What made our 2014 everywoman Woman of the Year Karen Betts stand out among a roomful of hugely talented and hopeful finalists? She’d already decided she was our winner.
Neuroscience backs up the Nouveau Beauty Group founder’s belief that this kind of winning mentality plays a major role in ultimate success. Whether you’re aiming to be the next Woman of the Year, or are fixated on securing that workplace promotion, discover how thinking like a winner can be the crucial ingredient in achieving your dreams.
1. Take a long look in the mirror
The brain of a person with a solid grasp of their own self shows sustained activity in the anterior cingulate – the area of the brain also related to positivity bias and emotional stability. It’s typically seen more in older people, who’ve had longer to become attuned to their own abilities. But it’s also seen in successful athletes who understand in what ways they are excellent and in what ways they are limited, and can make better, more informed choices as a result.
So, the first step towards a winning mentality is to make a brutal assessment, drawing on the input of your network wherever possible, of your own strengths and weaknesses.
Get started: Understanding your strengths in 9 simple steps
A few years before I entered the NatWest everywoman Awards I entered a different programme. I wasn’t hopeful; it wasn’t a great fit for me [and a different lady won].
Karen Betts on knowing yourself in order to understand good opportunities
2. Know what you want
When you set your sights on a tangible goal, your brain quite literally goes into overdrive, with no less than six regions showing increased activity. In the midst of this process, your brain actually tricks itself into believing you’ve already achieved your target, explaining the ‘high’ you might have experienced after you set your sights on some future reward. There’s both a positive and a potentially negative outcome of the hormone dopamine which floods your brain at this time: “By setting something as a goal… a part of our brain believes that desired outcome is an essential part of who we are – setting up the conditions that drive us to work towards the goals to fulfil the brain’s self-image. [But] until the moment the goal is achieved, we have failed to achieve it, setting up a constant tension that the brain seeks to resolve.”[i] And for as long as we fail to resolve this tension, we may experience fears, limiting beliefs and a sense of stagnation. The professional athlete taking to the Olympic track for the first time aims to beat his own personal best rather than win the race: the trick is to set tangible, realistic goals and to break them down into achievable milestones.
Get started: Willpower: 3 principles to help you achieve your goals
I approached judging day in the frame of mind that I really wanted to win and I wasn’t going to be modest and downplay my achievements. A lot of positive energy came out because of where my thinking was. We’d even baked the award into our business plan.
Karen Betts on goal setting
3. Jump into action
As you begin to get stuck into the detail of that first milestone, the prefrontal cortex – the brain region governing complex decisions and advanced cognitive behaviour – becomes a hive of activity. If you’ve done the work on your self-awareness, you already know what skills and talents you can bring to bear later in the process so use this time of heightened cognitive behaviour to free your mind of the mundane and allow it to incubate and spark to life new creative thoughts.
Get started: Workbook: Unleashing your creativity in the workplace
“Every other day I go back and read over my current goals. That process really helps to get things stuck in my mind and keeps me focused. I look at what I’ve been doing that day and how relevant those tasks are to my goals.”
Karen Betts on the importance of action
4. Soothe yourself
At this point in the process, stress and self-doubt might weigh in and threaten to overwhelm all those brain regions currently working hard to keeping you in a winning frame of mind. Rather than allow fear, anger or worry to overwhelm you, pay attention to how you’re feeling, notice the causes and their physical and emotional manifestations, and work with them rather than try to suppress them.
Get started: The 3 most common workplace emotions and how to manage them
5. Memorise and visualise
As you encounter inevitable difficulties along the way, draw on past accolades to enable meaningful visualisations of future wins. The brain region at play here is the hippocampus, your mind’s ‘memory muscle’ that also enables you to vividly imagine the future. Sports psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered that sporting champions who visualise themselves scoring a winning goal or raising a gold medal to the sky are more likely to achieve success.
Get started: Why a vivid imagination is your crucial career ingredient
6. Reconfigure your brain when needed
Single-mindedness is a great trait in a winning mindset, but the path to success is rarely smooth, and being able to adapt along the way, is every bit as much the preserve of a winner.
“Certain thoughts and activities set off strings of synapses between given parts of the brain. Growing traffic on these neural highways forces your brain to add further ‘lanes’ by growing new cells,” writes psychologist Nathalie Nahai. When a curveball comes your way, rise to the challenge of taking a diversion in your planned route.
Get started: Problem solving: techniques to get you thinking about your thinking
“Every three months I do a deeper analysis of my goals to make sure everything’s still relevant and that the day to day functions of the entire business are aligned with where we’re trying to get.”
Karen Betts on the importance of staying flexible
7. Give your brain regular breaks
From the moment you set that goal to the moment you proudly stand on stage after accepting your award (or, whatever else your career goal may bring!), your brain is sustaining your motivation, decision-making and ability to stay on course. Ensure you give something back by giving it regular fuel. A walk in the park boosts blood flow, glucose metabolism and oxygen, helping to keep you in the game. And take regular time out with a guided meditation or simply doing something restful and unrelated to your goal. By rejuvenating yourself, you’ll return to your winning mindset with more motivation, stronger focus and more creative thoughts to boot.
Get started: Quiz: How mindful are you?
[i] lifehack.org/articles/featured/the-science-of-setting-goals.html
[ii] awinningpersonality.com/self-improvement/secrets-to-a-failure-resistant-brain/
