How do you shift your mindset?

How you think about yourself, others and any issues or difficult situations that arise in your life has a huge effect on how you respond to these elements of your life.

If you have a positive mindset, it makes it much easier to find a way around any problems you come up against. On the other hand, if your mindset is rigid, self-limiting, distorted and negative, you will be your own worst enemy.

So, how do you shift your mindset?

Tapping is a great way to make changes. Part of the way it works is that tapping creates a state of calm in you, while you may think about difficulties you face. It is impossible to feel calm and anxious at the same time, so creating a state of calm even when thinking about things that would normally cause you to feel anxious disconnects these stressful triggers from your negative response. This gives you a bit of space to do things differently.

Equally, thinking about positive things while in a calm state reinforces those positive things: they start to feel even better!

And on top of all that, tapping helps you to get into a more creative mindset, what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘Flow’ (his books are absolutely excellent, if you’d like to read more on this topic: Flow, and Finding Flow, and now Creativity).

How then can you use tapping to shift your mindset?

One way is to tap on the things that are holding you back or stressing you out. For this, you use the traditional set-up and reminder approach. Something like this:

Tapping on the side of the hand: Even though I feel stressed about (name your issue) I love and accept myself.

Tapping through the points: This (name the issue) I feel so stressed… All this (name the issue).

Another way you can use tapping to shift your mindset is with the FoGI approach described in detail in the linked post.

Basically, you tap while figuring out and thinking about what you need to forgive yourself for, what you are grateful for, and what intentions you want to set (preferably for the next day to week: keep it brief and then go do it!) This helps you to release self-criticism, embrace positivity, and feel a renewed sense of meaning, purpose and joy!

If you’d like to give this a try, here is a video to guide you through the process: