What is a Growth Mindset?
Your mindset effects your thoughts—-beliefs—–and actions, which will have a direct impact upon your life. Basically, you are creating the world around you and it all begins with one thought.
Growth mindset is the belief that you can improve your mindset with practice. The power is in awareness.
Research has found that the brain is created with plastic, which is called “neuroplasticity.” This is excellent news because it allows us to reformat or “retrain” the neural pathway in our brain. When you have the same repetitive thoughts over and over again, they literally create “tracks” in your brain.
The good news is that you can recreate these neural pathway, or “tracks” by choosing better thoughts. These are thinking habits that have been built over time and it will take time to rebuild new thinking patterns.
Your habits play a powerful role in your life. By changing you’re old, stale thinking habits that don’t serve you, you are creating new habits that refresh your life and renew your dating life. By thinking consciously about what kind of thoughts you are having, you are breaking bad habits and empowering yourself to make new and healthy decisions for your future.
Your thoughts can make you feel despair, or they can bring you joy and freedom. Choose wisely! This should help you to feel empowered.
What is a Scarcity Mindset?
A Scarcity Mindset focuses on lack. If you believe that your situation can’t change or if you feel powerless over your situation, then you might have a scarcity mindset. It is a feeling and belief system that focuses on what you do not have. It is easy to fall into a scarcity mindset if your dating experiences have been negative but the reality is there is always something you can do to make your situation better.
Choose Hope and Faith
You must consciously have the courage to choose hope. Although you don’t know what the future holds, without hope, you don’t have a future at all. Hope allows you to keep on living and believing that there is something better out there for you. But first, you must believe you are worthy of it, which begins with building a stronger mindset.
As Christians, we believe that Jesus died on the cross for us. We also believe that he resurrected and defeated death and evil. We cannot focus more on his death than on his resurrection. We are an Easter people and therefore we should live in a state of hope and faith.
It is stated in James 2:14 that “For as the body without the spirit is dead, so is faith without works is dead.” This implies that if you pray but you do not believe, your prayer will not be fruitful. True faith is taking steps that lead you forward and trusting God to deliver what is truly best for you.
Below are ways that will help you build a healthier and more empowered Growth Mindset.
Meditate:
Creating a meditation routine will help you live from a place of more calm and stillness. This will help you become more mindful of your thought patterns which will allow you to choose healthier thoughts and therefore create a more positive mindset.
Say affirmations:
Reflect on your negative thoughts. For example, if you have a thought such as, “I attract bad dates.” How can you challenge that? Here are a few suggestions.
“I am gaining dating experience which will lead me to the right person”
“Maybe I haven’t met the right person because God is preparing my future husband’s heart.”
How will affirmations such as these change your day, you’re week, your life? How does that hope energize your spirit and feed your soul? How does that affirmation motivate you to get out of bed and live from a place of excitement and inspiration?
Miracle Mindset based on Miracles in the Bible and Imaginary Prayer:
A miracle mindset will encourage you to focus on what God can do for you. Choose your favorite miracle from the Bible and reflect on God’s omniscient power. There are countless examples from the Bible that exemplify faith.
God is a God of miracles. Remember, God is bigger than your problems! So, focus on God, and not on your problems. When you trust in his ability to help you, He will answer your prayers. Living in faith also frees you from worry. If you truly believe that Jesus will help you, you can live more freely in the present moment and live from a place of trust.
How to practice Imaginary Prayer:
We meet new friends and we want to get to know them better. How do we do it? We share our stories.
We live in a rational, left brain world with global technology at our fingertips. Yet as human beings, our soul is still fired by color and imagination. Our minds are storehouses of images and memories and through them God works in our hearts. Praying with our imaginations can create a deeper and more personal intimacy with Jesus, Mary, the disciples and others written about in scripture. We can take the familiar stories we know and let them flow through our own imagination and see where the Lord guides it.
Using the imagination in prayer has been a treasured tradition in prayer for centuries. It prompted St. Francis of Assisi to encourage people to create nativity scenes at Christmas, to imagine the Holy Family as people like we are. Four hundred years later, St. Ignatius of Loyola used imaginative prayer as a key part of his life-transforming Spiritual Exercises.
How do we start? First we get settled in a comfortable chair and in a quiet place where we won’t be distracted. Our first gesture might be to open our hands on our lap, and to ask God to open our hearts and imaginations.
Then pick a story out of scripture. Read through it once slowly and put it down. Now we begin to imagine the scene as if we are standing right there. What is around me? Who else is there? Imagine using your senses.
Now we begin to imagine the scene we read about. Who is in it? What conversation takes place? What is the mood – tense? joyful? confused? angry?
Feel free to paint this picture in any way your imagination takes you. If we worry about historical accuracy, it can be a distraction that takes us away from prayer. This isn’t scripture – this is letting God take our imaginations and reveal to us something of the intimate life of Jesus or others. If, in our prayer, Mary pulls the toddler Jesus onto her lap to tie his shoes or zip his coat, we can let it happen that way. We don’t want to fret about the historically accurate kinds of food served at a dinner or what kind of carpenter tools Joseph might have really had in
This is an experience of prayer that lets our imaginations free themselves from anything that limits them. This is God revealing himself to us.
It helps if we imagine Jesus and his disciples as the real people they were who walked the earth. St. Ignatius imagined that the first person Jesus appeared to after the Resurrection was his mother and he encourages us to picture Jesus appearing at home to Mary, watching the joy and emotion in the scene.
Source: https://onlineministries.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/Imagination/Intro.html
Journal Writing:
Brene Brown, shame researcher and NYT bestselling author recommends writing to heal shame, or negative feelings that block you from feeling abundant. Try to write during a time when you won’t be interrupted. Try not to judge what you are writing. Say a prayer before you write. Ask Jesus to help guide your writing to inspire healing, growth, and clarity.
- ~What have I been holding on that does not serve me? What do I need to let go of? (especially when I have done all I can do)
- ~What emotion is standing in my way from feeling abundance? How can I work through that emotion?
- ~Am I feeling worthy of what I desire? Why or why not?
By choosing hope and belief over your same old negative thinking pattern, you are making a dramatic shift in your mindset which will resonate with the world and bring to life your deepest desires.
Conclusion
As you date more, rejection is likely to happen. So creating a healthy, strong, and abundant mindset will prepare you mentally for the dating process.It takes thirty days to build a new habit so be consistent with improving your thought patterns. That means diminishing thoughts that don’t serve you and consciously choosing thoughts that empower you. This will create a healthier and refreshed mind. As you continue with this habit it will become easier.
Be compassionate with yourself. It might be a while until you start to see this positive transformation take place in your life, but it all starts in your mind first. However, stay the course! This is how you will create a life and relationship that will make your dream a reality. Learning how to become aware of your thoughts is paramount as you take control of your life. Letting go of what no longer serves you and affirming yourself in the process will put your life in the right trajectory. Through your mindset and awareness, you are choosing an empowered and intentional way to live that will make all the difference in your life. Try to improve one thought at a time and see how your life changes for the better. Don’t give up!