Your mindset influences everything: Your decisions, relationships, emotions, and direction in life. There are three subconscious mindsets that could get in the way of you living your dream life.

Here, neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff reveals how to drop the old scripts and adopt an experimental mindset.

ANNE-LAURE LE CUNFF: A mindset is a default way of seeing the world. And our mindsets influence so many things in our lives. They influence our decisions. They influence our relationships. They influence the way we think and even the way we feel. When we're not aware of our mindsets, they can impact the direction of our life, the path that we're taking without us even realizing it. Being aware of your mindsets is the difference between living a conscious life, where you're making choices in accord with what you actually want and going where you actually wanna go, versus being on autopilot and having those mindsets subconsciously drive all of your decisions. The great thing about mindsets is that they can actually change, but the first step is to make them conscious. I divide my life into two separate chapters. In the first one, I had a very linear approach that was driven by traditional definitions of success. I did my best to do well in school, and then I got a good job at Google, and then I tried to climb the corporate ladder, getting a promotion, working on the best projects possible. And from an external standpoint, I should have been happy, but I wasn't. Instead, I was feeling empty inside; I was both bored and burned out. I left my job at Google, thinking that I should try to do something different and not realizing that I was following yet another script of success. I decided to start a startup. And again, I didn't find happiness there by following this idea of success that everyone around me was following. It's only when my startup failed and that, for the very first time in my life, I didn't have a clear idea of what I was supposed to do next in order to be successful, that I finally asked myself: What is it that I wanted to do? What would make me happy, even if I forgot about the traditional definition of success? And so I went back to the drawing board, and I started thinking about what I was curious about. Again, not based on traditional definitions of success. What were topics I would be excited to explore, even if nobody was watching? And for me, that was the brain. I had always been fascinated with why we think the way we think and why we feel the way we feel. So I decided to go back to university to study neuroscience. I completed my graduate studies, and I got a PhD in neuroscience. Throughout this journey, I decided to learn in public, and this is how I started my newsletter. Every week, I would pick a topic that I had discovered in my studies in university, and I would take those neuroscience insights and turn them into practical tools that I would write about in the newsletter to help other people apply them in their life and work. This tiny experiment of starting to write online and sharing what I was learning in public was the beginning of my work of trying to understand how we can live more experimental lives. There are three subconscious mindsets that get in the way of us living happy, conscious lives. These three mindsets are called the cynical mindset, the escapist mindset, and the perfectionist mindset. The cynical mindset is when we have lost all curiosity and ambition in life, and we're actually sometimes even making fun of earnest people who still have this high level of curiosity and ambition. When we're cynical, we feel like there's no point in trying because we're in survival mode all the time, so things that we might be doing instead are doom scrolling, sitting on the sofa, going through negative news, being stuck in this cycle, and then maybe even spending a lot of time and energy discussing and debating those negative news with other people. In the escapist mindset, we're still curious, but we have decided to let go of our ambitions. With the escapist mindset, we're trying to do everything we can to escape our responsibilities. That can take the form of retail therapy, binge-watching, or dream planning our next vacation instead of doing something right now to change our lives. In the perfectionist mindset, we try to escape uncertainty through work, so we have high ambition but low curiosity. That might look like self-coercion, overworking ourselves, toxic productivity. Our goals are driving all of our decisions. We feel like if we manage to achieve that goal, if we manage to be successful then then we'll be happy. You can picture those three subconscious mindsets on the four-by-four metrics, where the two different factors are curiosity and ambition. In the case of the cynical mindset, it's low curiosity, low ambition; for the escapist mindset, high curiosity but low ambition; and with the perfectionist mindset, you do have high ambition, but you have decided to let go of your curiosity. Those mindsets are actually very fluid, and they might change depending on our situation and different triggers and different ambitions that we might have at the moment. This is actually really good news because that means that these mindsets are not fixed personality traits. We can change them by becoming aware of them and then making the decision to change our mindsets. This is something we can achieve. There is an alternative to those three mindsets, which is called the experimental mindset. This is a mindset where your curiosity and your ambition are both high. In an experimental mindset, you're open to uncertainty. You see it as an opportunity to explore, to grow, and to learn. Having an experimental mindset helps us completely reimagine our relationship to ambition and to goals. When you have an experimental mindset, instead of chasing those linear goals that give you the illusion of certainty, you're open to designing experiments. Instead of trying to get to a specific outcome, you start from a research question. Anytime you don't understand something, it doesn't create fear, it creates curiosity. Having an experimental mindset means seeing failures as data points that you can learn from. It means being open to making mistakes because you know you're going to learn from them. It means embracing the fact that you might not have a plan, that you don't know what's coming, and this is great. It means that you can design your life in a way that is conscious and connected. The idea of cultivating an experimental mindset is based on the scientific method, and this is very simple. First, you start by observing your current situation by looking at the world around you. Then you ask a research question, and you design a tiny experiment to collect data, which you can then analyze. Based on those results, you can decide what your next step is. What's great about that is that even though you don't know where you're going, you can trust that you're going to grow through each cycle of experimentation. To design an experiment, you need to commit to curiosity. A great way to do this is to design what I call a pact. This is a commitment device where you say, "I am going to run this experiment." The way it works is that you choose one action, and you then decide on a duration, and you say, "I will perform this action for this specific duration. Why does it look like that? There are several reasons. The first one is that when a scientist designs an experiment, they design in advance on the number of trials. You don't simply stop in the middle if the results don't really look like what you expected. You collect all of the data, and once you have all of that data, you can analyze it and decide what the answer is. The second reason is that it allows you to notice when you're falling prey to the maximized brain. You can make sure that you're keeping your experiment tiny enough that you're actually going to complete it by choosing a duration that is reasonable, something you can actually achieve, so you can collect all of the necessary data. A pact is purposeful. It needs to be something you care about, and what's great is that when each pact you design has purpose imbued into it, you don't need to have a grand purpose in life. A pact is actionable. This is something that you need to be able to do right now. You don't need extra resources. You don't need help from other people. This is something you can try straight away. A pact is continuous. This is something that you need to do regularly. Again, you decide on the duration, the number of trials, and then you say, "I'm going to do this action for two weeks. I'm going to do this action for two months. I'm going to do this action for one year." And finally, a pact is trackable, not measurable. You don't need complicated metrics. You only need to be able to say whether you did it or not. Did you do the action? Did you perform it? Yes or no? That's the only tracking you need. A pact is not a New Year resolution. This is not something that you decide on that is very ambitious at the beginning of the year and that you're going to abandon. This is something small and achievable that you can start doing at any point during the year. A pact is not a habit either. The difference between a habit and an experiment is that, with a habit, you're very clear that this is something that's going to be good for you, and so you commit to it for an indefinite amount of time. For example, you say, "Starting today, I'm going to go to bed at the same time." Whereas, with an experiment, you're not quite sure whether this is going to work for you or not. You're going to test it, and so you're going to say, "I'm going to go to bed at the same time every night for two weeks. And then only I'm going to decide whether this is good for me or not and whether I want to turn it into a habit." A pact is not a KPI, an OKR, a performance metric, or however people call them in the corporate world. It's really just about learning something new. It's not about being successful or getting to a specific outcome. Once you've completed your pact and you've gone through the entire duration of that data collection phase, you can finally look at the data. I highly encourage you, while you're running your pact, to take little notes. It can be very simple, a few bullet points on your phone, something in your journal, but just to keep track of whether you did it or not and how it felt. Based on that, you can make the decision to either persist with your pact as is because it works for you. You can also pause it if you feel like that's not really something you want to keep going with. Or you can pivot, which means making a little tweak and changing something before you start your next cycle of experimentation. A lot of us tend to only pay attention to external data or internal data when we're analyzing our experiments. For example, we might only look at the external metrics of success or only at the internal feelings that we might be experiencing. But both are very valuable in order to make the right decision when it comes to your next steps. The external signals might show you whether this is something that is worth pursuing in terms of financial success or career or any ambition that you might want to explore. But the internal signals are also very important. There's no point being successful externally if it feels horrible to work on this project. And equally, if it feels really good, but you have no way to sustain yourself with this project, it might be worth reconsidering the parameters to find a way where you can have an overlap between external success and also internal positive feelings and emotions of working on this. Let me give you an example. I designed an experiment where I wanted to explore whether I wanted to become a YouTuber. This was something I had noticed a lot of friends around me doing, and they seemed to have a lot of fun. That piqued my curiosity enough that I wanted to give it a try. So I designed a pact, and I said, "I'm going to publish a video every week until the end of the year." Very simple pact, which I completed. Every week, I published a new video. At the end of my pact, I looked at the data. External data? Pretty good. Looking at the traditional metrics of success of a YouTube channel, I got to a good number of subscribers, a lot of positive comments. People seemed to like the videos, and I even had some people reaching out and asking if we could collaborate together. But internal data. I actually did not enjoy producing these videos. Every week, when I had to sit down in front of the camera, I was dreading it. I love having face-to-face conversations with people and seeing their reactions in real-time, but just looking at a camera with no feedback whatsoever was very uncomfortable for me. As a result, every week I was procrastinating for so long every time I had to film a video. I felt deeply anxious, and I was not even able to work on anything else on those days where I was supposed to film. This is a typical example showing why it is so important to considering both the external and the internal signals before making a decision. Based on this, even though the YouTube channel was fairly successful in such a short amount of time, I decided to stop. I realized that I was not going to be a YouTuber, and I prefer to keep on writing my newsletter. You can run tiny experiments in all areas of your life. In work, for example, you could say, "I'm going to write an internal newsletter every week for the next six weeks, where I share the most interesting links that I find." In relationships, you could say, "I'm going every Sunday to sit down and send a note to a friend I haven't talked to in a while." And even when it comes to your health, you could say, "I'm going to go for a walk for 20 minutes for 20 days to see how I feel at the end of that experiment." With an experiment, you're not making any assumptions as to whether this is going to work for you or not. A habit that a friend has, for example, going for a run three times a week, might not be that good for you. Maybe when it comes to your health and body movement, you prefer dancing or something else. That's why it's interesting to run an experiment before committing to a habit. When it comes to running, for example, you could say, "I'm going to try that. I am going to go and run three times a week for three weeks, not for the rest of my life. And at the end of the three weeks, I'm going to decide whether this is what I wanna keep doing or if I wanna experiment with another way to move my body." In essence, committing to curiosity is ensuring that you're going to live a life that is intentional, that you're going to live your life, not the life that other people are expecting you to live. Curiosity keeps you adaptable and nimble in an ever-changing world. It ensures that you stay open to new possibilities, and, frankly, it just makes life more fun. This all might sound philosophical, but there's actually a lot of neuroscientific research showing that when we experience thirst for water, the same parts of the brain activate then when we experience thirst for information. So when we say, "I'm thirsty for knowledge; I wanna learn more; I wanna know more," we couldn't be more right. And thinking about your own mindsets, developing this self-awareness is really just a way to direct this curiosity towards the things that you actually wanna do with your life.