In this episode of the Origination Point Podcast, Bill dives into the topic of mindset and how it can affect your daily life, along with some other very intriguing topics.

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I’m fortunate in my life now. I have shared on this show that I moved from Denver, where I lived for many years, to Lake Oswego, Oregon, which is outside of Portland. What a big change it was to be able to have to uproot everything and move to another place. I have to reinvent myself to figure out how to get back to Denver to see my family, kids, grandkids, and friends, and how to start my own business and reinvent myself for this new life that I have.

It is exciting and scary. It takes a lot of strength and courage. I have been thinking a lot about mindset. I’m fortunate I get to take my dog for a walk most days when I’m home, and I do a lot of thinking when I’m on these walks. I was thinking a lot about mindset and the role that our mindset plays in how we see ourselves, how we see the world, and how we interact with each other.

I think about it a lot because, in the work I do, I’m fortunate to be able to sit with varieties of people and facilitate a lot of interesting conversations about how they think, how their stereotypes were created, and how judgment affects them and connecting it to life experiences, narratives and messages they had growing up.

There is no coincidence why I do this work because I am that person that has had to constantly think about who I am, look at my behaviors, self-criticize my own thoughts, actions, and outcomes, and think about what is the impact of how I view the world of my mindset. While I’m still growing, I had made some changes from when I was younger to now. I know that because I will share with you my own story about my origination mindset, a mindset that was created by my parents and that played out over many years in my life.

Heighten Your Self-Awareness

As you are reading this, think about your own mindset. When I ask you to think about your mindset, what I’m asking you to do is to heighten your self-awareness. There is a lot of work around self-awareness in terms of using that as a tool or a skill to be able to self-critique what we are doing every second of every day. It is a conscious effort.

The work in heightening self-awareness is to be more aware and conscious of your day-to-day activities, the things you say, the way you say to them, the places you go, and the people you interact with. Those are the little things that we don’t always think about as we are going through the day, “That is Susie. That is Joe. That is the same person that I see every day.” We get into these patterns of behavior. If we are unconscious, we run the risk of having those patterns of behavior and how we treat people without knowing who they are.

Even for me growing up, most of my behavioral mindset pieces were relatively unconscious. I didn’t know and wasn’t aware of what I was doing, although if I’m honest, I will say there was a point when I realized they were having a negative impact on people. I couldn’t deny that after a while. As you think about your own mindset, think about the stories, the narratives, the things you received, and how those play out.

What I have learned is I can’t change a behavior unless I change my thinking because my brain will always overrule the behavior. Whether it is a diet, being more open, willing to give feedback and take feedback, or being able to resolve conflicts, we all have a mindset about how we view those things. The challenge of growing our consciousness is to start to critically self-reflect on the impact.

Hurt People Hurt People

When I was young, about 8 or 9 years old, my dad was angry. The ways I was treated were the ways that he was treated. I believe that he was also a hurt person. Hurt people who were unconscious hurt people. When I was about nine years old, he started beating up on me. He gave me a narrative that I don’t often share, even in public, in the way it was said to me. I’m going to do that now because it is important to understand that we all have things that we struggle with and that are challenging us in terms of our ability to be fully human.

Hurt people hurt people. Share on X

The narrative I grew up with was that I was a worthless piece of shit, I would never amount to anything, and I would never be successful. There was a point when I was about 11 or 12 years old when I got called shithead by my dad many times that I joked that was my name. I tell you that not to tell you my dad was a bad person. I respected my dad, I loved my dad, and I also knew that the way I was being treated, there was something not right with that about getting that narrative from a parent.

This went on for a few years. At thirteen years old, my mindset had shifted to where I believed I was worthless, I wouldn’t amount to anything, and I wouldn’t be successful. Those were the narratives I carried in my head. When I interacted with people, the behaviors I exhibited reflected that. I didn’t care about people. I didn’t have empathy for what they were going through. I didn’t care at that time if I’m honest. I was about thirteen years old, and I had been given that narrative over again to the point where I started to believe that that was true about me.

I started to do behaviors that almost said, “Yes, you are right. I am worthless.” I had multiple arrests for street racing and unsafe racing. I had a revolving door in the juvenile hall when I was sixteen years old. Substance abuse was a part of my world. I ditched high school and almost got kicked out of high school. I had a four car accident in front of my high school at lunchtime one day.

My behavior was completely out of control. My relationships, I manage them the way that my narrative said that I should. I had a few friends in school. The close relationships that I did have, I usually destroyed them in some way or another because I didn’t feel like I was worth it. I didn’t feel like I would amount to anything and never be successful.

When I talk about mindsets, that was my mindset for a good several years of my life. It wasn’t as hurtful to me as a young adult as it was when I was a child because I began to start to understand how much my thinking drove my behaviors. When I was young, I wasn’t successful. I didn’t try a lot of things. I didn’t branch out very much. I sure didn’t know how to hurt people and how to cut people down. I was arrogant. I blamed everybody else for what was happening in my life. I was egotistical. It got to the point where I had few people around me, and sadly, a lot of the people around me were like me. We didn’t like each other. It was quite an interesting time in my life.

That mindset piece, I can’t let go of that because what I finally realized is that if I was going to start to change my life, I had to start to change my mindset or my narrative. I had a narrative that said, “You are worthless. You will never amount anything, and you will never be successful.” There were days that I was told, “I love you.” I don’t think I ever heard, “I respect who you have become or who you are.” That was always a challenge in my relationship with my dad, where he wanted me to be something and someone who I wasn’t.

 

I don’t know what drove that for him. I know that I never met up to his standards. We didn’t talk a lot about it. When I was thirteen years old, I had a different mindset because I was tired of how I was treated. I told my dad, “If you ever touch me again, I will kill you.” At thirteen, I could have done it because I had shut down my other feelings. When I was about eleven and a half, I told myself I would never let him see me cry.

What I didn’t realize is that when I shut down that emotion of crying, I shut down all my feelings and emotions. I shut down empathy and compassion. I thought that shut down acceptance and love. I didn’t realize that. When I say I could have and not care, it is because I didn’t have empathy and compassion. I had no idea that was happening at thirteen. I was completely unconscious. My self-awareness level was about a minus five because all I cared about was myself, and I played a victim. In my mind, everyone else was wrong.

Change The Narrative

In some elements, I lived that way for about half of my life. I started to realize, “If I’m going to change my behavior, I have to change my narrative.” Rather than have that narrative about not being worthy or not amounting to anything, I had to start to change it. This is a practice that anybody can do because what I want to tell you is the skills and the stories that I’m sharing with you and the things I have learned about how to grow my self-awareness and empathy. All these things are attainable to anybody if you choose to do the work.

I was confused for a long time because I would go to training and talk to people. They would say, “Do the work.” I would say, “I would love to do the work. I don’t know what the work is.” A lot of the places and spaces I was in for a long time were spaces of somebody else telling me their experience of the world and that I should do the work and do right by them.

What I want to share with you is more about choice and free will. Take what works for you from this, and don’t take what doesn’t work. What I do want you to know is all of the things I’m sharing with you, I learned and practice every day. I will never be perfect at them. This work is about practice. It is not about perfection.

I have to be vigilant every day to stay on top of my game because when I’m not conscious, I can do things I’m unaware of and have to make right later. Being present, aware, and critical thinking are skills and tools we can grow and learn. In my experience and what I have experienced with thousands of people I have shared this work with, it is that, as human beings, there are some universalities in how we go through the process of change. What we want to do is take shortcuts.

 

I don’t want to look at how people don’t trust me, but I want to look at what a great guy I am. I don’t want to think about how I have impacted people in my personal relationships with them, but I will think about how great I am. We have to be willing to look at all aspects of who we are. This idea of daily practice is thinking about what is one thing you can do. For a mindset shift, whenever I had the thinking that I was worthless, wouldn’t be successful, or had nothing to offer, I had to change that to a different narrative. The narrative I chose is, “I can do anything that I set my mind to.”

At first, I didn’t mean to believe I can do anything I set my mind to, “Sure, you can.” Can you fly an airplane? No. Can you build a car? No. I would think these silly things and tell myself it wasn’t possible. I had to work hard every single day, every time that thought came up. “You are not worthy.” “I can do anything I set my mind to.” “You will never be successful.” “I can do anything I set my mind to.” “You are worthless.” “I can do anything I set my mind to.”

I had it written everywhere. I had little Post-Its in my bathroom and books. I didn’t have a cell phone like the ones we have now. I couldn’t put reminders of how I could accomplish anything I set my mind to. If I had a phone, I would have probably done that. My point is one of the hardest parts for me to facilitate my own change was to own what was happening and what I was feeling, which is I was given this narrative of, “I’m worthless and don’t have anything to offer.” I bought into it. I have the life I have because of my unconscious choices and how they have impacted the things that I have and the people that I love. I had to change that narrative to, “I can accomplish anything that I set my mind to.”

When I was younger, I wasn’t even aware of the level of hurt I had caused to some people. I had to own that. In some, I had to go back and apologize. Some I have never seen again. Ownership of the impact of my own behavior was a hard first step for me. It is much easier to own my impact these days because, number one, I’m more conscious of how I’m behaving, and I do my best to be kind to people. I still stereotype, judge, and have biases. It is that I’m more aware of them. I have more tools to figure out what to do with them than to be a victim, to demean somebody, or to think they are the problem.

Every day I had to say, “I can do anything I set my mind to.” It is almost every minute on some days. Some days, I would have that in my head all day long because, at first, I didn’t believe it, and I didn’t know what it meant. Did it mean to make more money? Did it mean having a better career? Did it mean to make a family or buy something? All I knew is I wanted to be able to accomplish anything I set my mind to.

Over time, I began to believe it more. I started to change my behaviors because I knew I couldn’t have this new mindset with the same destructive behaviors. As I started to look, “What is the process for achieving anything you set your mind to?” first of all, it is having a vision or an end game about what I want to accomplish. It is thinking, “How do I structure it? What are the steps I have to take? What are the systems I have to build within my brain to go from the point of having an idea with the narrative that I can accomplish anything I set my mind to and having that idea bear fruit?”

You can’t have a new mindset with the same destructive behaviors. Share on X

I had to start to change my behaviors, collaborate more with people, and learn more about the things I wanted to change. I wanted to start a business. When I was younger, I started a business. I was going to be a painting contractor. I got a van and a sign. I hired people. I put accounts in place. I got clients, and I had a business. It had no foundation to it. It made a lot of money, yet there was no structure to it.

I was fortunate that the negativity of not having a foundation didn’t play out harshly on me, although I had a lot of good lessons. I went bankrupt once and was living in the living room of my friend’s floor with a trash bag full of clothes. I had to own all of that. That was the hardest time to say, “I can accomplish anything I set my mind to.” I’m sitting on my friend’s living room floor. I have a trash bag of clothes. My house was foreclosed on. I have a truck that is falling apart. I was 25 years old. In my head, I’m going, “I can accomplish anything I set in my mind to.”

That was the time I needed that narrative the most because it was one of the lowest times I had experienced. I had to rebuild my monetary life completely over again, which meant I had to shift my mindset and my behavior once again because no matter what I thought about myself, my behavior led me to lose everything. If I’m not playing a victim, I have to own that loss and figure out what step to take next. That was quite an eye-opener, as they say.

I had to start new again and new thinking and behaviors. Do they match? How close are they to matching? My mindset, “I can accomplish anything I want,” didn’t match the behaviors and what I ended up with, which was losing everything when my vision was to create a strong business. Part of the understanding is this work never ends. This is ongoing work because as we evolve, as you evolve, you will be forever at these precipices of, which way do I go? What should I do? What is in my best interest? What is in their best interest?

A heightened sense of self-awareness and consciousness is what is needed to be able to make those decisions. The worst decisions I have made were ones that were rash, emotional, and had no basis in reality. Every one of those turned out poorly. I was trying to manipulate the whole thing by saying, “No, it is this. It is that. I got this.” It was falling apart right before my eyes. The idea of the work of deconstructing and reconstructing mindsets and narratives is ongoing. I’m still evolving, is the point. If you think you are going to get there, you might stop or accept the fact this is work until the day we die.

Creating A Mindset When In Pain

We are getting into a stream of consciousness on mindsets. I have been talking a lot about how my mindset has had to shift over the years. It may be giving you the impression that we should always have this positive mindset, and no matter what is happening to us, we should always be positive and uplifting. I want to talk a little bit about how we manage to create a mindset when we are in pain and struggling because that has been the hardest time to be able to come up with something to say, “There is something positive about this. This is how I can rethink this and create a new narrative.”

When I was thirteen years old, I was at home, and we lived in Fountain Valley, California, at the time, in Southern California. It was early in the morning, and the phone rang. The phone never rings early in the morning at our house. My bedroom is right next to the kitchen. I came out of my bedroom into the kitchen. My mom was in there screaming into the phone, “Call the police and ambulance.” Out of the other end of the phone, her boyfriend said, “It is too late. She is cold.” My sister died from one day to the next.

I tell you that story because when I talk about having difficult times trying to think of how do I reframe that into a positive mindset, it was difficult because we were close. She took good care of me. She was one of the few people in my life I trusted. I want to make sure that I don’t give you the impression that shifting my mindset made it any easier to go through the grief, hurt, and pain I felt with my sister’s passing.

Shifting my mindset meant I could start to look at it from a perspective that didn’t victimize me, blame somebody else, or add to the hurt, pain, and grieving I was going through. It was challenging because I wanted to blame God, dad, my family, and myself. I’m like, “Why haven’t I seen the signs of someone who does not care?”

It took me a long time to get over the anger mindset that I had because it was anger at everything that this senseless death was allowed to happen. Over time, after I started to do my own healing process and my grieving process and started to be more reflective, I began to shift into what is the message about relationships I can take away from this. My mindset slowly started to shift to, “How do I let someone know who I care about that I care about them?” I have to be honest to say that I love you was not always a part of our family upbringing. I don’t ever remember if I told my sister I loved her.

My mindset was very demeaning of myself because here I had a sister for many years that I can’t ever remember that I said, “I love you too.” People who talked to me when I was 16, 17, and 18, going through this process, would say, “Don’t worry. She knows you loved her.” In my head, I’m thinking, “That is ridiculous. How could she know because I never told her? How often do we make assumptions that the people we care about know it by how we treat them, even though we never verbalize it?”

As I shifted my mindset around this particular incident, it started to reshape the way that I thought about relationships. My mindset started to shift to this narrative of, “What is it about me that couldn’t say I love you? What is it about my family that didn’t have it as a part of our being and sharing? What does it tell me about the importance of relationships?”

I started to shift that narrative into, “If you care about somebody, you should let them know while they are still alive because when they are lying in a coffin, it is too late. Their spirit is gone. They can’t hear me.” I remember lines of people walking by my sister’s casket telling her all these beautiful things. I never heard or saw many of these people in our family life sharing the same beautiful things they were sharing with her in her death.

If you care about somebody, you should let them know while they are still alive. Share on X

The idea of mindset and shifting mindset has been a critical part of my growth. It has not always been easy. Sometimes it has challenged me to think not only about my own thinking. It has also challenged me to think about my own behavior. How do I start to switch that? How do I become a kinder person if I realize that relationships matter so much? How do I let my friends and family know I truly love them right now at this moment by saying and showing it on a variety of levels?

Strategies To Change Your Mindset

As you think about your own mindsets, there are a couple of strategies I want to share with you that worked for me. Number one is to start to write down all your narratives. As you go through the course of a day, every time you think something about yourself, about the world, or about an interaction that you’re having, write it down. At the end of the day, look at all the narratives. How many of them are negative? How many of them are positive? How many of them propel you to a larger version of yourself?

This is where being honest plays a role. If I’m not honest with what I see, the chances of me growing from this exercise diminish. This is a daily practice. All of our episodes are going to end with a daily practice, which enables us to be able to continue to deepen our own work and create new behaviors and mindsets that will support each other in creating sustainable change.

 

As a daily practice, take out a sheet of paper and write down the narratives, the mindsets, and the thinking you have had throughout the course of the day. At the end of each day, sit down by yourself, sit down with another person, go over them, and write down negative and positive. Think about the interaction that you had. What was the intent? The intent is, “This is what I hope will happen versus what was the impact, which is this is what happened.” If the intent doesn’t match the impact, what can you do differently? How can you rethink the situation? How can you step into it from a different perspective?

I’m going to encourage you to continue to do these practices and allow yourself to grow. Do this work outside of judgment, blame, and shame, especially self-judgment, self-blame, and self-shame. Recognize that as human beings, we are all going through processes of growth. When we start to beat ourselves up for being normal, it makes it more challenging for us to use these processes to fully grow into our humanity.

In closing, I like to offer a quote by Maya Angelou where she says, “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.” The ability to shift our mindsets is imperative for us to shift behaviors that are sustainable and that we can continue to do. I want to leave you with a couple of questions. Is there someone in your life who you love that does not know it? What would it take for you to tell that person, “I care about you, I love you?” What is your own mindset about self-love and self-care? I want to thank you again for reading. We invite your thoughts and comments. We are looking forward to our next opportunity to be together. Have a blessed day.

 

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