Your Mindset is the way you interpret everything that crosses your path in life, using any view from your rose-colored glasses to your glass-is-half-empty attitude which then shapes your reality. (Or, as the dictionary defines it: A fixed mental attitude or disposition that predetermines a person’s responses to and interpretations of situations.) What is becoming more and more clear is how what you think of anything and everything can then transform the effect that it has on you. It’s your choice. Our world is so much more malleable than we ever thought.

This is a crucial point: it means that Stress is not a set, unchangeable thing – fascinating studies focused on Mindset Interventions prove to us over and over again that our attitude towards something changes its’ impact on us. Literally.
In one study, students taking an entrance exam for admission to PhD programs who were told anxiety was helpful, performed overall much better than those who were left to their habitual thinking that anxiety would get in their way of performing well.
In another study, when telling randomly chosen individuals before a stressful task that they are the kind of person whose performance improves under pressure, that action improved the actual performance of those people by 33%.

Alia Crum, in one of her mindset intervention studies, served a group of volunteers a milkshake called “Indulgence: Decadence you deserve” and one week later served the same group the same exact milkshake, but now it was labeled “Sensi-Shake: guilt-free satisfaction”. Both shakes had phony nutritional labels to bring home the point of just how good or bad for you that particular shake was. The blood samples taken of the volunteers after each shake was consumed showed that the bodies reacted dramatically different – to the exact same product, depending on how the participants felt, based on what the label said.
And it doesn’t have to be an elaborate intervention to have a powerful effect. Two interventions, each lasting about 45 minutes and delivered online, raised achievement in a large and diverse group of underperforming students over an academic semester,” wrote Gregory Walton, an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford.

These serve as such good reminders of how much we really are in charge of our own experience and how we can accomplish it by learning how to Shift our Mindsets. We’re In Charge! There’s no need to wait for someone else to manipulate your mind. You can decide if stress makes you crumble or thrive.

Today’s Transformational Practice: Meditate (or simply reflect) for a couple of minutes on a mantra or word of your choice that is resistance free for you and will enhance your positive Mindset, helping you feel whole and centered. “I am in the Flow and stress is my ally” / “The innate wisdom of my body readies me in every way” / “I am at peace.”