties. I was told to ‘Try and make sure that everyone you come into contact with walks away from you feeling a little bit happier.’ So have I learned to be an optimist through years of self-coaching? Did I have to put in the effort and the practice, or was I born with this predisposition? Is it my own default setting, programmed through my genes?

I would say that my mindset is due to a mixture of these things. Although there could be a genetic influence, this still doesn’t mean that anyone’s mindset is fixed for life. Recent research into epigenetics4 has shown that there are aspects of our genetic make-up that are only triggered given the right conditions. In other words, the possibility of change and adaptation is built in, whoever you started life as. As Oliver James says in his recent book Not in Your Genes, there is a case for nurture overcoming nature in determining how your personality develops throughout your life.5

If I didn’t believe you can change, whatever you think your default setting might be, then I wouldn’t be writing this book.

For many people, even in affluent, peaceful Western societies, times have been tough over the last few years. But, relatively speaking, life, for almost everyone, is better than it ever has been. Compared to life one hundred years ago, or to the suffering in war-torn countries, people in these societies have never had it so good. Can you remember the days before mobile phones, Facebook and the internet? Was life better or worse without social media, online shopping, and video on demand? It was certainly different. Given all these aids to better communication and connectedness, we need to ask why more and more people feel isolated, depressed, anxious and unhappy. Suicide is the biggest killer of men under fifty. Our prisons are full of people with mental health issues – in a Ministry of Justice study, 49% of female and 23% of male prisoners were assessed as suffering from anxiety and depression6 – and stress is often cited as a cause of employment difficulties. In Affluenza (2007), Oliver James says that many societies with less material wealth than ours have happier citizens, so a lack of money does not guarantee unhappiness.7 In fact, some of the wealthiest people seem distinctly unable to use their money to make themselves happy. Imagine you won the lottery. What would you care about? Preserving your fortune? Would you fret about what to spend it on? Or would you increase it by making investments? All of these issues are great opportunities for worrying, and can be seen as burdens.

So what is the secret of happiness?

As a child I was outgoing, gregarious, a little bit naughty and ‘alternative’, and also an introspective extrovert. I did crazy, loud things then spent hours thinking over what I had said or done – often regretting it. That tension between our public and private selves I will explore later, but I think this conflict is what led to my first trauma, a fear of public speaking which hit me like a hammer in my late teens. At first my main coping strategies were avoidance, denial and escape – ‘I don’t want to do it and I won’t do it’. Privately, I read up about anxiety, mind management and positive thinking. Eventually I attended courses on NLP, paid for hypnotherapy, and joined a public speaking support group. Unknowingly, I had set out on a lifelong quest to grow the mindset that would make me happy, and able to learn from my mistakes, and find out what works for me.

The secret, I found, was to choose to grow. By t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Why we need to grow
• Chapter 2: The human condition
• Chapter 3: Know yourself
• Chapter 4: The fragile powerhouse
• Chapter 5: If you believe you can, or believe you can’t, you’re right
• Chapter 6: Thinking on purpose
• Chapter 7: Growing others
• Chapter 8: Helping our children choose to grow
• Chapter 9: Tools for growth
• Top tips for thinking on purpose
• References and further reading
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright