Just like brushing your teeth every morning and night, just like going to work and going home, just like bathing, motivation is an everyday process.
In the morning, noon, and night, you need to set aside some time to inspire yourself. But what if you feel like you’re not a winner? What happens next?
Today, we’re going to teach you how to have a winner mindset even when you’re feeling down.
Think and Grow Rich
by Napoleon Hill
⏱ 15 minutes reading time
🎧 Audio version available
Recover, Recharge, and Reload
Right now, you may not be feeling much like a winner. But you know what?
After they experience failure, mistakes, loss, and wins, every person in the world needs some time to recover. It’s okay to indulge in some time for yourself. Use this time to change your strategies, adjust your performance, and learn from what went wrong.
It’s important to stress that this is not the time to criticize yourself heavily and beat yourself up over things. This time is to recharge and reload with stronger, more powerful, and more enduring batteries.
Focus on the Act of Winning, Not Winners
Looking at other people’s wild success is a sure way to feel like the opposite of a winner. To escape this relentless cycle of feeling down whenever we compare ourselves to others, we need to stop focusing on winners and start focusing on the act of winning.
Many people lose because they have spent too much time watching and envying other people’s success. What separates winners and loser is that the former focus on themselves and achieving their dreams in life. They win because they’re focused on the outcome.
If your failures are making you feel overwhelmed, keep your eyes on the finish line, the end goal. Let other people do what they want to do. What matters is you. Once you start putting in the work, at any cost, you start becoming unstoppable. People will be looking at you for inspiration.
Focus on Your Goals
Day or night, rain or shine, having a clear goal in mind will direct you to the right path. A clear goal makes for objectives to be achieved and a plan to follow; no matter how many bumps and obstacles you stumble upon in the road, you’ll still feel like you have a meaningful purpose.
But what should you do if even that goal feels too daunting to pursue? Start creating momentum using small steps.
According to J.C. Larreche, author of The Momentum Effect: How to Ignite Exceptional Growth, “Momentum leaders are not lucky — they are smart. They have discovered the source of momentum and, with it, the beginnings of a smarter way to exceptional growth. Managers often talk about ‘riding the wave.’ Momentum leaders aren’t that passive. They live by this motto: First, build your wave, then ride it.”
Those big goals that you feel like you can’t get a handle on them to start feeling a lot more manageable when you divide them into baby steps. It won’t always be exciting. And you may now always see instantaneous results. But whenever there’s even the smallest win, give yourself credit. You’re gaining momentum towards achieving your goals.
Trust Your Vision
Do you know what every winner has in common? They have a vision, and even when they’re not feeling up to it, they stay true to that vision. Even if it ends up entirely different from how it started, what matters is that you have an unshakeable trust that your ideas work, that they matter.
Take Barbara Corcoran, real estate mogul, and Shark Tank investor. She believes that the single most effective way to maintain this unshakeable trust is to stay optimistic no matter what.
According to her,
“Everyone has to find their own stroke, but the commonality that underlies all winning mentalities is the optimism that there is gold at the end of the rainbow. You have to stay with it and truly believe in the prize and reinforce that belief all along the way.”
Take a look at her past. In high school, Corcoran was a straight D student. By the time she was 23 years old, she’d lost and quit over 20 different jobs. How was she able to pick herself up and become a shark? She maintained a vision and kept being optimistic.
She believed in her real estate vision. She ended up borrowing $1,000 from her boyfriend and opening an office. Where is she now? She has a net worth of over $80 million. Corcoran Group sells billions of dollars of luxury real estate throughout Manhattan, the Hamptons, Brooklyn, and South Florida.
According to former WNBA star turned entrepreneur Swin Cash, a winning mindset includes “mental toughness” and “emotional resilience.”
This is the resilience that will get you through anything. People with a winning mindset always have faith in their vision. They know that nothing great or worth having comes easy.
That self-doubt, all those negative emotions? That’s normal. That’s how you know that you’re on your way to winning at this.
Winners are permanently confident in their strengths and not their weaknesses. And while they acknowledge failures, they don’t victimize themselves to the point that they give up.
Be Patient
Sometimes, it comes down to having patience. Things are hard right now. And life may seem too difficult, but you can be sure that not a single person in history was an overnight success. They became winners because of hard work and patience.
They didn’t stumble upon success and called themselves one day. You need patience because you know that while things take time to work out, your patience will be rewarded.
This little bump? You’ll cross it. This failure? You’ll get over it and learn from it.
Count Your Blessings
A sure way to start feeling like a winner? Count your blessings.
When we’re feeling down, we often ignore the good things that we do have. In this day and age, especially now, the world is always pushing us into striving for more and perfecting things to a nearly unreachable level.
Once you start looking back and appreciating what you already have, you’ll find an entirely new, more positive world opening up right in front of you.
This powerful thing to do is a real eye-opener, and it’s dramatically effective. Once you practice it every day, your mindset will change towards gratefulness.
Stop paying that much attention to negative situations, small inconveniences, and what you don’t have. Instead, focus on the good and wonderful things that have already happened. To add to that, to start thinking like a winner, start thinking about all the lessons you learned from all of those situations and encounters.
Every night, right before you go to sleep, think or write down three to five things that occurred today that you’re happy about and grateful for. They don’t have to be life-changing events. It can be anything from a delicious meal to receiving positive feedback from your boss.
Next time you’re feeling unhappy, this technique will help you remember the small joys of life.
Change Your Environment
Instead of sitting alone, feeling sorry, wallowing in misery, self-pity, or just plainly looking back at the past while going through the motions of feeling depressed then getting worried about it, how about changing your environment.
That’s one of the first steps towards changing your mindset. You can’t possibly think about winning when you’re overwhelmed by a toxic or suffocating environment. Go for a walk, pick up a book, watch TV– you can even turn up an upbeat playlist on Spotify to become inspired.
Do ten push up and 20 sit-ups. Go to the kitchen and make a refreshing cup of coffee. Whatever you choose to do, it must involve you stopping that negative trail of thoughts and changing your mood.
Give Back
What’s one thing that will consistently and constantly make you and everyone involved happy? It’s giving. Even when you feel like you’re about to quit, giving back and contributing to society is a dramatic motivator.
Nearly everyone in the world finds satisfaction from a sense of contribution, from feeling that their lives, work, and actions matter. When you do something for society, it gives you a feeling of mission, a sense of purpose, and then you start sharing a mindset with all the winners in the world. If you have no idea where to start, you can join groups, organizations, or initiatives in your workplace.
There will always be office event organizers, charity groups, donation drives, etc. Or you can contribute to your own neighborhood. Volunteering in animal shelters, elderly homes, orphanages, food drives, soup kitchens– all can provide you with a sense of purpose. Once you have that locked in, you’ll realize that somewhere along the line, you stopped feeling down and started feeling like a winner.
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