A growth mindset is a miraculous phenomenon. If cultivated with boundless optimism, it can result in a realistic manifestation of your goal. The fruition of your coveted aim in any pursuit will be made real with the help of a growth mindset. However, it requires the persistence of changing from a negative to a positive growth mindset.
Whether you’re a student in pursuit of academic success or a businessman engaged in the relentless pursuit of winning competitive leads, you need a growth mindset to expedite your hunt and make it successful. It is the lifeblood carrying out your goal. It is the embodiment of everything you need for gaining success in your personal or professional life.
A growth mindset is your key personality virtue narrowing down your chase to success. It helps you achieve name, fame, and glory.
Do you know the efficacy of having a growth mindset? Well, say it allows refinement of your intelligence and knowledge. So, you become informed about how to channelize your energy in the right direction. You gain an ability permitting you to handle things, unlike naysayers.
Your growth mindset is the very essential factor separating you from those negatively charged. This mental attitude results in a tectonic shift in your attitude of seeing challenges as something to learn, not to run away from.
It allows you to break free of your potential and achieve the success of your dream. The quality of the growth mindset is that it makes you stronger not to resign to difficulties.
Fixed Vs Growth Mindset
A fixed mindset is your willful servitude to a negative estimation of your self-worth. This means you remain blindfolded to the positive side of your own ability. In due course of time, this attitude makes you doubtful about whether you would achieve something worthwhile in your life.
A person endowed with this mentality always prefers downplaying his self-intelligence. They are people brooding over this notion, that their inborn quality is unchangeable. They refuse to believe that something they lack can be honed to perfection.
Interestingly, human beings are born with these two types of mindsets. Fixed mindset, and Growth mindset. Early detection of the same happens at a younger age. What remains to be seen is whether the person is willing to choose from going fixed mindset to a growth mindset.
Is that so easy, going from a fixed to a growth mindset?
It depends upon the willingness of CHANGE. If someone is born in an environment wherein they were repeatedly called pathetic or mocked at, then, in that case, the recipient of such flak, in due course of time, develops a fixed mentality of treating himself as pathetic. He thinks himself terrible.
If the very person, upon being exposed to an environment different from his former, cloistered childhood, wants to change the fixity of what he was insulted with, then the likelihood of his mindset gradually changing from fixed to growth one can’t be ruled out.
Say for instance in the State of Bihar where Hindi is still a dominant language in every syllabus of schools and colleges, most of the students grow up with this fixed mindset that English will remain an alien language to them.
This concept remains fixed UNTIL they firmly decide to no longer remain subjugated to that notion. As these students come in contact with the world outside of their narrowed academic environment, which is rather more challenging in a realistic stance, then their fixed mindset that used to feel apprehensive about the presence of English, slowly fizzles out, as long as they resign to a growth mindset.
Though the process is discreetly slow, it finally becomes perceptible when the students, self-confidently, break free of their fear and adapt to a growth mindset.
So, I personally believe that one can really come out of his/her fixed mindset and choose growth mindset depending on the gravity of willingness of doing so.
If someone simply believes in the negative projection of his inborn quality that it’s static given, that person will perhaps never embrace growth mindset.
Therefore, it is all about willingness or one’s docility that matters in whether someone will become endowed with growth mindset or remain fixed with what he has been thinking since childhood.
How To Cultivate Growth Mindset
Stop feeling embarrassed at what you lack
Nobody in this world is born perfect. Even Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Einstein, and so many renowned personalities faced mockery, derision and insults while they were in pursuit of their coveted goal in their respective calling. Great Edison was made to feel embarrassed over his inability to see objects at a far distance.
But did he resign to criticisms? Did he choose to believe in naysayers/haters?
NO!
Then why are you being so embarrassed at what you lack?
Remember, your weakness will never become your strength if you keep on concealing it from yourself and from the world. Face it, overcome it through the sheer willpower of improvement.
There is nothing like a fixed ability
There is nothing like a fixed ability. The concept of being born loser is such a condescending jibe on your individuality. You never have to resort to self-criticism. Why? There is always a room for improvement in anything that you think you don’t have.
I know a lot of people who thought that they could never write good, until they chose to change this mentality. They worked their ass off, kept on working without being discouraged, and here they are – writing awesome stuff like crazy!
Know that every challenge wears an opportunity
To get the best out of your practice of self-improvement, develop a growth-centric mindset. This involves recognizing every challenge that your current circumstance presents to you as an opportunity, not something to scorn off in hatred. Your aversion to downplaying the hidden opportunity of a challenge makes you vulnerable to negativity. This means being not willing to change the fixed mindset.
Accepting challenges as an opportunity means you know very well that you will give your hundred percent effort to complete backlogs, and even though failure comes in, instead of fretting over it, you will learn from it. Your acceptance of a challenge as an opportunity also means not to kowtow to difficulty and keep beating it until you see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Upgrade your skill
It has been observed that people not willing to change their fixed mindset are often the ones not learning new things that could help them succeed in their chosen calling. Remember, any learning doesn’t have a specific, one-size-fits model. This means, if cricketing works for Virat Kohli doesn’t mean it will work for you.
Therefore, learn new things, such as a language or programming language or any skill set that can help you grow your mindset from negative to positive. Many online courses and other mediums for learning can help you greatly, in this respect.
There is no failure for someone with a growth-centric mindset
A man with a growth-centric frame of mind doesn’t see failure as something to be despondent with. Rather, they are the persons who think that failure is life’s clandestine approach in bringing forth an opportunity to learn something new, something that can expedite your endeavor in pursuit of success.
This means you should cultivate a mindset to view failure as a learning opportunity. This will help you not to feel let up upon encountering failure as a result of certain mistakes in pursuit of your goal. When you learn that failure is a chance to learn to do something in a better way, that’s the moment your growth mindset starts to kick in its full potential.
Eventually, you get to learn how to map out strategies for your success in the future.
Don’t let your priority rest on someone else’s approval
It wonders me to see most of the people not being bold enough to shield their individual priorities from the approval of someone else who have no role in making their lives any better.
For example, if you are going to learn a new skill, this means you know you will have to sacrifice your own potential to make this priority work for you. Then why let it be judged by the approval of someone else? Solution? Don’t go for someone’s consent, don’t seek it. Let yourself become identifiable for others.
Never cease yourself to learning
If you want to transform your fixed mindset into a growth mindset, remember that learning new skills through academic pursuit is one of the best ways. The learning process is something you must embrace into your life, even though it requires of you to be persistent in its full acquisition. Save time and invest it into the learning process.
Many guys that I know have had their learning later, after quitting college a long time back.
Remember Criticism is a blessing in disguise
I know most of the readers will not accept this. They may think criticism, not as a positive factor of improving, but a destructive factor to ruin their creativity. However, criticism, hurts more when it is taken from a selfish perception.
Most of the time, it is not the way someone says something bad about your craft, but how you react to it, which makes it feel bad or good. Successful people from around the world will surely tell you that they owe a great deal of their today’s success to naysayers condemning their pursuit of success.
Hence, make sure you don’t get carried away by criticism. It’s surely a blessing in disguise, provided you conceptualize the same as a positive lead to learning something new.
Try to empower your GRIT
‘It’s not the size of the dog in fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.’
You can’t develop a growth mindset if you remain weaker from the inside. That said, you need to work harder to cultivate a higher degree of grit. This would serve as a certificate to acclimatize yourself to any situation. Moreover, such efforts will convince others of your inner potential.
You can’t avoid risk to risk failure in life
Nobody can say for sure if he is going to be successful or fail in a certain undertaking. What makes it inevitable is the quality of efforts exercised into it. Therefore, those tending to avoid risks are more susceptible to risking failure in life, compared to those otherwise willing to take risks.
To develop a growth mindset, learn to take risks, for even if you try to save face all the time just because you think you are imperfect, you may run the risk of embracing failure, eventually.
Always believe in the “CAN-DO” attitude
Even though you develop a growth mindset successfully if you constantly latch on to the dubiety of whether you have it or not, then the concept of having a growth mindset will die down, thus making you prone to developing negativity. To say otherwise, it’s all about BELIEF that factors the solidity of your growth mindset. If you believe in a CAN-DO attitude, it will empower you more to cultivate a growth mindset.
Developing a growth mindset is NOT an overnight accomplishment. It requires the cultivation of mental practice consistently. But once you develop it, you are no longer in the chain of the negative portrayal of your own personality. Rather, you get to experience a transformative result in your individuality – someone with a refined conscience to oneself!