How to Cultivate a Healthy Mindset to Yield Positive Personal Development

Healthy Mindset Yields Positive Personal Development

Gaining a healthy mindset and personal development get a lot of play. The publicity and material are bigger than you can imagine. How big? According to Business Development Research, personal development churned $50.06 billion in 2024 and will do over $54 billion in 2025.

I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news, obviously, is people want to improve, experience more fulfillment and grow into their potential. The bad news? We were only able to find one company that offers quantifiable results for everyone who utilized their offerings. One!

From “life coaches” to companies to writers to seminars we hear of great things done by a few but only one company gives you the hard facts. The bad news? The industry is pretty much a hustle. Promises of change, transformation and great income are the hooks in the personal development arena. And, damn, they are good at it. $50 billion!

How do they do it?

Healthy Mindsets are Hard

Slick marketing won’t change your life. As Charles Haanel wrote in The Master Key System, the tasks to create transformation are easy to understand but he adds, “most people are unwilling to do the hard mental labor.”

These pied-pipers of prosperity know that people won’t do the hard mental labor, so they make it seem easy. One of the biggest con jobs in recent years was The Secret. They referenced The Master Key System several times, quoting Haanel… but… they left out the work part. Of course. I’m grateful it did a quick death and has vanished from the literary landscape.

We live in a world of entitlement and most people are addicted to convenience or, even worse, instant gratification. Easy, fast and instant transformation.

Did you know the average person buys 7-10 self-help books, can quote brilliant passages, yet experiences no long-term shift? There are now 12-step programs to help people break the addiction to self-help books and meetings!

Most people reading this far, like myself… hey, I’m like most people… anyway, most people that would read this article have experienced what I did. Over 20 self-help books, tapes (remember cassettes?), CDs, etc., experienced constant hope followed by frustration and self-loathing that I could not change anything that mattered.

Why?

Why do we buy with hope and fail to change and repeat?

More Good News and Bad News

Again, let me give you the bad news first. When you read one of these books, or even worse, spend thousands of bucks with life coaches or seminars, your conscious mind understands it, comprehends the information. The bad news? Your conscious mind is not making the decisions.

The subconscious mind is running the show. Period. It took me a while to understand that the subconscious meant it was below my consciousness. Translation, I did not know it was running the show and making decisions, 95+% of the time.

Now it gets weird. When you think you are debating something in your mind, the subconscious has already made the decision a minimum of 7 seconds before you are conscious of it.

The “baddest” of the bad news? We do not determine our lives, our habits do. The first step in developing a healthy mindset and positive personal development is accepting that simple truth. Habits determine our lives.

The subconscious is the habit mind. So, all those books you’ve read and understood don’t yield the hoped for results because the subconscious does not learn that way. Boom!

The good news is, you can, if you are willing to do the “hard mental labor,” influence your subconscious mind, and reset the criteria it uses to make decisions. Most people know more about their cell phone and TV remote than they do about their brain… clearly the most astonishing mechanism on the planet.

When you were born, you were given a perfect operating system… your mind. But, like a computer, with no programs, the greatest hardware in the world can do nothing without programs. In the first 7 years of your life, you existed in the Theta state of vibration in your mind and by observing, you “downloaded” the programs… walking, talking, right, wrong, etc.

Things that go well for you? You downloaded good programs. Things you struggle with? Poor programs. And since they are running below consciousness you must become a non-judgmental observer of your behavior to see them

It is a conservative estimate that 70% of our “habits” are self-sabotaging. How do you change that so you create positive personal growth and a healthy mindset.

Create Your Own Healthy Mindset

Step 1 is to accept the fact that your subconscious mind is the habit mind and does not learn from regular books.

Step 2, never buy anything that does not address the subconscious mind and does not give you exercises to establish new habits in the subconscious mind.

Step 3 is to know the science. The idea bandied about for decades is that it takes 21 days to establish a new habit. This is a lie. It takes 57-63 days if you are in the “habit” of establishing new habits already. For most people, it’s 90 days. That's too long for those instant gratification addicts who desire a healthy mindset and personal development.

Step 4 is knowing when you are in the Theta vibrational state… when you are drifting off to sleep. Haanel’s The Master Key System is a great example of this... takes 24 weeks to work (there’s that word again) through it.

A best seller that walks you through these step and offers exercises that impact your subconscious mind is Standing Tall, now in 3 languages. The exercises take 27 weeks (plenty of time to develop the exercises as habits). Get your copy here at Mark J Books.

Developing a healthy mindset is difficult. Old habits die hard. That’s the hard mental labor thing, but the payoff of authentic personal development and becoming the architect of your reality is priceless.