Building a growth mindset

Have you ever thought how your mindset affect your personal and career development? In 2006, in her book “Mindset: the new psychology of success”, the psychologist Carol Dweck, talked about her mindset theory, according to which, people have either a growth or a fixed mindset. This determines how they deal with challenges, obstacles and successes in their lives. People with a fixed mindset believe that skills, talents and intelligence cannot be changed, are innate and cannot be developed through effort and learning. They tend to avoid challenges and difficulties and give up easily when faced with obstacles and feel threatened by the success of others. People with a growth mindset, believe that abilities and talents can be developed through effort, persistence, and learning and tend to see failures as opportunities for learning and development.

The growth mindset helps you expand your possibilities, revise the way you deal with failures and gain more confidence. A fixed mindset on the other hand, can hold you back in your career and lead to lack of motivation and a sense of being stuck.

The goal of the growth mindset is for the individual to develop resilience in facing the challenges and obstacles of everyday life and to see them as opportunities for personal and professional development.

How can you develop a growth mindset in your everyday personal and professional life?

 Here are 7 ways to start developing a growth mindset:

1. Identify your own mindset. See how you approach challenges in your life and where you stand in relation to your mindset. You will realize that, when you see things from a growth mindset perspective, you tend to believe that you can develop your skills and knowledge through practice and persistence, but when you see things from a fixed mindset, you tend to believe that skills and knowledge are naturally predetermined, so there is no meaning to put effort in order to improve them. As a result, being in a fixed mindset, means that you give up easily a skill or a subject, when you reach to a level of effort, without practicing hard to improve it.
2. Look at your own improvements. See how you have been improved in an area or field, in relation to the past. By doing so, you reflect on which skills you have improved and which you need to work on.
3. Seek feedback. Seeking feedback from other people, whether it is your coworkers, friends or other trusted people in your life, help you gain insight into where you have been developed, or what you need to improve. In turn, this can help you set goals for improvement.
4. Adopt the power of word “yet”. This helps you realize that there will always be skills and fields that you are not good at yet, but with attempt and perseverance you can improve these areas. Facing things from the “yet” perspective, you see your weaknesses as strengths that have not yet developed.
5. Learn new things or activities. Challenge yourself to try something new. It could be learning a new language, a hobby or any other activity.
6. Allow yourself to make mistakes and be kind to yourself. Do not fear to make mistakes, but see them as an opportunity to learn from them. Show empathy to yourself and reflect on your self-talk.
7. Reflect on your values, goals and your passions. Take some time for self-reflection and be in touch with your inner self, your values, your passions and your goals. Do not afraid to change plan if the current does not work for you. We are often feeling stuck because we do not know our values, needs and passions. So, let yourself to know which your values and goals are, or seek a professional guidance to help you define them.

Building a growth mindset is something that will help you move forward in your life and will open up new opportunities in your personal and career life. If you are struggling making positive changes in your life and wish to explore the possibility of building a growth mindset, let’s chat about it.