Of all the things you can do to boost your mindset, exercise is near the top of the list. It not only improves your mindset but does so with relatively little mental “work” compared to most of the other methods you can employ. Here are the top 5 ways exercise improves your mindset.

1. Exercise Makes You Feel Good Exercising causes your body to produce feel-good hormones such as oxytocin. These hormones lift your mood, make you feel better physically, and make you more optimistic. It also reduces depression, improves self-esteem, and increases your confidence.
2. Exercise Clears Your Mind One of the greatest benefits of exercise is that it helps you clear your mind of distractions. It gives you something to think about other than your problems and your to-do list. This “blank slate” effect both boosts your mood and temporarily improves your mindset.
3. Exercise Reduces Stress Levels Are you feeling stressed? Go out and exercise. Working out physically burns stress chemicals out of your body, making you feel better and improving your mood and mindset. You don’t need a lot of exercise to get this effect either; a brisk ten-minute walk is enough to do it.
4. Exercise Improves Your Ability to Concentrate The benefits of working out also extend to what you do afterward. Getting in a good workout improves your ability to concentrate on other tasks for several hours after you finish. This makes you more productive, puts you in a better mood, and again, boosts your mindset.
5. Exercise Results in Better Sleep All of the other benefits of exercise combine to create one more: better sleep. Exercising results in improved sleep, both in quality and quantity. Getting enough good-quality sleep is one of the most important parts of improving your mindset. Good sleep makes everything better and lack of it makes everyone grumpy.

Exercise has many other important benefits other than its effects on mindset and personal development, of course. It improves your health and longevity, just for starters. But its effects on mindset shouldn’t be understated.

If you want to improve your mindset, one of the best ways to do so is to start an exercise program. You don’t need to hire a personal trainer or join a gym to get these benefits. Start by walking a few days a week. Ten minutes is enough to start. Gradually increase your walks to 20 or 30 minutes and you’ll feel better in every possible way.

What are your goals? Do you have any? Or is that part of the problem? Goals are important at every age; they give you something to focus on, challenge you, and give you a feeling of accomplishment when you succeed at reaching them. Improving your mindset will help you reach your goals, but first, you have to know what they are.

Take out a sheet of paper and a pen and write down your top five goals for your life. Big or small, it doesn’t matter. Write down the goals that YOU want to reach, not that society expects you to want.

When you’ve finished, look at the list and prioritize it. Take your top goal -the most important one you want to accomplish -and make a plan to reach it. It doesn’t matter if this goal is big or small, whether it’s something as big as starting a business or as small as putting together a 1,000-piece puzzle. Make your plan and incorporate it into your mindset and self-improvement program. This is now what you’re striving for.

But what if your page is blank? What if you don’t know what your goals are, or you don’t have any? Well, your task now is to come up with some. Again, these have to be goals that are unique to you, not to the broader society. If you don’t want to ever own a house, don’t make that a goal.

Take out another sheet of paper. Close your eyes. Now imagine that time and money weren’t an issue. What would you do? You can do anything, anything in the world. Write down the first five things that come to mind. Next, write down five things that you enjoy doing and would like to do more of if you could find the time.

Compare the two lists. You’re probably going to find a significant amount of overlap. These are the things you really want. This is where your heart lies. Select a few of these things -three is enough to start with -and turn them into a concrete goal. “Travel more” could become “Take a cross-country trip in an RV next summer,” for example. Now make a plan to reach each of these goals. Start working on your plan.

Having goals is an important part of your plan to improve your mindset. You need the challenge and the effort to catalyze your mindset shift and personal growth. You also need them to live your best life. Working on your goals is a win-win!

Failure. No one likes it. Everyone wants to succeed, preferably on the first try. Unfortunately, that’s not realistic. You’re going to fail on your journey to improve your mindset and change your life. You’re probably going to fail many times. How should you handle it constructively without getting frustrated? Follow these tips.

1. Figure out why you failed. Look at your failure analytically. What caused it? What did you do wrong? Is there something you could do differently next time? Or was the failure outside of your control?
2. Change things before you try again. Did you approach the problem wrong? Change how you do it next time. Were the conditions wrong, the timing? Were you adequately prepared? These are all things you can remedy before your next attempt.
3. Ask for help. Don’t be a lone wolf! Life is hard, and challenges often require the input of more than one person. Find someone with more knowledge and experience than you and ask them to mentor you or help you solve the problem. You can find someone to help you with any problem, big or small, from an academic issue to work problems to dating. You just have to ask!
4. Look at and appreciate the progress you’ve made. Sure, you might have failed, but did you learn something? Are you further along than you were before? Of course. Look at how far you’ve come since you started on this journey. Appreciate it and congratulate yourself before tackling your failure again.
5. Consider adjusting your expectations. In other words, did you try to go too far too fast? You’re not going to create a masterpiece (or become CEO) overnight. Did you try to improve too much at once? Look at your expectations and adjust them before trying again. Remember the one-percent rule -improving by one percent each attempt will get you to your goal faster than trying (and failing) to make big leaps.

Above all, don’t give up! You can reach any goal you set your mind to. You just need to find the right way. It took Thomas Edison over 10,000 tries to invent the light bulb. He used to say that he hadn’t failed; he’d just found 10,000 ways that wouldn’t work!

You can put this knowledge to work for yourself. Follow the tips above to evaluate your failure, adjust what you’re doing, and try again. You can do it.

We humans are an impatient lot. When we want to do, achieve, or get something, we want it today, if not yesterday. This leads directly to impatience and frustration. It leads many people to give up when they’re on the verge of success.

Success takes time. Achievement takes time. Learning a new skill takes time, even if it’s something simple. Have you ever watched a young child learn to do something you take for granted, such as learn to walk? Success is halting, uneven, often looks like going backward, and sometimes involves falling on your backside (or your face).

The same is true of doing more difficult things as an adult. It takes about 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill. That’s almost 5 years of full-time work! This is why it’s said that we overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in ten years.

This is where the One Percent Rule comes in. It allows you to make visible, satisfying progress rapidly without expecting overnight success. It’s a simple rule: when you attempt to do something, aim to do it one percent better than before. Or finish one percent more.

If you practice this rule and do so faithfully, before long you’ll have mastered the skill or finished the task. Perfecting something is hard; doing it 1% better or finishing one percent more of a task is relatively easy. It’s a goal you can see and reach almost immediately.

You can apply this rule to anything. Are you trying to learn to live by a budget? Aim to do 1% better each month. Are you trying to increase how much you save? Increase it by 1% per month until you reach your ultimate goal. You’ll see the progress every month but not feel a lot of pain from it.

Do you want to improve your self-talk? Set a goal of achieving 1% improvement every week or month. Trying to start and keep an exercise routine? Once you get the habit down, aim to increase it by 1% a week. Using a software program to learn a new language? Make your goal completion of 1% of the program every time you log on.

The uses of this rule are infinite. It’s one of the best ways to improve your mindset and achieve the personal development you want. It will fulfill your brain’s desire for immediate gratification and simultaneously fuel your long-term success.

One of the most pervasive myths about mindset is that it’s static; that is, you either have a fixed or growth mindset and it doesn’t change. Not only is this myth wrong, but it can be dangerous, as it belies the potential for human change and personal development. Many people who think this also believe that people have a pure fixed or pure growth mindset, and the former is bad. Both of these myths are also untrue.

Not only is your mindset changeable, but it changes throughout your life, sometimes rapidly, and sometimes slowly. You’ve probably never noticed it changing before; it’s hard to notice something happening inside you!

Everyone’s mindset is a combination of fixed and growth mindsets, and it’s the ratio of these two that changes throughout life. You can become more or less open to risk, more or less believing in the power of hard work and dedication to reach goals, more or less convinced that intelligence or morality are inborn versus developed attributes. These are just examples -every aspect of your mindset is equally open to change.

What drives these changes? The experiences you have in life are the primary reason, and how your mindset shifts is due to your personality. The same experience will have different effects on different people. Most people shift more towards a growth mindset as they go through life, but there are exceptions. Trauma and other negative events can push people towards having more of a fixed mindset.

All of this is assuming that all the changes your mindset undergoes are unguided and happen naturally. You can also deliberately and consciously change your mindset. You can take the parts of your mindset that you don’t like and change them. Helping you do that is the purpose of this program.

Deliberately changing your mindset isn’t easy, but it can be done. You pick one aspect of your mindset you would like to work on at a time -such as embracing challenges or working through frustration -and work on it with the help of aids such as affirmations, journaling, and meditation. When you’re satisfied with your progress in that area, you move on to the next.

Don’t buy into the myth that mindset is static. Not only can it change, but it does change throughout your life, whether or not you purposefully try to change it. Why not guide these changes and help them along so that you can grow into the best possible version of yourself?

Growth mindset and fixed mindset might seem like opposites, and in many ways they are, but there’s more to it than that. These mindsets are different ways of looking at the world and of processing and using the information that we are presented with.

From a personal development standpoint, a growth mindset is preferred, but that doesn’t mean it’s better than a fixed mindset in other ways. Both have their advantages and disadvantages and having more of a fixed mindset or more of a growth mindset doesn’t determine what type of person someone is.

Furthermore, the vast majority of people don’t have either a pure fixed mindset or a pure growth mindset. It’s doubtful if a person with such a mindset even exists. All that can be said of anyone is that they have more of one type of mindset than the other.

Mindset is a tricky thing in that it can vary from one facet of life to another as well. This means that someone can have a strong fixed mindset in one arena and a strong growth mindset in another. As an example, imagine a person who is convinced pursuing romantic relationships is a waste of time (“I will never find love, so what’s the point?”) but excels at work and is constantly getting promotions.

Another important fact about growth versus fixed mindset is that no one’s mindset is static. It changes throughout the lifespan. It usually (but not always) becomes more mixed or predominantly growth mindset as people age. The changes are directed by innate personality and life experiences unless a person is actively involved in personal development.

Because mindset is changeable, it can be directed by both internal and external forces in one direction or the other. That is to say, you can direct your mindset into more growth mindset-oriented patterns, but so can other people. Educators and psychologists have designed numerous programs and developed multiple methods of doing this with students and employees. These programs seem to work, but the long-term effects aren’t yet known.

If you’re interested in learning which type of mindset you have, psychologists have designed quizzes you can take for this purpose. Some of them are available online for free but keep in mind that these aren’t comprehensive and provide only a small snapshot of the large portrait that is your mindset. They are handy for identifying specific areas you want to work on, however. Changing your mindset takes time and effort, but the rewards are worth it.