Excerpt from Book 02 – THINK

This is the first twenty pages of book #2 in the series - THINK. This is about understanding your mindset, how it works and how to get the most out of it.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION AND MY STORY (If You're Interested)

PART ONE – THE STRUCTURAL MIND

Chapter 1 - The Problem Of Mindset

Chapter 2 - The Ecosystem Of Mindset

Chapter 3 - The Negotiator Within

Chapter 4 - The Economy Of Energy

Chapter 5 - The Shadows Of Mindset

Chapter 6 - The Blindspots Of Mindset

Chapter 7 - The Rhythms And Cycles Of Mindset

Chapter 8 - The Stacking Of Mindsets

Chapter 9 - The Shift Of Mindsets

Chapter 10 - Social Conditioning And Reprogramming

Chapter 11 - The Maintenance Of Mindset

PART TWO - THE OPERATIONAL MINDSET

Chapter 12 - Maximising The Mindsets Operational Ability

Chapter 13 - Tools And Processes For Mindset Optimisation

Chapter 14 - Insights For Operational Mastery

Chapter 15 - Living In Alignment: The Long Game Of Mindset

Chapter 16 - The Custodian And The Long Game

PART THREE - WHAT MINDSET REALLY IS  (The Part Everyone Seems To Skip)

Chapter 17 - Mindset: The Hidden Operating System Behind Your Life

Chapter 18 - The Hidden Mindsets Nobody Talks About

Chapter 19 - Your Mindset Balance: The Balance Of The Different Areas Of Your Life

PART FOUR - THE MINDSET PARTS: HOW OUR MINDSET IS MORE THAN ONE PART

Chapter 20 - The Inner Ecosystem: You’re Not One Mind, You’re Many

Chapter 21 - The Negotiator Mind: The Real Decision-Maker You Never Knew You Had

Chapter 22 - The Energy Economy of Your Mind

Chapter 23 - Perspective: The Lens We Look Through

PART FIVE - THE DIVISION OF OUR MINDSET

Chapter 24 - How Our Mindset Gets Split

Chapter 25 - Social Conditioning: How We Are Taught To Split Our Mindset

Chapter 26 - Invisible Contracts: The Hidden Agreements Running Your Life

Chapter 27 - Duality: How The Spectrum Includes Everything

PART SIX - THE REBUILD: HOW TO TAKE BACK THE CONTROLS

Chapter 28 - The Alignment OS: Resetting Your Internal System

Chapter 29 - The Mindset Atlas: Mapping Your Psychological Terrain

Chapter 30 - Aligned Mind: How Authenticity Affects Our Mindset

Chapter 31 - The Gravity Of The Familiar

Chapter 32 - The Cost Of Telling Yourself The Truth And Lying

Chapter 33 - The Power Of Words: Rewriting The Voice That Shapes You

Chapter 34 - From Victim to Victor: Reclaiming Your Inner Power

Chapter 35 - The Mindset Feedback Loop

Chapter 36 - You Get What You Focus On

PART SEVEN - TOOLS FOR LONG-TERM ALIGNMENT

Chapter 37 - The Energy Audit

Chapter 38 - The Authenticity Framework

Chapter 39 - Mindset Time Horizons

Chapter 40 - 30 Days To A Stronger Mindset

PART EIGHT - THE FUTURE SELF: SUSTAINABLE GROWTH THROUGH A TRUE PARTNERSHIP WITH YOUR MIND

Chapter 41 - When Your Mind Becomes an Ally

Chapter 42 - The Return to Self

PART NINE - ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION AND MY STORY (If You're Interested)

The human mindset has always fascinated me ever since I was a teenager. I had a P.E. (Physical Education) teacher named Mr Randall who was a little out there, and one day after a light weights workout at the local recreation centre, he told us to lay on the floor as we were about to meditate. We begrudgingly agreed. I lay on the concrete floor with its thin industrial carpet wearing just my shorts and a t-shirt. It was the middle of winter so there was a chill in the air.

Mr Randall started to say in a low monotonous voice “You're laying on a beach. You can feel the sun on you, you can hear the waves crashing, the heat of the sand radiating up beneath you. You can hear the sand crunching as people walk by.” He then proceeded to recite over and over again “You can feel the sun on your skin, you can feel the heat radiating up from the sand” and within a few minutes I started to sweat. Middle of winter, wearing next to nothing, not doing anything. This was my introduction to the power of our mindset. Mind blown.

Since then I have read lots of books and even though I gained more understanding from them, some left me scratching my head as I felt they lacked a little something, or where something was missing.

A lot of books seemed to talk about a small focused portion of mindset. They could also go into great detail about the biological structure of the brain, which is all very interesting and ultimately boring. I feel that they implied that mindset was like a single switch that could be thrown. Think growth versus fixed mindset, positive thinking etc.

I always felt that mindset was a lot more involved than we anticipated. The more that we learn about mindset, the more we realise there is to learn. Even if you look at mindset as just the brain, the more we learn about the brain, the more we realise that there is to learn. Mindset is so much more than just the brain.

What I am looking to achieve with this book is to map, design, and sustain a mindset that serves every area of your life. As I believe that the mindset is far more complex than we realise I wanted to explore it from a few different points of view. You will find that this book presents a few different angles to this very complex bit of machinery that resides somewhere within our brains. The first two parts will read like a typical book and these two parts are designed to give you an overview of what I believe is what the mind is about. The third part starts to explore it in greater depth and the parts after offer exercises and processes that help you understand and get the most out of you and your mindset. The remaining parts explore various parts of what our mindset consists of and offers various tools you can use and exercises to further your understanding of your mindset and how to get the most out of it.

Just a note, whilst you are reading this book, you will find that there are exercises, processes, or tools for you to do, practice or implement so you can achieve your results. In order for you to easily notice these aspects so you don't miss them, the font will look like this in size and style to clarify for you to do this part personally. Keep an eye out for it.

WARNING: Reading this book is likely to lead to a situation where you won't be able to go back to what and who you were, because once you become aware of what you have the potential to be, you will know too much and feel compelled to move forward and to improve.

More Of My Story (If You Are Still Interested)

A great example of our perspective and how it influences our lives, was what I encountered when my first wife left, in not very pleasant circumstances. It left me battling many negative and potentially damaging perspectives. This left me facing a dilemma. I could have adopted a mindset that a lot of people seem to adopt after an emotionally, and financially damaging situation like a seperation/divorce and that is to generalise and blanket label the opposite gender as a derogatory negative. This is of course, in reality not true and is a coping mechanism that is designed to protect from getting hurt further and to avoid future pain. Thankfully, I knew lots of quality women so it was incumbent on me as someone who wanted to be a better version of myself to keep a positive view of women and people in general.

This is one aspect of mindset that has a massive impact on my life and sadly which most tend to downplay which is how we see the world and the people in it. I know that I certainly did. It is well documented that people can see the same event and recall the details in different ways and seem to have seen a different event. Consider the illustration to the left. Both of the characters are looking at the same item, yet see it totally different to each other.

This was one of the big lessons that I learned. The way that we see something is the way that we see something. It is generally not right and it's generally not wrong either. It's just the way that we see things. You like a particular movie and I wasn't keen on it. Does that mean it was a good movie or a crap movie. It's just a perspective and that applies to most things.

These days I am far more inclined to listen to a different perspective as it may reveal something that I have missed or something that I hadn't considered. I certainly would hesitate to argue over a perspective, especially if I don't have certainty over the way that I see something.

My mindset many years ago was a very ineffective mindset and one that set me up for all sorts of issues. I had many habits that kept me down and struggling just to function.

The first habit was to beat myself up over every slight. If I made a mistake, I berated myself. If I felt I was a certain way, I would dwell on that perception incessantly. If the behaviour or reaction of a certain person hurt me, and I said nothing, I would call myself all sorts of names. This went on for many years, this downward spiral that never seemed to reverse, until I came across a saying. The saying was “If you are always beating yourself up, the moment you meet a real enemy, you are already outnumbered.” After this, I worked on being more gentle with myself.

Around this time, I attended a talk by Jim Rohn, a well known speaker. During his talk he mentioned something that hit home. He talked about a time that he was talking with his mentor and his mentor asked him to list all the reasons that he hadn't achieved what he had set out to achieve. Of course, Mr Rohn listed the job market, his employer, the government, his paycheck, his lack of family support, taxes being too high, and so on. His mentor looked at the list and said “There's one problem with this list. You're not on it.” That started me thinking about my own victimhood. This was my second habit, that of playing the victim.

A while later I stumbled upon another saying. “When you are blaming someone and pointing your finger at them, remember there are three pointing back at you.” It was a hard thing to admit, my so easily playing the victim. I denied for quite some time that I was playing a victim. I justified my behaviour and my results, I persisted in blaming others. Eventually though, I had to admit that I was playing the victim.

There was a good thing about admitting that I had actually created my results and not everyone and everything else. That was, that if I had unconsciously created everything in my past, I could consciously create everything in my future. That led to me doing many things to take control of my future.

I did have one mindset change that had an impact on my life. I was brought up as many men are, denying aspects of my character. “Don't cry,” “Don't show weakness,” etc. Because of this, there were moments in my life that I felt useless and powerless. During my second marriage, my then wife's mother passed away. Due to my disconnection from the part of me that would be empathetic, and supportive, I did nothing. I didn't ask her how she was doing, if there was anything that I could do, I just glossed over it like it never happened.

By the time I met my current wife, I had been working on myself and had embraced that part of me that was disempowered. This meant that I could now step into my power and be supportive and empathetic as I should be. What I realised was that I was inhabiting only one part of the spectrum that represents me.

Allow me to explain. There was a well known book published many years ago where the author proposed that one gender originated from a particular planet and the other gender originated from a different planet. I read this book and originally thought it was a good book. I certainly could see where they were going with the content. I certainly hope that the author has evolved their viewpoint a little more than they did back then.

Anyway, something bothered me and I couldn't put my finger on it. It was only some years later that it dawned on me as I looked at my own situation. It's not that each gender originates from a particular planet. That is way too generalising. I realised that there is a spectrum of these two mindsets and we each gravitate naturally toward a particular position on that spectrum. I'll explain how this impacted my life through this change in mindset. Imagine a spectrum as below.

●----------------------------x-------------------------------------------------------●

Masculine Feminine

On one end of this spectrum is pure 100% masculine energy. On the other end of the spectrum is 100% pure feminine energy. In the middle is a 50/50 mix of both and where the little x is, is where I naturally gravitate. My problem was that I stayed to the masculine side and didn't acknowledge or move to the feminine side which is where I could have supported my second wife.

Because this spectrum has nothing to do with gender and only with energy, I realised that I could step into my feminine energy, support whoever I needed to support, or whatever the situation called for, and then gravitate back to my natural position. It also meant that I could move to a more masculine energy if needed and then move back to the x. I have done both of these numerous times. I will be exploring this further in other books. However, for me it was a massive realisation that I could do this and be happier and more effective in my mindset, just with this small shift of understanding.

Here is another example from my life that could have had a massive impact on my life had I not succumbed to a fearful and negative mindset. Many years ago I was working for a lovely lady as a graphic artist. This is before we had computers as well. You had to actually be able to draw. Yes, I am that old. We had a lull in our workload and she asked me if I would like to earn some cash washing her car. Of course, I agreed.

As I was washing her car, I had the idea of washing the cars of other people in the building that we worked in. I then thought, wow, this could be a business. This is a number of years before mobile car washes were a thing. At the time, the Australian government would give you an interest-free loan so that they could boost local business. All you had to do was provide a profit and loss sheet, and a income projection sheet. The trouble was that I had no idea what they were and fear and doubt got the better of me. I didn't do anything.

A few years later, the first mobile carwashes appeared. I beat myself up because I could have been the first and that would have changed my life. These days, because I can look at it without the fear and doubt and also with a more mature and balanced mindset, I can realise some things. I could have asked the lady I worked for. I could have asked my maternal; grandparents who owned a newsagency. I could have asked my grandmothers sister and husband who owned a successful garden nursery. Because I allowed my fear to dominate and put me in a negative downward spiral, I didn't do anything. These days, I give things a go. I had to learn a different mindset though.

There are many things about mindset that influence our lives. What follows are a lot of things that I realised and now understand about that lump of gray mush that we call our brain and its mindset. Enjoy and make sure to give it all a go.

PART ONE

THE STRUCTURAL MIND

CHAPTER 1

THE PROBLEM OF MINDSET

There is a quiet architect behind everything we do, a force so close to us that we rarely see it clearly. It shapes the stories we tell ourselves, the energy we wake with, the choices we defend, and the limits we never question. It is not our intelligence, our personality, or even our beliefs alone, it is the living ecosystem of our mindset.

Mindset is not a single thought or a fixed philosophy. It is the total weather pattern of our inner world. It decides what gets sunlight and what remains in shadow. It negotiates between our fears and our ambitions, our ideals and our excuses. And like any ecosystem, it can become lush and generative, or stagnant and hostile, depending on how it is tended.

Yet most of us inherit our mindset unconsciously. It is formed in the heat of childhood, reinforced by culture, and solidified by repetition until we mistake its contours for the edges of reality itself. We do not think about our mindset, we think through it. And that is the problem.

The human mind is astonishingly capable of adaptation, but it is equally capable of entrapment. Once a pattern of thought has proven useful, the mind prefers efficiency over evolution. It reuses familiar paths even when they no longer lead anywhere worthwhile. What begins as protection turns into prison. The “I” who once shaped the mindset now becomes the one shaped by it.

This is the quiet tragedy of the modern psyche: we have mastered the external world, its technologies, its networks, its dazzling abundance, but neglected the internal architecture that interprets it all. Our mindset is the unseen filter through which every experience, relationship, and opportunity is translated. If that filter is distorted, the entire picture of our life bends with it.

And yet, here lies the premise and the promise. The same system that traps us also holds the key to our liberation. Mindset is plastic, alive, and endlessly reconfigurable. When you begin to see your mindset not as a fixed identity but as an evolving ecosystem, you discover that change is not only possible, it is natural.

You learn that your inner conflicts are not enemies but negotiations for balance. You learn that the shadows in your mind are not flaws but vital compost for growth. You begin to sense the rhythms and cycles of your energy, the tides of clarity, the seasons of renewal, and how to move with them rather than against them. You begin to build not just a better mindset, but a sustainable relationship with your own consciousness.

The purpose of this book is not to hand you a new set of thoughts to replace the old ones. It is to help you see how thoughts form, why they cling, and when to release them. It is about understanding your mindset as a dynamic organism, capable of negotiation, evolution, and profound intelligence when allowed to breathe.

Through these chapters, we will explore the machinery of your mind: its hidden patterns, blind spots, and adaptive tricks, the subtle exchanges of energy that govern attention and emotion, the ways social conditioning programs your inner scripts; and, most importantly, the tools for reprogramming and maintaining your mental ecosystem so it serves your highest aims.

By the end, you will not merely “think differently.” You will relate differently, to yourself, to others, and to the living field of ideas you inhabit every day.

So before we begin, pause for a moment. Feel the quiet hum of your own awareness, the steady pulse behind the noise of your thoughts. That hum is the engine of everything that follows. This book is not about adding more noise to it, it is about helping you tune it, understand its rhythm, and learn to play it consciously.

The problem of mindset is that it never stops operating. The promise of mindset is that it can evolve as far as you are willing to go. Between those two truths lies the adventure of becoming.

And that is where we start.

CHAPTER 2

THE ECOSYSTEM OF MINDSET

Every organism survives within an ecosystem, a network of interdependent forces that regulate its growth, energy, and evolution. The same is true of your inner world. Your mindset is not a single structure sitting in your skull, it is a living system composed of beliefs, emotions, habits, and perceptions, all influencing one another in subtle and astonishing ways.

To understand mindset as an ecosystem is to realise that no thought exists in isolation. Every idea has roots in experience, and every emotion is a weather event in the climate of consciousness. Change one element, and the balance of the whole begins to shift.

Most people treat mindset as a switch, either positive or negative, fixed or growth-oriented, but switches belong to machines, not living systems. A healthy mindset cannot be toggled on by motivation or reset by affirmations. It must be cultivated, the way a gardener tends soil, prunes dead growth, and learns the rhythm of the seasons.

Think of your mindset as made of several interacting environments:

The Terrain Of Belief, where your assumptions about yourself and the world take root.

The Climate Of Emotion, which governs what ideas flourish and which wither.

The Waters Of Attention, flowing toward whatever you value or fear.

The Fauna Of Habit, the creatures of repetition that shape behaviour and maintain stability.

The Unseen Currents Of Energy, subtle yet powerful, directing how you invest mental and emotional effort.

Each part sustains the others. A shift in one domain, say, a change in emotional climate, can cause drought or growth across the whole ecosystem. This is why people can make surface-level changes (a new goal, a new habit, a new mindset trick) and still find themselves repeating the same internal struggles. They changed the foliage, not the soil.

When your mindset ecosystem is balanced, it has resilience. You recover from setbacks more quickly, see through distortions more clearly, and channel energy efficiently. But when imbalance creeps in, when fear crowds out curiosity, when habits choke growth, when attention becomes polluted by noise, the ecosystem begins to degrade. You may still function, but not flourish.

A degraded mindset doesn’t announce itself dramatically. It creeps in through exhaustion, cynicism, comparison, distraction. It whispers, “You’re just tired,” or “This is how life is.” The erosion of vitality feels ordinary until the day you realise you’ve been living in a desert of your own making.

Yet this is not cause for despair, it is an invitation to begin ecological restoration within your own consciousness. You can re-wild your mind. You can reintroduce lost species of thought, curiosity, wonder, self-trust. You can detoxify patterns that no longer serve you and cultivate new, more generative ones. The process is neither fast nor linear, but it is deeply human and profoundly worthwhile.

In the chapters that follow, we’ll explore the practical ecology of your inner world: how mindset mediates inner conflict, how it manages energy, how shadows and blind spots form, and how social conditioning plants invasive species in the garden of the mind. We’ll also examine the art of maintenance, how to sustain equilibrium once you’ve found it, and how to keep the ecosystem flexible enough to evolve.

A healthy mindset is not one that never falters. It’s one that recovers, adapts, and keeps learning. Evolution, not perfection, is the goal.

When you begin to see your mindset as an ecosystem, you stop trying to “fix” yourself and start learning to work with yourself. You stop fighting the seasons and start moving in rhythm with them. And in that cooperation, you discover something powerful, the mind is not your master, and it never was. It is your living landscape, waiting for you to become its conscious steward.

CHAPTER 3

THE NEGOTIATOR WITHIN

Inside every human being lives a council of voices. Some are loud and certain, others quiet but persistent. They argue, persuade, resist, and occasionally unite. This inner parliament is not chaos, it’s negotiation. And the negotiator presiding over it all is your mindset.

Mindset acts as the intermediary between your conscious choices and your unconscious drivers. It is the diplomat that tries to find harmony between your ideals and your instincts, between what you want to do and what you’re afraid to lose. When that negotiation goes well, you experience alignment, a feeling of flow, clarity, and momentum. When it goes badly, you experience conflict, tension, procrastination, and self-sabotage.

Most people interpret inner conflict as evidence of weakness or confusion. In truth, it’s evidence of complexity. You contain multitudes of versions. The version of you that seeks freedom may not yet trust the version that craves safety. The part that wants connection may not fully agree with the part that fears rejection. These contradictions aren’t flaws to eliminate, they’re competing values trying to find a workable treaty.

The problem arises when the negotiator, the mindset, starts playing favourites. It listens only to the voices that confirm its current worldview and dismisses the rest. A mindset that sides too much with fear becomes defensive and rigid. A mindset that sides too much with ambition becomes restless and unsatisfied. In both cases, imbalance creeps in.

The art of mindset mastery begins when you recognise this process for what it is, a continuous negotiation, not a civil war. The goal is not to silence dissenting parts of yourself but to understand what each is protecting. Fear is rarely irrational, it’s just outdated. It learned its job long ago when we operated from a more primitive mind that still resides deep within us, and it never got the memo that you’ve grown.

When you listen deeply to your own resistance, you often find intelligence hidden inside it. The inner critic may be trying (awkwardly) to keep you safe from humiliation. The procrastinator may be signalling exhaustion or lack of clarity. The perfectionist may be pleading for a sense of control in a chaotic world. Once the negotiator acknowledges these motives, they soften. They begin to cooperate instead of compete.

Mindset, then, is the quality of your internal diplomacy. A wise negotiator doesn’t impose peace by force, it cultivates understanding through awareness. It knows when to yield and when to stand firm. It balances energy between patience and action, reflection and risk. This is what we mean when we talk about being “centred.” Centring isn’t stillness, it’s equilibrium under movement.

In the same way that ecosystems thrive through diversity, your inner world thrives through integration. Every part of you, light and shadow, courage and fear, reason and intuition, deserves a seat at the table. A resilient mindset learns to translate their language. It turns conflict into dialogue, tension into information.

When that negotiation stabilises, something remarkable happens. Energy that was once trapped in internal argument becomes available for creation. Your system becomes efficient again. You begin to move through life not as a divided collection of impulses, but as an orchestra tuning to one shared rhythm.

As we continue, we’ll explore how this negotiation process also governs energy management, how your mindset allocates attention, emotion, and willpower throughout the day. Why some patterns drain you while others replenish you and how you can train your inner negotiator to budget energy as wisely as it balances values.

Because mindset is not only a mediator of meaning, it is also an economist of energy. And without that economy, even the most inspired vision runs out of fuel.

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