A Metaphor to Explain How Your Mindset Impacts Your Behavior Habits
In her preeminent book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D. provides a simple definition of mindset.
The view you adopt for yourself [that] profoundly affects the way you lead your life.
The way you lead your life is another way of defining your behavior. Therefore, your mindset is the connection between how you think and how you behave.
A metaphor you can use to explain this connection between how you think and how you behave is your weight. Everybody has a weight, just like everybody has a mindset. Some people have a healthy weight, and some people have an unhealthy weight. Moreover, whether your weight is healthy or unhealthy is a product of your behavior habits.
As an example of this let’s use one of the foundational mindsets I write about often, task vs. ego. The task mindset focuses on the process of controlling the “controllables” in your life and deemphasizing things you can’t control. On the other hand, the ego mindset focuses on comparing oneself to others among other external factors you can’t control.
Healthy and Unhealthy Weight vs. Healthy and Unhealthy Mindset
You can think about the task mindset as the “healthy weight” and the ego mindset as the “unhealthy weight”. When it comes to your weight, your thoughts lead to your behaviors, and your behaviors dictate if you have a healthy or unhealthy weight.
If you think of food as a coping mechanism for boredom or stress, then behavior habits producing an unhealthy weight will follow. Likewise, if you think about your goals in terms of money, fame, or beauty then your behavior habits will beget the ego mindset. Furthermore, just as an unhealthy weight has negative health consequences, an unhealthy mindset such as the ego mindset has negative achievement consequences.
To conclude, changing your mindset is both just as easy and just as hard as it is to change your weight. It’s easy to gain unhealthy weight when you don’t have a plan for coping with boredom or stress eating. It’s also easy to have an unhealthy mindset when you don’t have a plan for how you deal with the emotions of having vs. being. On the flip side, once you have an unhealthy weight or mindset because of bad behavior habits, it’s hard to change. Moreover, you can only eliminate those bad behavior habits by replacing them with good new habits.