Stretching Your Growth Mindset — 5 Ways To Help You Find More Success
All champions know that to fail is part of the game. But what keeps them trying, after fail, fail, success, fail? The ‘growth mindset’ is usually something we find in common in a lot of leaders, athletes, and innovators. In fact, this ‘growth mindset’ is essential for innovation, motivation, and for creating a safe space to test and learn, to experiment. It’s important for you, and it’s even more important for your team (if you are managing one)! No matter your job or ambition, here are a few tried tricks I use that can help you adopt the ‘growth mindset’, in order to gain learning agility and to survive in an ever-changing environment.
1. Accept it: There are going to be quite a few failed attempts before you succeed, at anything.
The ultimate success is not reachable the first time around. How many times did you fall and try to get up when you were just a baby learning to walk? Research says almost 70 times per hour.
You may not remember the fearless baby in you, but what this means is you’ve already had the growth mindset… you never abandoned your goal, no matter how many times you failed! That is why kids are more patient with themselves: they are used to falling and standing back up. But when growing up, we tend to reverse our thinking and we are less used to accepting the efforts (and failures) needed to reach success.
Every day, we fail at many things, much more than we succeed. But even if we are used to it, the issue is that no one likes failing, because we perceive it as a matter of quality and worth. Should we really?
2. Redefine the word “genius” and “talent”
It is not because you don’t find success first that you do not have talent. We won’t write the exhaustive list of artists that were considered a genius or very talented, but still could never find ‘success’ from their living… The fact is, your brain will always prefer to see things as constant and fixed. But they are not! On the other hand, have you ever considered non-genius people also very successful?
By acknowledging that success and talent are two things not directly related, it will help you remove this censorship of who deserves to succeed or not, including yourself.
3. See new challenges as opportunities
The worst-case scenario is to not even try because of the fear to fail. Carol Dweck, a leading psychologist in the field of mindset, defined growth as ‘looking for challenges and being willing to fail to learn’. The opposite of growth would be to avoid risks to stay in the safe/comfort zone at any price.
The best way to imagine your capacity to get closer to success is by training your ‘trying’ muscle. How? Don’t block yourself with fear of not finding success and focus on what you want to achieve and what can help you get there, especially when it comes to relying on your strength.
It’s normal not to feel ready to embrace this ‘growth mindset’ when facing challenges. But how can we have this mindset as much as possible? Try to make it consciously and give yourself time to find the energy to be able to make the right decisions. If you aim for perfection, you lose the joy of the journey along the way.
4. Make peace with the feeling of failing
The moment happens: you have just failed… How to get over it? It’s all about making peace with it.
At first, it’s absolutely ok not to feel ok… but you can turn it into your advantage! Failing shows vulnerability. Embrace it, people will relate to your experience and engage with your story.
5. Replace ‘failing’ with ‘learning’
If you failed, try to look back on the journey: Did you learn something new because of this? What did you learn? What could you have done differently?
Leaders believe in constant growth and they are the first extreme ‘learners’! No matter their original capacity and potential, it requires extra steps, effort, with conscious effort and conscious growth…
So better to focus and highlight the process and journey rather than the result. When you talk to your managers don’t highlight only the pure performance but all the milestones that made you grow and develop new skills along the way!
Last pro tip here: set a new objective every time you achieve one, that will always keep you in the ‘growth mindset’.
Finally, ask yourself: have you been ever afraid to fail?
Don’t be, instead, be courageous and learn so you can make better mistakes tomorrow.