What is Mindset Initiation?

That is a good question.

One of the first goals to focusing your mindset is to have a clear idea of what you want. In many ways mindset initiation is about discovering simple strategies to assist you in learning about your self. When things are not working out the way you would like them to, it is useful to initiate these processes so that you can put your self back on track and re-motivate your self.

Suggestion: If you have a realisation about your self while reading this, or any other substack article, write it down. It may come in handy.

There are several reasons I chose Mindset Initiation as the banner for these articles. So many people talk about mindset, but few take the time to get down to the basics of how a mindset, or more specifically, your mindset is constructed. For some, mindset is a set of values related to a group or lifestyle, I suppose what I am talking about is super personal. These articles are targeted at your own personal mindset and its development. I am not a scientist, my thoughts on this are a combination of my personal experiences and memories, as well as from thousands of therapeutic sessions I have conducted with real people, with day to day problems and goals. My goal as a therapist is always to simplify their outcomes and to give them practical enabling tools to deal with the quotidian.

A big part of that change is mindset. I often see people who want to refine certain skills or deal with day to day situations better.

What mindset do you want to have? I don’t really think mindset is something you are born with. In my opinion, it is more a development of nurture and experience until you get the idea of what you want to be or do.

As a child, did you ever imagine being a fireman, or a nurse, an astronaut or a multi-millionaire? Whatever you thought you might like to be when you were young, is that what you became? If so, is that what you still do? My dad was a Hypnotherapist, but that didn’t really appeal to me at all at the time.

Allow me to offer a personal anecdote as a bit of background.

I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do for work until my early to mid teens. Some kids at my school knew they were joining the navy or police, doing law or being a doctor. Not me, not a clue. I had always loved taking photographs from about the age of seven. In 1967 I saw the movie Blow-up with David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave. It was as if a flashbulb had gone off in my head. Instantly I wanted to convert from taking snapshots to being a fashion photographer. Ah the folly of youth. Even though the premise of the mystery aspect of the movie is far-fetched, the glamour of being a high-fashion photographer really grabbed me. The idea of photographing beautiful people, going to interesting locations. Wow, just wow!

From that point on I used to buy every Harpers Bazaar, Vogue and any British or European high fashion magazines I could get my hands on. I would pore over the photographs, thinking about poses, angles, lighting and everything else that goes into a good commercial photograph. My mindset was obsessed and growing with this idea. I was constantly imagining the shoots I would do.

One afternoon about half way through my second last year at High School, sitting in an economics class, I realised I had absolutely no idea what the teacher was talking about. It was as if everything on the blackboard was in an alien language. I couldn’t see how this was going to help me in life. In hindsight, I can see that at least some of the information in those classes would have been useful to retain but at 17, my self just didn’t get it.

That night I nervously told my dad I wanted to leave school. He surprised me by saying, “OK you can leave school but you have to have a job first. Get a job and you can leave.” I couldn’t believe it. Things were different in those days.

A week later I was wearing my first suit, a terrible suit, heading into the big city accompanied by my Mum for my first real job interview.

I got the job!

The following Monday I was working in the advertising department of a huge department store in Sydney. Mind you, I was at the bottom of the pile. My job as a production assistant, was taking proofs of newspaper ads to the various buyers. It was great. I loved it. I got to see every aspect of how the advertising business worked. I met lots of creative and interesting people. Everything except the photography was done in-house. Layouts and design, deep-etching and retouching. All done manually by commercial artists, no computers. The photo-copiers in those days had their own room and a technician who managed them. They were the most sophisticated technology in the building, huge things, with barrels of chemicals and complex procedures.

A few months later I was offered a position as an assistant layout artist, working with the doyen of High Fashion in this establishment. I jumped at the new opportunity, this was exactly the right direction. I now had my own little cubicle. The copywriter sat next to me in hers. I was intrinsically doing the same job as before, but now it was all to do with the best women’s fashion. I did get to do the design work on some of the smaller ads, so it made me feel as if I really was involved in the creative process. This was perfect. I was often sent out on location to monitor the fashion shoots and started meeting professional photographers. The best in town. Well they were making huge money, I know that much. Some were creative and some were very ordinary. The ordinary were consistent with the quality of their work, the creatives not always.

Seeing this dreamworld almost daily only made my desire to become a professional fashion photographer more intense.

Eighteen months down the track and I was getting frustrated and stagnant. I wanted to work in photography. I started looking at job ads in the paper and surprisingly, saw one as an assistant photographer in a city studio. Not a studio that I knew. I applied enthusiastically and was offered the position out of thirty two other applicants, on the proviso that I had a drivers licence, which I didn’t. I had my learners. I had one week to have enough lessons to do my test. Thankfully, I passed the test on the Friday, so I could start the job on the following Monday. My driving instructor was great, he raced cars too, so I learnt some useful tips from him about defensive driving.

I was now working in one of the top three photographic studios in Sydney. There were three photographers in the studio and I assisted all of them at various times as well as doing most of the film processing and some printing. I mainly worked with the top fashion photographer. He was from England and had actually assisted some of the photographers in London who had been referenced in Blow-up. He had made quite a name for himself in the fashion scene here. My dreams were coming true. But as they say, be careful what you wish for. Here I was, learning and using state of the art equipment, working with the top models in Australia and from overseas. It was amazing.

About eighteen months into working here, it all went off the rails. One of the other photographers, the senior partner in the business, whose ego was much larger than his ability, asked me to assist him with one of his setups. The job was for one of our bread and butter clients, a large pharmaceutical company.

He asked me to arrange a few lights, arrange some shelves as a set to put product on and set-up the 10x8 view camera in the approximate position he wanted. Once I had done that he dismissed me. He proceeded to put the product on the shelves. There were perhaps thirty different boxes and bottles for him to place. The next morning the client arrived for the shoot and the senior partner proudly guided the client, with me in tow. As they walked into the studio, my boss said with a flourish, “I’ve set it up the way you wanted it.” The client took one look at it and said, “No, that’s not how I described it!” My boss’s immediate reaction was to say, “Oh? Well William did it.”

My jaw literally dropped wide open. The client saw my reaction and rolled his eyes. I was shellshocked. Ten days later I quit.

I was nearly nineteen and my dreams had all just evaporated. Okay, 1st world problems, but at that age, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I’d gone from having the best job ever to…

I learnt a lot from that experience. In retrospect, this event led me to a number of important life lessons and experiences. If that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have done many of the things that enabled what I know and do today.

Even though mindset isn’t a word much in use back then, it helped me to formulate much of how I live and deal with stress.

I continued taking photographs and did quite a lot of freelance work. I still take many photos and have had several successful exhibitions over the years. Most of my work these days is abstract and you can see some of it here in my articles.

Over many years of clinical work as a Hypnotherapist, I have seen many different types of mindset. Some positive, some negative and not a few in neutral.

When I speak of mindset, it is not some hip, new-age concept with no foundation or considered focus. It is much more than that. It is as much about dealing with life’s challenges as it is about setting goals. It is how you deal with everything that you do and create and everything that happens in your life that you have to come to terms with. It is how you focus on and practise your skills. It is developing the knowledge experience and enthusiasm required to achieve these goals. It is also about having tools to deal with the stresses and strains that arise when things don’t go exactly to your liking without losing sight of your longer term goals. These skills can be learnt.

The important thing about mindset is recognising your uniqueness and developing that to differentiate yourself from everyone else.

A couple of years ago, Brian Eno, the creator of ambient music and one of the most creative musicians and musical producers no-one has ever heard of, was being interviewed. The following comment is what mindset is all about.

"We underestimate innovation. Everybody in this room will form six or seven sentences today that nobody else has ever said. In the world of art, everything we do is innovation. It's impossible to do something that's exactly the same as something someone else has done!” Brian Eno

Not only that, every day, everyone on this planet will think and do something that no-one else on the planet will. That is an absolute minimum of 8 Billion unique experiences every day.

Our life experience is absolutely unique from conception onwards. No-one else could possibly have the same experience as you and ultimately that is what really differentiates each one of us and indeed challenges us all to find our own unique ways of facing and dealing with the world as we perceive it. That is important as well. How we perceive the world. We can look at all of our experiences as positive, negative or neutral. Ultimately, it is not what happens around us or to us, but how we deal with it. We invent our future every single day by the choices we make.

Mindset has a lot to do with how you differentiate your self and explore your potential. By initiating yourself to the idea of welcoming change, you open your self to new potential every day. Initiating. Beginning. The new you, today, every day.

Here is a little mind game to play with yourself. Think of a past experience where, when you look back at it, you wish you had handled things differently. Don’t pick a major life event, more something you said or did that you would rather you hadn’t. If you have read my first article, use the simple relaxation exercise I describe there. If you haven’t, now might be a good time (hint, hint).

Don't Get Stressed About Relaxing

When your body is relaxed, recall that difficult situation and knowing what you know now, imagine the younger you being able to handle the situation the way you would like to have been able to do it, if you could do it over. I call these kinds of past experiences squirm material, I don’t know about you but they make my tummy go funny. We all have them. Perhaps our emotions were running hot or experientially we just didn’t have a better way of dealing with it at the time. Don’t give your self a hard time about it, just create a better outcome in your imagination. Help your self to reprogram the negativity by using it as a positive learning experience.

More on memory and how to really learn to manage these kinds of things in a later article.

Thanks for reading.

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