The life you lead is the result of the opportunities you’ve pursued. Every choice you’ve made, no matter how small – Has shaped your life journey. By viewing opportunities as stepping stones, you’ll understand why it’s so important to jump on them.
Opportunities are gateways to new life experiences. That’s why it’s so important to develop an opportunity mindset – Where you perceive your life to be abundant in opportunities, choices, and new exciting experiences.
What Is the Opportunity Mindset?
The opportunity mindset is a perception where you see opportunities everywhere. It’s a positive mindset that instills hope and encourages you to make the most of your life.
Someone without an opportunity mindset might thoughtlessly brush off an invitation to meet new people. Someone with an opportunity mindset is likely to think about the potential doorways this experience could open up – And is more likely to pursue it.
By developing an opportunity mindset, you’ll see life through a frame of possibility. You’ll think about where any given course of action could take you, embrace new experiences, and view challenges as opportunities for growth.
The opportunity mindset is empowering because it encourages you to take a more proactive approach to life. By seeing your life through a frame where there is always a new road to take, you’ll never feel like you’ve hit a dead end.
You never know where a doorway will lead you or how your life will change by walking through it. So, instead of seeing barriers everywhere, learn to recognize uncertainty as a gateway to new experiences.
Opportunity Mindset vs Threat Mindset
Why is it that one person might see a situation as an adventure while another may see it as a nightmare?
The way we perceive things often boils down to our mindset and outlook. The opportunity mindset and threat mindset are contrasting lenses that determine how we see different situations in life.
People who don’t see through a frame of opportunity are often trapped in a threat mindset. Instead of seeing your circumstances in a way where you can somehow benefit from them, a threat mindset is a pessimistic counterpart.
The threat mindset is a limiting belief system where you focus on the risk and perceive obstacles as barriers. Instead of trying new things, you have an aversion to life change. Therefore, you see challenges as something negative.
The threat mindset leads to a much more conservative lifestyle. Instead of jumping on different opportunities that are presented, you try to hold onto security.
A threat mindset magnifies risks and leads to a heightened sense of fear, which is why it’s important to identify and replace it with an opportunity mindset.
The truth is you’re always surrounded by opportunities. Part of the opportunity mindset is to recognize that there is always a pathway you can take, and if nothing seems obvious, create one!
The reason why you don’t see these opportunities is because you’re stuck in the groove of doing what feels normal to you. So you end up doing the same things over and over again, and wondering why you’re life is stagnant.
But every day you can make different decisions.
You can try new things, meet new people, and go to new events.
You can reach out to friends, try a new hobby, and change up your routine.
There’s an infinite amount of possibilities, and you never know where any one of these things will lead you.
Opportunities lead to opportunities.
By looking at all the different pathways you can take daily, you will never feel like you’re trapped. And if you do, it’s because you’re not changing things up.
Identifying Windows of Opportunity
Opportunities are like windows. They open temporarily, but if you don’t jump through them while they’re open, they can close forever.
Throughout your life, windows of opportunity are constantly opening and closing. Many of these windows will appear suddenly (last-minute invitations, the perfect moment for a first kiss), and that window could be a make-it-or-break-it moment.
A window might appear in the form of a partner or relationship, jobs, avocations, friends, hobbies, or anything at all. The more determined you are the follow that particular path, the further it will lead you into a different lifestyle.
Utilizing opportunities is about seeing these windows all around you, and the pathways each window potential leads to. You will never know what could have been if you always let these windows close, and never take a risk to find out.
Windows of opportunity can open out of the blue, so jump on them before they disappear forever. Take a chance and see where these windows take you, otherwise, you might regret not crawling through them when you had the chance.
It’s easy to think of some reason why you’re not living the life you want to live. But at the end of the day, it all comes back to the decisions you’ve made and the decisions that you continue to make.
Your life path is built with decisions, and each day is shaped by hundreds of little decisions.
You decide to meditate or watch another episode of your favorite show. You decide to get drunk or to work on an avocation. You decide to apply for a new job, take a course, or move to another country.
Your decision to work toward better things makes a world of difference. No decision should be seen as good or bad, but you should think about where those decisions will lead you and what opportunities will open up in the future because of them.
If you’re constantly making decisions that stunt your growth and limit you, then you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Strive to make better decisions that open you up to a more colorful world because your decisions facilitate the experiences you have.
Your day-to-day decisions pave the road you walk, and the bigger decisions plan out the route. The big decisions can change the trajectory of your life, so they’re important to consider carefully.
Do you ever wonder where your life would be now if you had done things a little differently? Did you decide to leave that toxic relationship even though you knew it would hurt? Did you pursue a line of work that fulfills you? Have you closed yourself off to other people, or do you have a thriving social life?
When it comes to the little things, you decide to work on yourself or not. You decided to shut out conflicting ideas that could have helped you. You decided to be a victim, to be stuck in your ways, and you are responsible for every decision you have made.
But don’t beat yourself up. We are human, and it’s okay to make some bad decisions; that’s how we learn after all. But realize just how important your decisions are and strive to make better ones that will serve your growth.
Work on Making More Connections
So many opportunities in life come through people. So if you want to live a life abundant in different possibilities, it’s important to meet people, make contacts, and push yourself out there a little bit.
If you’re always sitting at home making no effort to stay in touch with people, go to events, or take the initiative to invite people to things, your life is probably going to be pretty bland.
So start by working on your social life and creating contacts. There are always people to meet through the workplace, friendship groups, and by going to networking events.
Do some research to see if any events are coming up that interest you. Make an effort to go to these events and chat with people. Stay in contact with friends, and don’t decline opportunities to meet their friendship groups.
The more you generally put yourself out there on all fronts, whether it’s making more of a name for yourself in your workplace, networking at events, or engaging the online social sphere more, naturally the more opportunities are going to show up.
Keep an Open Mind
Have you ever been invited to something and thought it would suck? But then you ended up doing it, and certainly didn’t regret it?
Well, think about everything in this way. There are so many things that we turn down regularly because we either don’t have time, feel uncomfortable, or the opportunity doesn’t even register because we’re so caught up in routine.
Maybe someone starts chatting to you at a cafe. Instead of engaging in the conversation and seeing what you can learn from it, you dismiss the person, often unconsciously.
Maybe some people at work will invite you out to do something. You feel like it might be a bit awkward, so you don’t go out and don’t strengthen the connection with your colleagues.
Suddenly, you’re on the outside of your workplace, and those colleagues never become more than colleagues because you didn’t take the opportunity to get to know them better. You had the opportunity, but you closed your mind to it.
How about trying something new for the sake of experiencing it? Even if you don’t think you’ll enjoy it, what do you have to lose from giving it a shot?
This is why it’s important to keep an open mind because you never know what you might enjoy. If you base your decisions on what you think might happen, then you’re not allowing yourself to explore a little and discover new things in life, and you close yourself off.
Weighing Up the Opportunity Cost
The opportunity cost is what you would have missed out on if you didn’t take an opportunity that was presented.
Think about it this way. If you don’t take an opportunity to meet some acquaintances for a coffee, you miss out on creating deeper connections with them. If you seldom get out of your comfort zone, you forgo the competence you would gain otherwise.
It’s important to think about the opportunity cost for every decision you make. Assessing the opportunity cost gives you some sort of framework that allows you to decide on an unbiased lens.
Therefore, ask yourself what you would gain by pursuing any given opportunity. Likewise, ask yourself what you could lose.
If you’re struggling to make a decision, write down all the potential benefits and all the potential setbacks of pursuing that particular opportunity. If the pros outweigh the cons, act on it.
Always exercise caution, but donโt let moderated cautiousness mutate into paranoia. Some situations are dangerous. Some are not worth the potential loss-to-gain ratio.
If the opportunity doesn’t seem like it’s worth the potential payoff, don’t follow through with it. But if you identify that it’s solely fear holding you back and taking the opportunity is likely a good move, then do it.
It’s important to not instantly dismiss any opportunity that’s presented. Make sure you give it some consideration, weigh up the potential risks, and then decide whether to jump on it or not.
Another Way to Look At Challenges
Viewing everything that happens to me in a frame of personal growth drives the opportunity mentality. Instead of defaulting to not doing something because it pushes me out of my comfort zone, I think about how it will help me grow as a person.
If I’m invited to a social outing with people I don’t know, I might feel a little uncomfortable, and my first instinct will be not to go. After all, it’s much more comfortable to stay home. But if I let that little voice win, then I’m sure it won’t be a one-off occurrence.
So I need to challenge that voice with the growth voice and think about why it would be beneficial for me to do it. What would I potentially miss out on if I decided not to take the opportunity?
That’s the side of me that says, ‘It might be uncomfortable, I might even regret it, but trying something and having a bad time will make me feel a whole lot better than not experiencing it at all.
Whenever you’re presented with a challenge in your life, look at it in a way that it’s there to push you to grow. Because if we weren’t challenged, we would probably just stay and same and get nowhere.
The most competent people have usually had some pretty big challenges in their lives. But instead of feeling defeated by those challenges, they strove to grow from them.
The result? They become more capable people who can handle a lot more. They know that future obstacles are just temporary barriers that lead to even more growth, so they move toward them rather than away from them. After all, why wouldn’t you when you see how beneficial they are for you, even though sometimes they suck?
This is the mentality you need to adopt.
Any obstacle in your life is there to teach you valuable skills. You just need the determination, ingenuity, and perseverance to overcome those obstacles, and you’ll find that those obstacles are essential to building you into the person you want to become.
Overcoming Resistance to Change
Life is constantly presenting you with choices. If you feel like nothing ever happens, it’s because you’re not being proactive. If opportunities aren’t coming to you, you need to start seeking them out.
A big reason why you’re not seeking out opportunities is because you’re avoidant. You’re complacent in a life where you’re not struggling enough to force change, but you don’t have a big enough incentive to change either. I call this the stagnation zone.
When you’re in your comfort zone, it’s important to start moving the needle in any way possible. Think about what you can gain from having new experiences, and how these new experiences can lead to better things.
If you view your life in a frame of personal growth, this should incentivize you to change things up. Then it comes to discipline. This means making decisions that will benefit you and forcing yourself to follow through.
You will disappoint yourself at times, and it’s okay. Remember, your life is built up brick by brick. You need to commit to change before you begin to see it manifesting in your life.