The Garage of Your Mind

I’m going to share with you one of the most powerful secrets of life that I’ve come to learn and over the last 5 years have attempted to master. Why would I share it with you? Well, because I’m on a mission, and that mission is to spread love, kindness and fun in the world. And how do I spread these values regardless of the external environment; well the spread to the world starts with me, at home. The idea for Google was created at home in a garage- you know that space in our homes (if you’ve got one or ever had one) where all the stuff we’ve accumulated sits gathering dust waiting for us to use it again. But, how many times have you had a clear out of your home/garage and found stuff that you’d completely forgotten was in there? In these ‘unprecedented’ times I’ve been noticing my neighbours weeding their gardens, cleaning their windows, reorganising their garages and maybe even getting some of those old tools back in action? So why not do the same with your mind?

Throughout our lives we develop and have access to multiple mindsets.  And herein lies the first important lesson. Once we’ve acquired a mindset, we never lose it; we put it into our metaphorical garage- our personal storage space.  But it’s important to remember we always have the capability to access it if we are aware of it and if we choose to do so. Think about it. Whenever you’ve learnt something or made a commitment to yourself and then forgotten about it, that thing hasn’t disappeared. It’s still in there - you just have to be willing to go back to the garage and find it. Once you’ve found it, it might only need the dust blowing off of it but it could require significantly more work to get it going again.

The good news is that we have a user manual that will make it really easy for you to get your mindset back into perfect working order. Over the next 4 posts we’ll share the 4 mindsets that create our reality and what to do to access your full power and potential. Here’s the first one.

MAGICAL

All children are born magical. It’s who they are, the way they think, play, explore and interact with the world. As I write this article my wife is busy telling my young daughters all about the Easter bunny who brings eggs and hides them around the garden for them to uncover. They ask no questions to cast doubt on the existence of this magical bunny. Children believe ‘ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE’ and it’s one of the two attributes of the magical mindset. The other is ZERO LIMITS. When you were between 2-5 years old what did you believe in? What stories did you act out? I bet there were zero limits to what your imagination could create, through stories, play and fun. The magical mindset has no limits. Read a child a story or make one up. Your child will not question it no matter how weird and whacky it gets. They fully buy into the vastness of the possibility in the world. When did you last do that? Truly access your magical mindset? When did you last read a book, watch a film, or listen to a song and immerse yourself so fully that you forgot about limits? When was the last time you applied this concept to your life or an idea you have? If you have kids when was the last time you took them out to play and left your phone in your bag so you could really play with them, not pretend to play and be on your phone simultaneously? I see this far too often. Parents sitting on bright colourful soft play on their phone whilst their child either runs off to play alone or is jumping all over them saying come on mummy/daddy.

When we access our Magical mindset we feel uninterrupted joy and the beauty of the present moment. When we play “fully” with our children we “fully” access the power of the Magical mindset. We never lose the ability to be magical, so create some space in your life for your magical mindset to surface.

Darren Smallridge, Power-Up Partner

Read about the other Power-Up mindsets here