Are you a rudderless boat being tossed about in life’s sea or are you on course to get what you want from life? 

The very best thing you can do to achieve your goals and change your life is to make friends with your mind so it works with you, rather than against you.

Here’s five ways to help you do just that. Five techniques to manage your mind, to get what you want in life.

Mind management Technique 1 – Vision and goal setting ​

“Do you know where you’re going to, do you like the things that life is showing you, where are you going to, do you know?” – Diana Ross

The first technique to manage your mind to get what you want in life and business is about knowing where you’re going and what you want to achieve.

It’s a bit like being in a rudderless boat if you don’t have any direction or goals.

Now if that’s how you want to live your life that’s absolutely fine, we’re not saying everybody has to have goals - but if there’s something you want to change about your life, having goals is a great way to start.

These could be long-term goals, they could be short-term but it's about getting clear about what it is you want your life to look like and having a clarity of vision so you can set your clear intentions.

It’s about thinking about what you want your life to look like after you’ve made those changes.

How do you want to feel? What are the themes you want to live your life by? What words sum up what you want life to be like for you.

Write them down.

And if don’t know what you want, what’s your purpose or aim or goals - think about what you would do if money were no object. If you had all the money in the world that you could ever possibly need, what is it you would do, how would you spend your time.

Another way of doing this is to think about what you liked doing when you were a child. Before life started crowding in on you and you got caught up with the day to day realities of earning a living and looking after a house, family, or whatever you think gets in the way of you achieving your dreams and goals.

When you know what you want to change or improve, what you want your life to look like - write it down.

Go back to the purpose behind it and make sure your goals are aligned with your values. For example, your why might be – as mine is – that you want to be able to provide for your family; to ensure we have a certain level of financial security that allows us to do the things we want to do and have the lifestyle we want.

But it’s not just about money – because the goal has to align with my values. So, for me that’s about not just having money but how that money is obtained. One of the values I try to live my life by is integrity – so it’s important my goals are aligned with integrity.

Likewise, it’s about being of value – so I want to earn my money through offering value to people, which means helping people improve their lives in some way.

If this is all sounding a bit worthy you can also have values or themes around having fun, enjoyment, health, wellbeing, love, and so on.

A little hint. When coming up with your goals is to think about if your goal is an ‘ends or a means’ goal. Is it about what you want to achieve in the end, or is your goal about the means to get there?

If you say you want to have more money - is money the goal, or is it the means to get to your goal? For most people money is the means to get to their goal, or the result of a goal – not the goal itself.

Mind Management Technique 2 - Taking stock

Goals are great but not enough on their own. This is where mind management really starts to make the difference. You need to take stock of where you are and look at what’s stopping or inhibiting you achieving your goals.

The likelihood is there are self-beliefs and negative thoughts lurking about in your subconscious working hard to keep you precisely where you are now. Nice and safe and secure, at least as far as your mind is concerned, even though you might not realise that’s where you want to be!

This technique is about identifying and exploring these limiting beliefs.

Look at your goals and listen to the reaction within you.

Wherever you have a negative feeling or negative emotional reaction when you say to yourself - this is my goal but I can’t do it because... or I’ll never do that… or it’s not realistic… there’s a limiting negative belief behind every one of those thoughts.

Your job here is to catch them out and write them down.

Once you recognise them you can deal with them. You can tell yourself - I’m just having those negative and unhelpful limiting thoughts, but they are just thoughts. They’re not a universal truth and you can kick them out.

Mind Management Technique 3 – Releasing limiting beliefs 

Let it go. And no that’s not a cue for a song – but it could well be.

The idea behind this technique is to take each of these limiting thoughts, look at it and explore it.

Ask yourself why do you think you're thinking this. Is there any justification for it? If so do something about it, but the likelihood is there won’t be, so let it go.

There are some simple techniques to help get rid of or minimise the impact of these limiting beliefs and thoughts. A quick and easy one is to take your list of your limiting thoughts and tear it up into little pieces and throw it in the bin or burn it.

Mind Management Technique 4 - Empowering Affirmations

With the fourth of our mind management techniques you replace those negative limiting thoughts with positive empowering ones.

Those limiting thoughts are like negative affirmations that you’re affirming to yourself all the time. So you want to replace these with positive empowering affirmations to help you acquire and affirm (or make firm) the behaviours, characteristics and actions required to achieve your goals and make the changes you want.

To do this, write out positive statements of how you want to be and read them repeatedly, preferable out loud, throughout the day.

Write them as if they are already true, because you are in a way tricking your non-conscious to act like this now. You are persuading your subconscious that this is now your new reality – so it will be more likely to act in line with what you want in this new reality.

Try using pre-recorded affirmations, as they can be a great help to you and a convenient way of using affirmations. Listen as often as convenient as they enter your non-conscious through repetition.

The secret is to repeat them often. It’s not surprising when you think it’s taken years for you to build up your negative affirmations and now you want to build up your positive affirmations. Repeat on a daily basis as often as you can for as many days in a row and certainly for at least a month.

Mind Management Technique 5 – Visualising 

Visualisation is a mind management technique which involves imagining the desired outcome (your goals, your changed life) over and over.

Academic studies suggest it’s best practice to also imagine or visualise the steps it takes to get there, including overcoming obstacles and challenges along the way.

Visualisation is also called mental rehearsal, especially in the field of sports psychology where it’s a hugely popular form of mind management used the world over to enhance an athlete’s physical and mental training.

It’s also used by successful people across all walks of life to pre-prepare and rehearse the success they want.

Visualisation helps get you (and your non-conscious) in the right frame of mind to do what needs to be done to achieve it.

It does this through visualising or rehearsing in your imagination or mind’s eye what you want to achieve and how to achieve it, in a way that makes it as real as possible. That means using your emotions and feelings and all your senses as you visualise, sight is an obvious one but also your hearing, sense of touch and smell and taste.

Picture all this in the present moment as if happening now rather than in some distant future time. This is another mind management trick as the non-conscious does not differentiate between what is real and what is imagined as real.

For a quick start visualisation to help you get going you can also use a guided visualisation.

The Changeability Podcast Episode 31 

Listen to episode 31 of the Changeability Podcast where we take you back to school for a little revision session – starting with a little test – but don’t worry, you don’t have to tell us your score! Hear Julian’s rendition of Let It Go and find out how to be the star of your own movie. And by the end of it you’ll be up to speed with the 5 mind management techniques we’ve talked about.

The super quick summary version

That’s 5 mind management techniques you can use today to change and improve your life.

First, get clear on what you want and set your vision and goals. Second, identify what’s getting in the way of your achieving this – which will mainly be around your limiting thoughts. Third, recognise these thoughts for what they are and let them go. Fourth, replace them with empowering position statements that affirm what you want and how you want to be. And fifth, visualise yourself with the changes you want and how you got there.

What To Do Next

It’s a great start, but that’s not the end is it – there are more ways to help your mind help you get what you want so you can live a brilliant life you love.

Join us for our Free Webclass to find out more.