A winning mindset is not a way of thinking. It is a way of being.

I was back on Motivation Monday with Eric F. King in October. The topic was how to develop a winning mindset. When Eric handed me the floor, I said the thing I had been thinking about all week.

Most people hear the words about mindset. Some read the books. Some watch the videos. They leave the event, and they carry on exactly as they were. Nothing changes. And then they wonder why nothing changes.

If you do not change, nothing changes. That is the whole sentence.

The part of mindset that people skip

There is a reason most mindset work does not stick. People treat it as a way of thinking. Pick a better thought, reframe the negative, repeat the affirmation. That is a start. It is not the work.

A winning mindset is not a way of thinking. It is not even a way of behaving. It is a way of being. You have to become a different person.

And that is where most people stop, because becoming a different person is not a weekend workshop. It is the biggest task I have ever taken on in my life.

You cannot do this alone

I want to say something that I know is uncomfortable because I pushed back against it for years myself. You cannot do this work on your own.

You will try. We all try. We think we are self-aware enough, disciplined enough, read enough books, listened to enough podcasts. Then we catch ourselves, six months later, doing the same thing we were doing a year ago. That was me, almost every day, for a long time.

The answer I landed on, and the answer I keep handing to clients, is a coach. Not a motivator, not a cheerleader, not a supportive friend. A coach. Someone who will look you in the eye and tell you, "You are bullshitting yourself. Stop it. You are stuck because you keep thinking the same way."

A good coach sees the thing you are hiding from yourself and names it out loud. That is what you are paying for. Not inspiration. Clarity.

What my coach told me first, which I did not expect

The first thing my coach said to me was not about business.

He said the problem was my relationship with my family. Deal with that first.

I was offended for about a day. I thought I was there for strategy, for growth, for the next level. What did my family have to do with it?

Everything, as it turned out. Because until you have peace of mind at home, you do not have the room inside your head to build anything ambitious outside of it. I was trying to build a publishing business on top of unresolved personal noise, and the noise was slowly eating the business.

I do not talk about this much publicly. I am talking about it today because I have watched dozens of entrepreneurs try to fix the work by working harder, when the thing quietly keeping them stuck is the relationship they would rather not look at.

Brutal honesty, in both directions

The real prerequisite for a winning mindset is not optimism. Optimism helps. But the prerequisite is honesty.

Brutal honesty about where you actually are. Brutal honesty about what you are pretending is fine. Brutal honesty about the fact that you have read fifteen books on this and are still the same person you were five years ago.

You do not need more books. You do not need another podcast. You need a coach, you need honesty, and you need to accept that becoming a different person is a multi-year job. Once you accept that, the work actually starts.

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Watch the full episode below. For the practical version of mindset for self-published authors whose books are stalling, see Why your self-published book isn't selling (and how to diagnose it) on Global.Media.