How to orient your self to a growth mindset:
Much has been said and done about how our vision can limit or open up our personal potential. One could choose to have a fixed mindset and go about life with a limited sense of their own potential or one could choose a growth mindset and thrive with possibilities and a life budding with potential.
A growth mindset allows people to enjoy what they undertake and to enjoy it despite the challenges – with the belief that learning and improvement can take them beyond their current state of performance.
The power of the growth-oriented mindset motivates people to constant cultivate their abilities both physical and intellectual, through effort and practice. Such people are not discouraged by failure and instead of seeing their inability to reach a desired goal as failure, they see it as a learning curve.
So, what really happens when you assume that capabilities are not fixed and immutable – but simply faculties that may be developed and strengthened?
According to intelligence expert Robert Sternberg, the key to reaching a level of expertise is to be purposefully engaged. According to his two decades long research – people’s self-perception profoundly affects the way they lead their lives.
Then the question is what is the point in staying where you are and defending your efficacy while it remains static, when you can learn and level up. Why hide your weaknesses instead of overcoming them? If you are someone with a growth mindset, then you will be defined by stretching your limits and sticking to your hustle when the going gets tough and it will most certainly lead you to improving with a high possibility of overcoming. A fixed mindset on the other hand will lead to be overly concerned with judgements and equating success with how well you can prove your smartness or talent simply with the purpose of validating yourself.
A growth mindset will instead help you to change who you are and what you are capable of as you stretch your limits to learn something new and develop your potential further.
According to eminent sociologist Benjamin Barber, the wold is not made of weak and strong, or successes and failures, it is made of the learners and the non-learners.
So, people with growth mindsets are not afraid of challenges, they thrive on them – as facing a challenge and overcoming it represents progress to such personalities.
Rather than becoming disappointed when faced with a challenge growth-oriented people enjoy the process of becoming better, because they are not concerned with already being the best possible, they can be.
The legendary basketball coach – John Wooden says that until we begin to blame, we are not failures – or in other words taking ownership of our mistakes allows us to stay in the process of learning from them, hence minimising the negative impact of having failed.
French Executive Pierre Chevalier calls the French culture a culture of savoir-faire – a mixture of know-how and cool that allows you do things effortlessly. However, the growth mindset believes something else – that even geniuses have to work hard to achieve their goals.
Overall, the growth mindset allows people to love what they do, to enjoy it while they do it and to enjoy doing it even in the face of challenges. In fact, they find motivation in the setbacks and have the ability to take charge of the process and achieve success and to maintain it.
