You can use this post to reclaim your sanity and reset your whole trajectory, at any time…

If you feel stuck, anxious, angry, outraged, regretful or any of the more than 100 negative emotions that we all experience from time to time, this post will give you some MindShifting tools to help.

Unfortunately, we are living in an era of constant change, interruptions, disagreements, and disappointments; but MindShifting is a framework for interrupting our limbic reactions.

Below are 36 specific questions you can use to help access your own abilities, and meet whatever situation you are in, with a sense of resourcefulness, resilience, and collaboration.

RESOURCEFULNESS

Defined

Resourcefulness is the ability to transform challenges, outcomes, and even failures into useful information that fuels future success. When things don’t go as planned, our brains often push us toward blame, frustration, or even surrender. MindShifting teaches us to notice those reflexive reactions and replace them with curiosity, allowing us to explore what happened and uncover new paths forward. By shifting out of reactive thinking and into constructive analysis, we reclaim our power and find opportunity—even in adversity.

Intro Questions

• “What’s one thing you’re good at that others often miss?”
• “When have you felt creative or resourceful? What were you doing?”
• “What options do you have that you haven’t considered yet?”
• “If you had to solve this problem with what you have (not what you don’t have), what would you do?”

Intermediate Questions

• “What belief is limiting your sense of options in this situation?”
• “How might this problem be an opportunity in disguise?”
• “If you were advising a friend with this problem, what would you suggest?”
• “What would resourcefulness look like here? How is it different from what you’re currently doing?”

Deep Reflection Questions

• “What’s keeping you from trusting your own resourcefulness?”
• “How might your relationship to problems shift if you saw them as invitations to be resourceful?”
• “What part of yourself have you not yet developed that would help here?”
• “If resourcefulness is a skill, what’s your practice plan to develop it?”

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RESILIENCE

Resilience goes beyond grit. It’s not just about powering through difficulty—it’s about learning how to bounce back with purpose. Resilience is the capacity to take any result, whether expected or not, and feed it back into our growth process. Through MindShifting, we practice interrupting the spiral of disappointment and re-engaging with clarity and intention. By shifting our mindset, we can recover more quickly and continue moving toward success with adaptability and inner strength.

Surface Questions

• “What’s something you’ve bounced back from? How did you do it?”
• “What do you do when you feel discouraged?”
• “Who’s someone you see as resilient? What do they do?”
• “What’s one thing you learned from a failure?”

Intermediate Questions

• “What’s the difference between resilience and just ‘toughing it out’?”
• “If failure is data, not defeat, what data are you getting from a current situation?”
• “How might your relationship to setbacks change if you saw them as teachers?”
• “What would it look like to be both vulnerable AND resilient?”

Deep Reflection Questions

• “What belief about failure is limiting your resilience?”
• “Where did you learn that mistakes = something being wrong with you?”
• “What becomes possible when you can hold failure + growth at the same time?”
• “How might you need to grieve or forgive yourself to move forward?”

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COLLABORATION

Defined

Collaboration isn’t about being agreeable—it’s about forward momentum through meaningful connection. MindShifting teaches us to navigate disagreement with clarity and flexibility. We learn to choose the right conflict resolution tools for the moment, to frame conversations in ways that invite alignment, and to understand the perspectives of others without getting derailed. Through this lens, collaboration becomes a powerful, strategic skill rooted in connection—even when faced with resistance.

Surface Questions

• “When have you worked well with someone? What made it work?”
• “What’s hard about collaboration for you?”
• “What’s one thing you could do differently to strengthen this relationship?”
• “How do you typically respond when you disagree with someone?”

Intermediate Questions

• “If the other person isn’t the problem, what’s actually getting in the way here?”
• “What would it look like to approach this person with curiosity instead of judgment?”
• “What might they be experiencing that you haven’t considered?”
• “How might this conflict be an invitation to deepen the relationship?”

Deep Reflection Questions

• “What belief about the other person is keeping you from collaborating?”
• “What would need to be true about them (and you) for collaboration to feel possible?”
• “How might your need to be right be costing you connection?”
• “What becomes possible when you stop trying to fix them + start trying to understand them?”

What You Can Do Next

These are thirty six questions.

You can’t memorize and become fluent in all thirty six at once.

On the other hand, if you just accept that and move on to some other activity, you are not giving yourself the opportunity to reclaim your sanity and reset your trajectory.

I’d like to leave you with a challenge:

What is one thing you can do every day for the next week to make at least a few of these tools accessible to you when needed?

BTW…You’ll be more likely to follow through if you leave a comment to this post saying what you intend to do.

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To learn more about the MindShifting framework:

http://www.MindSiftingwithMitch.com

http://www.MindShiftingwithMitch.blog

Conflict and Collaboration on Amazon