It can be tricky to change your mindset by yourself. That’s where a coach can come
in useful. Click here to arrange an introductory session to find out more.
Is there something you'd love to learn? A language? A sport? A hobby? A business
tool, like sales, marketing or networking? A social skill, like speaking with confidence,
or making friends quickly and easily?
The way you approach learning is critical to your success. Researchers have found
that people who believe that they have innate talent and think they are smart (a
Fixed Mindset) make much poorer progress than people who believe results will alter
radically in proportion to individual effort, energy, application, focus and time
(a Growth Mindset). From the book - Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol
Dweck.
If we want to approach life and business with a Growth Mindset, it will firstly be
important to realise that attributing results to learning and application is very
important. Secondly it will be important to become more aware of any areas where
we find ourselves stuck in a Fixed Mindset. This will often reveal itself in thoughts
like: "I'm just no good at it.", "I couldn't do it if my life depended on it.", "I've
never been able to do it." These belief statements may be accurate assessments of
past performance, but become limiting when used as predictors of future possibility.
Guidelines for noticing what mindset you are bringing to your projects:
GROWTH
FIXED
Skills are developable
Ability is innate
What happens when I do it this way?
How do I do this?
Experiment and discover
Tell me what to do
Learning and enjoyment
Looking good/not looking bad
Imagination creates the present
Memory creates the future
What can be done differently
It’s always been like this
An example of how a fixed mindset can derail even the most positive of findings can
be seen in the original intention behind IQ tests (devised by Alfred Stanford-Binet).
Binet created the original tests as a way of evaluating students’ need for extra
help at school, with a warning that scores should not be interpreted literally due
to the "plasticity" of intelligence. However, these tests have come to be used as
a measure of intelligence as an innate character trait.
So we can learn something
truly valuable from this: we can never accurately measure future possibilities on
the basis of current reality, i.e. we can always do better and have fun exploring
on the way.
