Feeling Stuck? Here’s a Mindset Shift Inspired (for me) by an Icon
Feeling Stuck? Here’s a Mindset Shift Inspired (for me) by an Icon
If you’ve been following along with my articles, you’ll know I’m a big believer in building a personal toolkit of small but mighty tricks and hacks. Think of it as your mental “Swiss army knife” – something you can reach for whenever life throws a challenge your way. Not every tool will be the answer to every problem, but the beauty of a good toolkit is that it gives you options.
Today, I want to share one of my favourites: a simple, adaptable mindset shift that’s been helping me push through my own recent challenges.
One of the reasons for learning as many of these little hacks as possible is that the same one will not be useful for everything you face in this life. What works for me to solve problem x, may not work well for you. But each of the tricks will most likely work for a heck of a lot of people.
I believe in this life, the more you seek to learn and understand, the better you’ll be. That’s not to say that we all need to learn advanced maths or to become astrophysicists, but just that every little grain of knowledge you can pop into your noggin can help you to understand not only more about how the world works, but just as importantly how your own brain works.
I tell people all the time that a lot of the challenges we face in this world are normal. I often receive a sceptically-raised eyebrow for my trouble.
I know, I know.
Some of this stuff doesn’t feel normal, not when you’re going through it. I remember very vividly, as if it was yesterday (it definitely wasn’t), facing up to things which started to come up for me when I was a teenager, and feeling very very alone, as if no one else in the entire world had ever gone through the things I’d gone through before. I now know, with the benefit of an (allegedly) adult head on my shoulders, that this is patently not true.
In my mid twenties I started reading self-help books, consuming and devouring as much information as I could in a bid to be able to work through some of the things which had started holding me back from my childhood. And baby step by baby step, I managed to work through each of them. Some of them faded away when I learned a new technique, such as the wonderful phrase “I’ll handle it” from Dr. Susan Jeffer’s Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, and some required therapy, meditation and journalling to help me to get to the root cause of the problem.
I learned about different kinds of therapy, such as CBT and Jungian. I learned about techniques such as NLP (neurolinguistic programming), where one of the main principles is that you model best behaviour, working out how someone you admire has achieved the things you’re looking to do, and you do the same things, as much as you can…
Today’s little phrase, just easy to drop into your mind when you’re struggling as ‘I’ll handle it’, is:
What would <x> do?
Now, the name that fits in that sentence and replaces “x” for you is entirely your choice.
For me over the last few years, it’s been various people, including David Lynch, Mary Shelley and Marcus Aurelius, among others.
What you’re doing is you’re trying to refocus your mind and ask for guidance from a person who you may well not know. But you know enough about them and admire them on some level. You know about what they’ve achieved in their life, and you have a pretty good idea what they’d do if they were faced with the same task you have to tackle. You may want to achieve the same things as them, ultimately.
A couple of my oldest and dearesr friends went on a mega tour of America just recently. They went to Comic Con and then on to New Orleans, but the last stop on their holiday was Dollywood.
They brought this small (but very thoughtful!) gift back for me:
Now, if you don’t know much about Dolly Parton beyond her music, let me tell you how wonderful she truly is.
Dolly is the epitome of a philanthropist, and she’s given millions to various charities, as well having established some herself. You can find out more about that work on Wikipedia here.
She’s pulled herself up by her (fabulously glittery, sequinned I’m sure) bootstraps, from a childhood of extreme poverty and she’s made the world a better place on many, many levels — not just with her music.
As a heavily-tattooed AFAB person from Manchester (UK), I may be nothing like Dolly, but that doesn’t matter. I can still draw inspiration from her!
I’m facing some challenging personal tasks that I need to work through at the moment. For a start, I need to move house, to be closer to my family and loved ones again, and I’m only just psychologically in the right frame of mind to be able to do so after the last time I moved, 18 months ago.
I want to sell my house, so of course I need to get the ball rolling with that and then I need to pack my life up. Again. It’s not something I’m looking forward to doing, but as I’ve said many times before, I’m trying to focus on the fact I’ll be happier once I’ve done it.
So, every time I waver, when the challenge seems too big for me to tackle, I whisper to myself ‘what would Dolly do?’.
The answer is ‘she would pull up her big girl pants and get on with it, face the challenges with bravery and humour and she’d get it done.’
Yep. You’re darn tootin’ she would!
There are several ways I’ve brought this kind of mantra-based mindset change into my daily life:
Post-Its stuck to mirrors/dotted about the house where you’ll pass by and look at them several times a day
An Alexa (or other IoT-driven device) reminder/nudge
A piece of inexpensive jewellery - if you look on sites such as Etsy, you can get bracelets and other items with letters included, so for me at the moment, it’d be WWDD? A bracelet or wristband feels more useful for me, as it’s in front of me when I’m sitting at a computer, typing (so, for most of my day, pretty much every day! 🤓)
So there you have it – a simple trick to help you channel the inner grit and resilience of people you admire. The next time you face something tough, give it a try and see how it feels.
And if you enjoyed this article, subscribe to keep picking up tools like this from me to add to your mental arsenal.
Life’s full of challenges, but we don’t have to face them alone. Let’s keep growing, learning, and showing up for ourselves, one hack at a time. ❤️
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