The Power of "How?" — Hacking Your Mindset #3
Open the doors to a new realm of possibilities that otherwise will remain locked.
In our previous lesson on the Hacking Your Mindset thread, we touched on how to reframe your questions to shift the inner narrative to your advantage.
When we turn the questions we ask ourselves into open-ended questions, we put our brains into a solution-looking mode. The crazy part is that the brain won’t stop until it has a solution, thanks to the Zeigarnik effect.
One simple way to achieve this is to start our questions with “When?”, “What?”, “Where?”, or “Who?”.
“Who is already where I want to be and how could they help me get there?"
“When will I go for a run this week?”
“What is one habit I currently have that I could leverage to adopt this new behavior?”
Today I will take this method one step further and introduce you to the power of “How?”.
The Power of "How?"
It was late December last year when I got a call from my boss. He hadn’t called me in a long time, so I knew something had gone sideways. And I had a hunch.
I was in a mental state where I was radiating a lot of negative energy around my peers, and looking back I don’t fully understand why. Maybe it was stress, combined with an unhealthy dose of perfectionism and frustration with things not happening by the book. Add a little bit of burnout and pressure to deliver and things can escalate quickly.
My boss called to understand what the hack happened to me because he started to receive complaints as I started to give people a hard time. From miles away, both literally and figuratively, he could notice my negativity both in behavior and attitude.
So he did what every great coach does, and verbally slapped me to pull myself together: “Dude, you’re not in the right mindset. The question is not who is wrong or right, good or bad. The question you should be asking is how we can succeed as a team?”.
And then I clicked (well, some days later, after I completely processed the discussion) — the power of shifting our mindset stands in the questions we ask ourselves.
And sometimes it takes a difficult discussion to reach the aha moment.
“How?” turns out to be the single, maybe most powerful, word you need to shift your negative inner affirmations and convictions into the questions that set your brain in a constructive solution-seeking mode.
This is similar to the technique of “What?”, with the difference that “How?” helps you rewire your detracting affirmations to positive open-ended questions.
It helps you go from“I can’t afford this!” to asking yourself “How can I afford this?”. Thus, opening you to deeper thinking and problem-solving modes and pushing you past identifying the solutions into mapping the steps you need to take to achieve them.
We all know the trash talk we give to ourselves: “I’m not good enough!”, “I can’t do this!”, “I will never succeed!”, and the list goes on and on…
But I think it’s time to overwrite or self-sabotaging affirmations with more empowering questions:
“How can I become better and improve my skills?”
“How can I do this?”
“How can I take steps towards achieving success?”
“How can I make this work?”
—
Regards,
Alex from The Craftsman Mindset
Now It’s Your Turn
I’m curious to hear about your inner narratives:
What are the self-sabotaging affirmations you repeat to yourself most often?
How can you reframe them into empowering “How?” questions?
Please tell me in the comments or reply to this email. Your story might inspire or motivate others in the community. 💬
Next on Hacking Your Mindset
Congrats on finishing the third lesson of the Hacking Your Mindset mini-course: The Power of "How?".
We learned that by turning our self-sabotaging affirmations into empowering questions we open the doors to a new realm of possibilities that otherwise will remain locked, without even trying.
The simple, yet most powerful, way to achieve this is to ask ourselves “How?”.
You don’t want to miss the next lesson, where we will go down the rabbit hole of “Why?“.
Great tip 🙏
Great reframing Shanjitha. How questions are positive. They have hope attached to them.