People with a growth mindset understand they can get smarter through hard work, the use of effective strategies, and help from others when needed. It is contrasted with a fixed mindset: the belief that intelligence is a fixed trait that is set in stone at birth.
What can we do to have a Growth Mindset?
Top 5 Tips:
1. Continual learning
If we avoid facing obstacles, we cannot develop our current gifts and talents or learn new skills. Challenges always provide us with opportunities to learn. The more we learn, the more knowledge we develop, the more skill we acquire and the more value we offer to our employees, friends and family. The willingness to expand and grow, will naturally increase our emotional well-being. Continuous learning means we're keeping our brain freshly stocked, enabling us to come up with new and better ideas and solutions, which are one of the primary ways to add value to our job and increase our success.
2. Perseverance
Frustration can drive us to quit long before we should. We must discipline ourselves to look at what our challenges add to us, rather than on what they take away. There is no obstacle too great for us to overcome. We must learn to turn our obstacles upside down by acting with the mentality that there is always a route to get to where we need to go. When we believe setbacks are temporary, we can use them to strengthen and empower us.
3. Resilience
Meeting our challenges head-on builds our resiliency to face even greater challenges to come in our future. Confronting our challenges makes for a smaller ego and brings the things we still need to learn. When we take action in the face of challenge, we develop a sense of personal responsibility, instead of looking to others as a source of blame or help. The confidence and pride of accomplishing difficult tasks frees up our mind and spirit to be kind, thoughtful, and generous to others, letting compassion rule.
4. Embrace failure
We cannot avoid failure and view this as success. Failure is truly a matter of perspective. It is almost impossible to go through life without experiencing some kind of failure. For this reason, there is no benefit in living a cautious or paranoid life. Doors are going to open and doors are going to close, and we will all likely make some extremely poor decisions. But, we must think of all the opportunities we would miss if we allow our fears to stop us. Failure is a master teacher. It teaches us things about ourselves we could have never learned otherwise. Often, our most usable, practical and valuable insights come only after a failure. Accepting and learning from those insights is the key to our success.
5. Celebrate others
Envy can too easily sabotage our own success. We must commit to being genuinely happy for the success others have achieved. There is nothing appealing about a "hater." How we handle other people's success, especially when things may not be going so well for us, is an indicator of our own maturity and belief about ourselves. Sincerely congratulating others helps create an atmosphere for others to want to celebrate our successes with us as we reach them. The next time someone we know receives great news, don't hate - celebrate with them. Remember, we reap what we sow. We only set ourselves up for more joy in our own lives as we celebrate the successes of others.