What Is More Important: Mindset Or Discipline?

I felt compelled to write about this today, because it seems pretty common online these days to talk about mindset and how it can hold you back from your own success.

While I completely believe that developing your mindset can have an amazing impact in your life and that having a limiting one can also effect you negatively….

I also don’t think it’s right to imply that just because you have a limiting or negative mindset, that you won’t achieve success.

There are many ways in which you may find and experience success, irrelevant to the state of your mindset.

To me, there is something a lot more important than your mindset and that is: Discipline!

Because, whether you have a great mindset or not, if you’re not actually disciplined enough to put in the work required over a sustained amount of time, you’re not going to get anywhere.

You can have all the positive visualisation techniques at your disposal that you want…. But if you’re not actually doing something to get where you want to be, a positive mindset isn’t going to get you there.

My discipline has been up and down over the years and I can assure you, so has my mindset.

But ultimately, it’s been the fact that I have forced myself to put the work in over time, (no matter how I’ve felt about it) that has created the biggest changes in my life.

I’m sure I could probably have achieved things a lot faster if I had perhaps worked on having a different mindset more seriously than I did or have….

However, being disciplined in what you do can win out anyway!

Developing Your Mindset Is A Process…. But It Is Not A Linear One!

I don’t think there is one day when BAM…. you have this incredible positive mindset and you never look back.

Or that as soon as you develop this positive mindset… BAM …. You are a success and amazing things happen to you.

I’ve struggled with my mindset all of my life.

Way before I had even heard of having limiting beliefs… I was still aware that my own thoughts and beliefs could hold me back.

The real shift for me happened when I was 31. I actually decided to get fit. I started working out. Then I started training for a marathon.

During this time, I had a massive internal shift where I realised how my own deliberate actions could have a massive impact on my reality.

It seems completely obvious.

Of course what you do will have an impact on your life.

But somehow before this… It’s like I felt everything was happening TO ME.

I didn’t truly acknowledge how much personal power and responsibility I had over my own life.

I was someone who would rarely come out of their comfort zone before and my mindset shifted.

I started looking more into personal development from there and started looking into how to change my mindset for the better.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t shifted back and forth over the years.

I think completing the first marathon probably had the biggest impact on my thought process.

Suddenly I acknowledged that, if I could put my mind towards doing that thing, then surely I could achieve so much more?

That’s when I decided I wanted to try and start a business and looking online seemed ideal for me. My dream was to be able to work from anywhere and be location independent.

I’d love to say that I jumped online and started making money the following week… But there were many ups and downs along the way.

However, when I DID start making a regular income online, something weird happened.

I started experiencing a lot of anxiety.

In fact, the more success I seemed to have, the more anxious I felt.

It was almost like I’d felt the whole thing was a fluke – a stroke of luck and that it may just all crumble and then what would I do, I would be back at square one.

I was catastrophising.

The worst case scenarios would keep popping into my head.

I’d had all these plans for how I was going to expand my business…. But what do you think I did?

Well…. Not very much for quite a while! I was overwhelmed.

I found it really difficult to do any work on my business at all and even harder to focus on the new tasks I’d planned out to help me grow.

All the positive mindset stuff I’d developed seemed to be overtaken by all this self doubt and anxiety.

So, did the fact I had this mindset problem mean that I didn’t achieve success and everything crumbled?

Not at all.

First of all, the work I’d put in previously meant I was making passive income.

But also, I was disciplined enough to gradually get myself back into doing small tasks here and there and building that up over time.

Just because you have a bit of a relapse into negative thinking, it doesn’t mean that suddenly everything falls apart for you.