As Week Six of 2014 opens, take a little time to reflect upon the mindsets that characterize you. What is your default mindset? Are you happy with it? Are there things which you’d like changed? Do you need to grow in certain aspects?

Here are a few Magnificent Mindsets which I trust will be something you would like to aspire to. With one or two handles on how you can start developing those mindsets.

Mindset of Mindfulness

It is great that more and more people have been talking about Mindfulness recently. Mindfulness is having your wits about you when all others are losing theirs. It is being other-oriented, not self-oriented. It is truly having others’ best interests at heart. This includes NOT forcing what you know is good stuff upon them, especially when they are not ready to receive that same good stuff. It is having a readiness to serve people’s needs as and when they are manifest. It is also about knowing that the needs of other people may outweigh the needs of the one, and that it may sometimes be necessary to deliver even stinging rebukes to an individual if that individual is unheedful of the needs of others around him.

Is there someone you need to be mindful of this coming week? What is that person’s most pressing need, and how can you help him with it? Extrapolate that to the needs of your organization.

Mindset of Magnanimity

Be Magnanimous. Give of yourself to others even when it becomes obvious that they might surpass you in some way. Go ahead, give anyway. No one can be good at all things, and if you find that the recipient of your goodwill and of your skills and knowledge becomes far better than you, then it is a good sign that you ought to be upgrading yourself, and quite likely very soon, if not immediately! A magnanimous mind does not hesitate to make other people look good. In fact, you will end up becoming the most valuable player in the room!

Heard of “Greater Than Yourself”? Find someone who you think would surpass you in at least one aspect. Invest time and resources in this person. Make sure you both agree to the relationship, of course. You will find that one great side benefit is the encouragement to yourself to become better in at least one thing!

Mindset of Malleability

This is the mindset that pertains to being flexible, to being accommodating. It does not refer to the bending or breaking of principles which you know very well ought not to be broken, stretched, distorted or mutilated. What it means is that you would be willing to make yourself available to meet the needs of others even at the expense of your schedule. It does not mean that you need to be a doormat for others to step on. It means that you recognize the fact that there are many others who are not at the same level of character development as yourself, and it helps you to demonstrate the quality of patience in everyday life.

Think of how well, or how poorly, you deal with disruptions to your schedule. How can you quickly reorganize and re-orientate your time and resources so that disruptions become valuable life lessons?

Mindset of Maintainability

Maintenance workers are really the unsung heroes of any age. Often looked upon as mindlessly robotic, we tend to forget that they are the ones who actually keep all our modern machinery running smoothly. We forget that the law of entropy is more real than imagined, and we think of ourselves as above this law. Well, we aren’t. We push maintenance tasks to other people because we think that those tasks are below our station in life.

This week, take on a few maintenance tasks at your workplace. If you can’t do that for practical reasons, start chatting with the people who do the work, and find out more about what they do. I wager you’ll find a greater appreciation for what they do, and you might even find one or two ingenious things, nowadays called hacks, that can actually help you with your own work!

Let us know how it went! Choose your mindsets today!