In your daily life do you feel that your skills and abilities are capped at what you were born with. For example, being labeled a gifted kid early in elementary school and believing that this was the intelligence you have for the rest of your life. This was known as a fixed mindset where you view your abilities and intelligence as innate and finite. This fixed mindset was the predominant idea regarding intelligence and abilities but more recently the growth mindset has become popularized and is shaping how we view our innate intelligence. This blog will tackle how you can develop a growth mindset in order to make the most of your potential.
Table of Contents
Why is the Growth Mindset Important
How to Cultivate the Growth Mindset
What is the Growth Mindset?
The growth mindset is that the intelligence and abilities you have now are just a starting point and that with hardwork and discipline you can improve in these areas. This mindset is better than the fixed mindset as it allows people to improve in areas in their life and also reflect on their weaknesses and turn them into strengths.
Why is the Growth Mindset Important?
A growth mindset can help you get past failure. If you have a growth mindset, failing tests will not discourage you and cause you to give up, but it will inspire you to try harder and encourage you to achieve your full potential. In life, you will always encounter hardships and setbacks so having a good mindset around failure is key, in order to succeed.
How to Cultivate the Growth Mindset
Recognize when you are falling into your fixed mindset
If you find yourself saying that this is just how things are, or I am not good at math, throw all of that out of the window. You need to embrace that you may be bad at something now, but with consistent effort and hard work you can improve in this area. You should not fall back into believing that just because you are bad at something now, you will be bad at it forever.
Embrace challenges
As I mentioned above, it is important that you encounter challenges and experience failure. When you experience failure you are able to grow and improve yourself. If you recognize that failures are not the end, but really stepping stones for you to better your abilities and determine where you are lacking. You really need to step out of your comfort zone in order to stretch your abilities to the fullest.
Tackle Constructive Criticism
Although it can be easy to brush off constructive criticism in order to appease our egos, it is important to embrace it to really figure out where our weaknesses are. This goes hand and hand with embracing failure because with our growth mindset we are trying to improve our capabilities and with this criticism we can get a new perspective on how we can improve. Additionally, the act of embracing criticism helps us to foster a growth mindset because we can embrace the challenges of this process.
Be Persistent
It is important that when you embrace a growth mindset you have to keep trying and you can never give up even when many obstacles come your way. Even if something seems impossible you should keep trying and even if you fail it will still be a good learning experience. Additionally, the act of trying over and over will help you to really appreciate something once you get it.
Find a like minded peer group
In a previous blog, I mentioned that the people who you are around matter, and in this case it certainly does for developing a growth mindset. When your peers succeed, you should congratulate them sincerely, you should be motivated by their success as it can help to show you that you can achieve a lot as well. Try not to compare the success of others with your own as everyone is on their own journey and peoples’ lives are not the same. And when you draw motivation from others, they can draw inspiration from your own successes.
Value the process over the end result
An important part of the growth mindset is working to improve over time and making improvement everyday. Sometimes if you focus so hard on the end result you can forget about the actual steps you need to accomplish the goal. For example, if you were running a race and you just focused on the finish line and what it would look like and how it would feel to finally be done with the race you would be distracted from just trying to keep moving forward one step at a time and you would also lose motivation to even run as the end would seem so far away.
Be realistic
Although you will be able to improve your abilities, it will take time and a lot of effort. You cannot expect to instantly become good at something you were bad at in a week or two. Additionally, being realistic allows you to not experience disappointment in yourself if you are inevitably unable to become a master in math for example in one week. Now this isn’t to say that you shouldn’t challenge yourself to become better as that is a key component of the growth mindset, but you should be grounded in reality when you decide what is a reasonable time frame to improve
Conclusion
Developing a growth mindset can be a valuable tool in your toolbox as it allows you to use failure as a learning opportunity to better yourself. It can also show you that consistent and diligent effort can pay off and really improve your abilities. Think of the growth mindset like a system in a video game where you gain experience by winning battles and the battles you lose tell you that you need to level up. This kind of system helps to make your team stronger over time and you might not even know it. This has been Impromental. Thank you for reading and stay tuned in for the next blog.