A GUIDE TO SELECTING
Books About Changing your Mindset
Mindset Change with or without the Belief in Conscious Manifesting
There seems to be a consensus that changing your mindset requires 3 to 4 weeks; this time is needed for the neural pathways – the framework of the brain's gray matter – to physically change.
Factors such as age, motivation, meta-beliefs about changing your mindset, emotional backlog, sense of security and amount of practice will impact the duration of the process.
Some actors use a technique called “method acting”. By studying and imagining how their character would think, perceive circumstances and behave, some actors became so immersed in that character that they had difficulty with returning to their normal mindset.
Many people quit before any mindset change could even have taken place because they see no instant effect from their efforts. Insights may be instant, but breaking thought patterns takes time.
Knowing that it will take a while before new thought pattern feels natural will help persist with the process despite no visible effects following the efforts in the first few days or even weeks.
A key factor in mindset change is reframing. Many people spend most of their attention on aspects of their lives they don’t like, which conditions them to accept that as reality.
With deliberate focus on other aspects of reality, either by looking for positive aspects, zooming in or out, and also by noticing how you have distorted your sense of reality by focusing on only a few aspects, your perception and experience of the same circumstances changes.
Many people are not aware of their habit of focusing on unpleasant aspects and the freedom to focus on pleasant ones. The same goes for the habit of choosing an unpleasant level of magnification for the lens through which we perceive life, such as focusing on world issues when your family life is healthy, or vice versa.
When it comes to limiting beliefs, it can help to falsify those beliefs with facts, but there can also be a fear of success at play. This might relate to low self-esteem. As long as you believe you'd benefit from negative emotions or circumstances, you'll keep finding ways to have them.
Attempts at success in any area can benefit from reframing from a success-oriented frame to one that is about having fun, being proud for being authentic and being already successful just by taking on the risk of failure.
Mindset change does NOT happen by lying to yourself – untrue positive thoughts – or by filtering out undesired aspects of reality. This is why many attempts at positive thinking fail to produce results. Positive thinking and mindset change is about focusing on the pleasant and prospective aspects of reality while acknowledging the unpleasant ones.
Mindset change is often approached with some use of conscious manifesting. This is the idea that the frequency of our thoughts carries over to the frequency of our circumstances. The higher the frequency, the more events unfold the way you envisioned them to be. The most distinguishing factor between books about mindset change, is whether or not they consider conscious manifesting real.
Types of Books about How to Change your Mindset
Here you find a list of archetypal books about mindset change from which we captured the essence in a short summary. The books are listed in a random order. We don't earn any commission on your selection.
"Mindset"
If you're new to the topic of mindset change, Carol Dweck's book might be a good place to start. She explains why all change starts with first changing your belief about the possibility of growth by understanding 'why so', learning how to see value in failures and letting go of the imaginary 'perfect self' you are trying to become. She uses findings from scientific research to convince you that these meta-beliefs about mindset change are fundamental. But if you can take that for granted, you may not need the book anyway.
"Rewire your Brain"
John Arden emphasizes that the brain's flexibility allows for mindset changes. To reshape your mindset, deliberately focus on desired thoughts, feelings, and actions. This repeated focus will strengthen new brain pathways and weaken unhelpful ones, leading to lasting shifts in your perspective. Go for the updated version.
"Evolve Your Brain"
Using insights from biology, neuroscience and the autonomic nervous system, Joe Dispenza explains why changing your mindset is within reach for every person, but initially involves working through some discomfort, meditation and repetition – and how you can do it.
"The Power of Habit"
Charles Duhigg takes the stance that changing behavior is the key to changing your mindset, not the other way around. He emphasizes identifying and understanding the "habit loop" - cue, routine, reward - and how e.g. taking a walk instead of a snack helps to overcome the habit loop easiest. By achieving small wins, you build momentum and gradually change your mindset on multiple levels, which makes behavioral change easier in the future.
"The Biology of Belief"
This book by Bruce Lipton explains from a biological point of view why mindset is important and why meditation and imagination are key to changing the mindset. This book incorporates evolutionary biology and neuroscience to explain how the contents of our minds are translated into emotions and even molecules as well as how to use imagination and meditation to improve your health.
Bukuru's Zero-Books Approach
The message in most books is very similar, but reading them could help you accept the evidence on a cognitive level. But experiencing a mindset change, however small, will falsify the belief that mindset change is impossible in practice – something most people will feel.
A very simple technique to change your perception, is the cheesy practice of writing down five things every evening, for 21 days, that you were happy to experience. This will have the effect of making you more aware of such aspects of your experience, like how you normally won't notice blue cars, but suddenly notice them once you've been instructed to do so.
Similarly, you can write down three situations that you were not happy with and then work on finding a positive aspect or angle for it.
About Bukuru
The core philosophy of Bukuru is that each person should test their own beliefs. The project started as a quest to categorize self-development books in such a way that it would become easier to find books that match your beliefs. However, along the way we concluded that the essence of most books can be captured in a few sentences – if the idea is original at all. Instead of helping people buy books, we now help people not buying books.