THE MINDSET THAT CAN UNDERMINE EVERYTHING – AND HOW TO CHANGE IT
One of the most harmful ways of thinking of ourselves is as a victim. It can make it nearly impossible to find success, financially or otherwise, and undermines our capacity for relationships.
Yet this mindset is not uncommon, we’ve probably all experienced it to some degree. But for some it can create a more pervasive atmosphere in their lives.
As researchers Rahav Gabay and his colleagues have shown, this mindset has four specific qualities that lead to three specific biases, and one onerous tendency, that can skew our view of the world.
Today we’ll look at how to move away from this kind of mindset, and re-orient toward taking effective, positive action.
Changing a victim mindset is much more complicated than the kind of “get over it” advice that’s so common – and useless.
We have reasons for feeling like a victim – sometimes because we have been seriously harmed in some way; sometimes because for some reason at some point it seemed like a good strategy to deal with challenging circumstances, and eventually became a habit.
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Here’s a name I haven’t thought about in a couple of years, and happily so: Ann Selzer.
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Lost in the current debate over Israel and Hamas is the utter transformation of the former over the last two decades.
We’re into five or six months now of the 
“Life is a state of dynamic equilibrium (movement and change combined with balance), rather like walking a tightrope. Your continued life requires that your body manufacture tens of thousands of chemicals in the right amounts, at the right places, and at appropriate times. Accumulated damage at the cellular level (regardless of cause) will interfere with this balancing act. Finally a stress comes along (an infection, a mutation causing cancer, or simply exertion from shoveling snow) that you could have handled easily in your youth—but now it pushes you too far from your living dynamic equilibrium, and you fall off the tightrope of life into your grave.” –Durk Pearson
Change and growth is, first and foremost, an active, creative process. Charting a new course for ourselves, even if we’re only talking about a specific habit or two, involves envisioning what we would like different, how we would like it to be different, and what steps we need to take to get there.
