How to Have a Success Mindset

Strengthen the 3 Traits Associated with Success

There are 3 mental traits common to successful people. I went into them in more detail in a recent LinkedIn article. Many of the comments asked how to develop these traits if you don’t already have them.

That’s what this newsletter will address.

The three mental traits common to successful people all start with the letter A. They are Attribution, Always/Never, and Ability.

Attribution - Do you attribute success or failure internally or externally?

Always/Never - Do you avoid the always/never trap?

Ability - Do you think you can increase your ability, or that it’s fixed?

Successful people attribute their success to themselves, and their failures to external events. They understand that every situation is different, even if it resembles previous situations. And they have a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset.

So, what do you do if you don’t have these successful mental traits? You can fix them.

If you follow the work of Jocko Willink, you may be familiar with his prescription for success: Take responsibility for everything.

That looks like it flies in the face of the mental attribution I described. After all, how can success be internally attributed, and failure externally attributed, if I’m supposed to be responsible for everything? If I’m responsible, isn’t failure my fault?

That’s not what I mean by attribution. I’m not trying to explain who gets the credit or who gets the blame.

Instead, an internal attribution says that success or failure comes from something intrinsic about you. You succeeded because you’re lucky, or a hard worker, or a great networker. You failed because you’re unlucky, or lazy, or nobody likes you.

An external attribution says that success or failure is circumstantial. You hit the lottery, were in the right place at the right time, or got a favor from a friend. If things did not turn out well, it was because you had an unanticipated expense, were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or got screwed over by someone else.

The way to fix your attribution problem, is to take more responsibility.

It is your responsibility to try to account for all of the variables that could go wrong. Your responsibility to put plans in place to deal with them. Your responsibility to build enough flexibility into your schedule that you will be able to adapt and adjust when something unexpected goes wrong.

You will know, on a deep and unshakable level, that your success is because you took responsibility for it. It is an internal attribution. And if you do happen to fail, because something truly unexpected happened—for example, the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns and supply chain failures—you know it’s a fluke of circumstances.

The trick to getting rid of the always/never thought process is learning to see the differences between similar situations.

My favorite way of doing this is with lists.

Draw a big line down the middle of a sheet of paper. On one side, write the current situation. On the other side, a previous situation that was very similar to this, and that had an outcome you didn’t want.

You can tell you picked the right previous situation when looking at it makes you think your current situation will turn out the same way. So why even bother trying? (Or whatever defeatist thought your always/never judgments provoke.)

Then, make a list of at least 10 differences between the two situations. They could be differences in the people involved, the maturity and experience of the same people, level of support, level of preparation, or anything else you can think of.

Now, here’s the crucial part. Next to each item under the previous situation, determine how much of an impact that item had on its success/failure. “Lack of management support” might have had a huge impact. “Occurred in Autumn” probably didn’t have much impact, unless you were impacted by businesses getting ready for the holidays.

If any of the differences, even just one, was something that had a high impact, that is enough to prove to you that this situation is significantly different from that previous situation. Therefore, it’s possible it will have a different outcome.

Even small differences, if there are enough of them, can show you that this situation is not like the previous situation.

But if all this is still not enough to convince you, create another list. This time, pick a previous situation that had the outcome you desired. And find 10 similarities between your current situation and that previous situation.

You might think that changing your mindset from fixed (you’re dealt a hand of abilities when you’re born, and that’s all you get) to growth (you can learn and improve abilities) might be the most challenging trait to fix.

The good news is, because it’s also incredibly common, there is a lot of help to make this change.

The two key methods of changing your mindset are embracing failure and the word “yet”.

Think of how a baby learns to walk. It doesn’t fall down and think, “That’s it. I just don’t have this ‘walking’ ability. I’ll have to crawl the rest of my life.”

Falling down is part of the process of learning to walk.

Don’t look at early failures as a flaw within yourself, or something to be embarrassed about. Instead, look at it as part of the process. Expect that there will be some failures and missteps along the way. As long as you can recover from them, they’re just learning experiences.

Some people struggle with negative self-talk, which repeats a loop of “You can’t do this.” This is part of a fixed mindset, because it illustrates the belief that if you can’t do something now, you’ll never be able to do it. The way out of this is simple. Just add the word “yet” to the end of it. “You can’t do this, yet.”

Changing your Mindset for Success

If you don’t currently have the AAA mental beliefs associated with success, here’s the list of ways to change them.

1. Take more responsibility. This changes your attribution for success to an internal one, and your attribution for failure to an external one.

2. Make lists of differences. This shows you that past failure is not a prediction of future failure.

3. Make lists of similarities. This shows you that past success can predict future success.

4. Embrace failure as part of the process. Expect setbacks and learn from them, don’t avoid them or feel embarrassed about them.

5. Add the word “yet”. Instead of thinking “I can’t do this” think “I can’t do this, yet”.

Do all of these, and you, too, will be a successful person.

Top 3 Blocks Dissolved This Week

1. Removed “my feelings don’t matter”

2. Removed “journaling is a waste of time” 

3. Removed “I can’t trust myself to do things correctly”

This week was the Beta Launch of my Vision to Reality™️ program. The participants worked with me one-on-one on their blocks to success. They also listened to a guided meditation (some listened to it multiple times!) that helped to dissolve negative beliefs they may have had about their ability to journal “correctly” or the value of journaling.

Usually, these inspirational words come from extremely famous people. Today’s quote comes from someone much less well known, although very popular within his circle. Geoffrey “Jeff” Ocaya is a Ugandan YouTuber and author of “The Passion Booklet”, describing how he found success after a disastrous business failure.

Ocaya’s distinction between loss and failure is very similar to what I was describing in the lead article about mental traits for success. Accepting that you have lost lets you: take more responsibility, determine that past failures do not indicate future failures, and admit that you can’t do something “yet”.

Accepting failure, on the other hand, attributes the failure to you, personally, and the flaws in your own makeup. It reinforces that you “always” fail and “never” succeed. And it sets an upper limit on your ability forever.

Do all that, and he’s right. It is over for you. Instead, develop the mental traits of success, and make up for that loss with future wins.

To your success!

Jennifer Dunne, Caribbean Compassion Coaching