Your mindset is one of those tricky things that lives in your blindspots but a way that I’ve found to notice my mindset is a weekly review process. Every Friday, I ask myself a series of questions that I keep in a single Word document. I learned the technique from Laura Garnett, a performance strategist. The purpose of these questions is to reveal what’s responsible for the high points and low points of your work week. When you are able to see the underlying root causes of how you feel about your week, you can begin to make changes to your activities and mindset so that the next week will feel different. This is what leads to changes in how you see the world and it is a reminder that you are responsible for the success of your work and personal life. She suggests the following questions:
1. What was the most enjoyable work activity of the week?
2. How many enjoyable work moments did you have?
3. How many frustrating or boring moments did you have?
4. How would you describe your impact on others you work with, your customers, or those whom you came into contact with this week?
5. Is this the type of impact you want?
6. If not, what prompted this change in desired impact?
7. Were you challenged this week?
8. Were you bored?
9. What were your biggest and most exciting challenges this past week?
10. How confident did you feel this week?
11. Did you have any negative mental chatter about yourself?
12. Are you practicing actively believing that you can achieve whatever it is you have set your sights on?
13. Are you committed to having joy and groundbreaking results at work?
14. What distractions came up this week that prevented you from getting the most out of your job?
15. How can you avoid that going forward?