Use This Entrepreneurial Tool to Get Into an Opportunity-Optimized Mind
Let’s talk about gratitude, and getting our minds into a positive place as we start our day or as we end our day.
Most people might be familiar with the concept of Gratitude Journaling and positivity, and getting our mind into a positive state, and all of the data that’s come out of the positive psychology world over the last 20 years. But what’s really interesting to us about this practice is that if we haven’t done it in a while, we can easily forget what is feels like to be in an opportunity-optimized mind instead of a fear- or challenge-optimized mind, and that’s entirely what this practice is about.
The challenge this week is to use the simple process of Gratitude Journaling and we’d recommend you use the technique that we share in the Founders First app around Gratitude Journaling where we walk through a process of thinking about the people, the events, and the things in our life that we can be grateful for.
The research around this is really interesting because it shows that when we’re calm and positive, we make better decisions (and as entrepreneurs and busy people, we’re constantly making decisions, right?), and so if we can make one decision a little bit better, we might be able to save ourselves tons of trouble or tons of time or tons of money for going down the wrong path that we didn’t intend to be on in the first place. The data also shows that we make better long-term optimizations instead of short-term optimizations when we’re calm and positive.
Instead of doing something that maybe makes the next 10 minutes a little bit easier in our lives, we can instead maybe do something or make a decision that helps make the next 5 years of our lives as entrepreneurs and as humans a little bit easier.
The challenge this week is to use Gratitude Journaling for just 5 minutes a day. We recommend you do it as part of your morning routine, and see if you can attach it to something else. Maybe the thought of picking up your toothbrush in the morning, can that remind you that it’s time to do your gratitude journaling? Or putting your socks on, can you have a journal or some paper sitting next to the side of where you get dressed in the morning? Whatever works for you. Think about attaching it to something or even make a part of an evening routine next to your bedside stand before you’re going to bed, next to a table that you know you’re going to pass by on your way as part of your evening routine.
See if you can attach it to something, make it part of the habits in your life that you have already, it makes it easier to do. See if you can maybe do it once each day over the next week and then consider how it went and what that experience was like, if it helped your mindset in the moment, if it helped improve your day, maybe if you even made decisions a little bit differently or noticed a change in the way we were thinking about the challenges ahead of you, the opportunities ahead of you, as you’re now in this positive mindstate.
The Gratitude Journaling tool is one of many tools available in the Founders First mindstate tracking app for entrepreneurs. See all the tools and get personalized recommendations on how to best invest your time each day based on your current mindstate by trying the app free for 7 days.
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Founders First is a set of evaluation tools that will improve your business by strengthening its most critical asset: You.
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