How to Manage Your Career

The Power of Mindset in Fostering Success

Kelly Swingler

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781947098008
• eBook ISBN:
  9781947098015
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

If you are looking to move to the next level of your career then this book is for you. The author has written an easy-to-understand, easy-to-digest book about mindset that includes the neuroscience about why we think and feel the way we do, hints and tips on how to take control of and grow your own career, as well as case studies, hints, tips, and tools to help you manage your career through the power of mindset to help you foster success. Readers will learn what mindset is, and discover how to gain a different perspective into everyday workplace and life occurances and how just some simple yet effective mindset shifts can make the difference between stagnation and growth. The author has been working with mindset for years and her techniques and insights helped catapult her own career and is now running one of the leading HR Consultancies in the UK, with an emphasis on doing things differently. This book is dedicated to all those who want to master their mindset

PART I

An Introduction to Mindset

How the Brain Works and Why We Think and Feel the Way We Do

Before we go into some of the specifics about mindset and how by changing your mindset you can foster a career for success, let’s start with a bit more of the science behind some of this.

Let’s start by understanding how the brain works. How we create feelings of doubt, fear, stress, anxiety, lack of confidence, and phobic responses that can hold us back from taking the next step in our career progression. How the interference comes and goes and what we can do about it to ensure we create a mindset for career success.

If we imagine our brain in the shape of a rugby ball, the very tip at the front of the ball is called the prefrontal cortex—this is the bit you know as you.

It is your conscious part. The part that interacts with the world. The part we are using to be aware of our interactions together. At the moment it is attached to a vast intellectual resource, the intellectual mind (the top part of the ball). This part we don’t share with other animals.

Now, when we operate from the intellectual part of the brain we generally get things right in life. It will always come up with answers based on a proper assessment of the situation and is generally very positive.

There is another part of the brain. This part is the original, primitive part (the bottom of the ball). The central and influential part of this brain is the amygdala. This is generally referred to as the fight/flight/depression area of the brain and it is associated with two other very primitive parts.

The hippocampus, which holds all our primitive and sometimes inappropriate behavioral experiences and patterns, and the hypothalamus, which regulates chemical responses in the body and mind.

So, let us imagine that when you leave here today you run into a polar bear. What would happen?

Your anxiety would go up. You would lose intellectual control and move from the top part of the brain (the intellectual brain) to the bottom part of the brain (the primitive emotional brain), go “sweaty,” increase the heartbeat, churn the stomach, and you would be off like a shot.

In the circumstances this response would be entirely appropriate and you would be pleased.

Unfortunately, it is the same in life. When our anxiety goes up, and it can be a gradual process, we lose intellectual control and to a greater or lesser extent the primitive mind takes over, and this mind always operates within the primitive parameters of depression, anxiety, and anger or a combination of all three.

If our primitive mind thinks that, for one reason or another, our life is in some sort of crisis or emergency, it will step in generally to help.

Depression, anxiety, and anger are all primitive opt-out clauses.

When the caveman looked out of the cave and there was snow or ice or danger and he couldn’t go out to hunt, he pulled the rug over his head and didn’t act until the situation changed. We have adapted this to all the modern-day symptoms of depression, anxiety, stress, and so on.

If we were in the jungle in those days I doubt very much if we would be too far away from our panic button at any given time.

And anger is merely a primitive way of increasing our strength to defend ourselves against wild animals and other wild tribesman, and in many cases it is this increase in anxiety that creates our thoughts of fear, stress, self-doubt, or phobias.

But there is more.

The primitive mind is a negative mind. It will always see things from the worst possible perspective. If you think about it, it has to—for your self-preservation. When you run into the polar bear the primitive mind won’t say, “Ah! It has probably eaten.” No; quite rightly it will say, “It will snaffle you.”

This response is great when we run into polar bears but not so good when the bank statement arrives or we are facing redundancy, or you are going for a promotion or we’ve had an argument, and so on.

It is an obsessional mind. If you did have a polar bear in the back garden you would be reminded of it constantly. You would keep checking.

It is a vigilant mind. If the perception is that danger is all around, then, it is wise to stay on red alert.

And, because the primitive brain is not an intellect, it can’t be innovative. It has to refer to previous patterns of behavior. If what we did yesterday ensured our survival, then, we are encouraged to do it again.

So how do we create this anxiety that causes us to move from the intellectual, sensible part of the brain to the angry, anxious, and depressed part?

Well, anxiety is caused by negative thinking.

It is not the events in one’s lives that necessarily cause the perception of crisis. No; if that were so, everyone at university would be suffering from panic attacks and we know that is not the case. So it must be our thought patterns surrounding the events of our life.

(We will touch on this more later in our case study about Jen and Sally toward the end of the book.)

Every negative thought we have is converted into anxiety. We can create anxiety by negatively forecasting the future, big things; “we will never be able to afford that,” “I’ll never find another girlfriend,” “I’ll never have a baby,” and so on. It can be small things; that meeting.

Here we should remember that the mind can’t tell the difference between imagination and reality.

Intellectually, you know the meeting is going to go OK; they generally do, but being you, you start thinking about things going wrong.

You think about it 50 times?

The actual meeting goes quite well, but you have attended 51 meetings and 50 have been disasters.

We can negatively introspect about the past.

Now, within the primitive mind there’s a library of all the patterns of thought and patterns of behavior that help us to survive.

Some of them are instinctive, but a baby doesn’t know where it’s going to be born—the Antarctic, or the jungle, for example.

So it needs to be able to learn automatic patterns of thought and behavior based on its environment.

So a three-year-old primitive man faced with a bear for the first time has to be able to learn that that bear isn’t a nice and big fluffy to play with; it has to learn that that bear is going to eat the three-year-old primitive man unless it gets the hell out of there.

And it learns that because mum is screaming, “BEAR!!” The three-year-old primitive man picks up the stress from mum, focuses on the bear, and forms that pattern in the primitive mind that says “bears are dangerous.”

So the next time he’s out in the forest he’s keeping a lookout for bears. If he spots one, the primitive mind refers to the pattern that says bears are dangerous and gets him the hell out of there with the fight-or-flight response.

This releases adrenaline and cortisol into the bloodstream, which increases heart rate and breathing rate and blood pressure to get oxygen to his muscles that enable him to escape as quickly as possible.

But sometimes the subconscious gets it wrong.

You can imagine Daisy, aged one, playing with a spider on the carpet when mum walks in—who’s always been terrified of spiders. Mum screams because Daisy’s eating the damn thing by this stage and Daisy forms that pattern that says “spiders are dangerous.” Meanwhile during these potentially dangerous situations, the logical rational mind gets blocked out.

Partly because the subconscious is trying to protect those patterns that it thinks are important for survival, and partly because logic is just too slow. If you meet a bear the last thing you want is to rationally analyze what kind of a bear it is, whether it’s dangerous, whether it’s hungry, or whether you should freeze or run like hell.

This is why, while Daisy, 20 years down the line, logically and rationally knows that spiders aren’t dangerous in this country—that doesn’t stop her primitive mind not letting her in the same room as a spider.

So here’s this distinction between what she logically and rationally knows to be the case and the behavior that the subconscious drives.

Now, every negative thought that we have is accumulated and stored. We say it is stored in a stress bucket.

Thankfully, we do have a method for emptying our buc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I An Introduction to Mindset
• Part II At Work Mindset
• Part III Out of Work Mindset
• Part IV Case Studies/Stories
• Part V Mindset Tips and Tools
• About the Author
• Index
• Backcover