More Mindset: The Eleven-Word Power Statement That Gives Me Control of My Mind
And I'll show you how to create your own mindset power statement.
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At the beginning of that strange time when most of humanity was locked away for the best part of a year, I was less than three months into my nomadic adventure, exploring the UK.
Abruptly I was faced with being sans abode. My parents, who are in their 80s, welcomed me into their home in Scotland for as long as I needed a place to stay. It proved to be the greatest blessing in so many ways, and also a bit of a challenge.
Home during lockdown
My folks’ house is a three-bedroom bungalow on a hillside, with wide-open views over the River Forth estuary. From the living room you can see half of the beautiful East Lothian coastline, from Edinburgh to North Berwick.
It’s a compact house. The room I sleep in is no larger than a college study-bedroom, with just enough space for a single bed, desk and chest of drawers. The developer who built it 23 years ago decided not to squander any of his profits on sound-proofing so I can hear my Dad breathing in the kitchen, on the other side of my wall. I always know exactly which point the washing machine has reached in its cycle.
After living mostly alone for twenty years, it was quite a challenge getting used to being with other people 24/7. Let’s just say a certain amount of adjustment was required.
My work as a mindset trainer involves hypnosis so we rigged up a “Call in progress” sign for my door that effectively meant “Don’t breathe in the kitchen for the next hour”. Bless my folks, I didn’t feel good about asking them to be quiet in their own home but they willingly fell in with what I needed.
I never forgot for a moment that they were giving up their space and privacy for me, but there were definitely moments when not being able to enter a room without finding someone in it – someone who, quite reasonably, might expect to have a conversation – was a strain.
It got harder
In addition to everything else going at that time, I was dealing with the end of a complex relationship. The breakage played out over a year of difficult conversations and rare, harrowing meet-ups, during which we weren’t even reading the same book, never mind finding ourselves on the same page.
Pressure was building. I had to find a way to get some much-needed time alone to process my thoughts and emotions. To feel and express what I needed to feel and express, and recalibrate a future without this person in it. And, let’s face it, my folks deserved a break from me.
Saved by the beach
I chose walking. I made a commitment to walk every day, regardless of the weather, and it became my way of looking after myself, physically, mentally and emotionally. I can certainly vouch for howling one’s grief and frustration into a 30-mile-an-hour headwind as an effective way to de-escalate emotional meltdown.
The local beach rapidly became my preferred route. On days when high tide took away this option, a hike up the hill or through a nearby gorge would do.
Leven Beach is three-and-a-half miles from my parents’ house. That’s technically further than we were supposed to travel during lockdown (“Stay at home! Save lives!”) but needs must. It’s a huge beach, nearly two miles long and 250 yards wide at low tide. Most of it is dark blonde sand, with a stretch of tumbled stones dotted with glowing pebbles of sea glass at the high tide mark.
Although part of its length skirts the busy town of Leven, the beach never feels crowded, even on the brightest of days. In more interesting weather, I often have it almost to myself.
At the other end, away from the town, I often see seal pups, parked on rocks in the shallows by their mothers, who leave them to go fishing in the cold, clear waters of the Forth. Horses gallop those sands. Herons and cormorants feed off the rocks. Once or twice I’ve seen dolphins ride the waves within sight of an oil rig or a container ship heading for the Port of Leith.
This stretch of sand, sea and sky became more than my gym; it was (and remains) my sanctuary. It also proved that regular beach-walking is a handy addition to the treatment protocol for heartbreak.
The weather in Scotland is reliably unreliable.
Although the east coast is by some order of magnitude drier and sunnier than the west, at any time of year you can find yourself dealing with a savage east wind that hurtles off the water and drills holes in your face. When it’s accompanied by belts of stinging rain and the haar – a drenching sea-fog that rolls in for days and sends the temperature plummeting – staying at home feels like the prudent option. But prudence is off the menu when you’re trying to build a habit.
The thing about setting up a new habit…
When you’re trying to form a new habit, or break an old one that’s not helping you, one of my ground-rules is “Don’t fail twice”. By this I mean that if you skip meeting your target one day, bloody made sure you’re back on it the next day. One blip is forgivable. Two or more establish a pattern that smells of failure.
I wasn’t prepared to sanction even one blip in my new walking habit so I wheeled out one of my most powerful self-leadership tools to keep me on track.
What drove me out into the wind, rain and snow, every day?
A single sentence, just eleven words long.
That statement commanded me to walk every single day for more than a year. It made (and still makes) the hairs on my body prickle and would propel me from the depths of a cosy armchair into wellies and waterproofs in thirty seconds flat. It drove me as I burned through over 2,000 miles, and 25 pounds of body fat. It wore out three pairs of wellies and got me fitter than I’d been in thirty years. It consoled me in my grief and gave me sovereignty over my at times scattered and rebellious mind.
It’s quite possibly the most powerful tool in my personal mindset armoury and I summon it when I need all of my strength and willpower.