Corporate Growth Mindset

In a competitive business world, you’ll find that what really separates successful enterprises from failed attempts at stardom is one simple yet little-known game-changer: the all-important Growth Mindset.

But what is a Growth Mindset and how can it really help you accomplish your business goals in 2019? By reading the following expanded Growth Mindset article, you’ll get to understand the value of developing a Growth Mindset, how this technique can leverage amazing possibilities, and how a simple method can radically change a company’s corporate culture.

What is a Growth Mindset?

A Growth Mindset is basically the belief that some individuals have that their talents can be developed through instructive hard work, resilient ability, and an unflagging will to take proficient strategies and relevant outside input into account. There are many advantages of having a Growth Mindset, a philosophy that was created thirty years ago by Carol Dweck, a renowned Stanford psychologist.

But the main goal of the Growth Mindset? To allow every single person to understand that they have remarkable yet untapped potential to earn anything they want to get. By leveraging advice, learning from best practices, and believing that they will always be able to achieve progress through a mix of educational research and thoroughly resounding hard work, any person can conquer great things.

At the end of the day, this mindset can be simply summed up as a tendency to actually believe there is always room for improvement, whether in your personal or business life. In her now famous book, “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success”, Carol Dweck goes on to explain that there are two different types of mindset.

On the one hand, a fixed mindset will make us all assume that our creative skills, intellectual abilities, and overall potential are fixed. It’s a feeling which makes us all succumb to the erroneous belief that this is how we are, and this is how we will always be. It promotes a sense of paralysis and it debases the value of human ability.

Indeed, by allowing you to feel that there’s no room for improvement anywhere, anyhow, this type of mindset kills creativity and ensures human beings become stagnated, stale, and impossibly resistant to any sort of remotely positive change or improvement.

On the other hand, a Growth Mindset is an overwhelming sea of endless possibilities. By energizing this empowering mindset, individuals can really understand their true potential, learn new skills every single day, and boost their personal and professional careers.

How Can a Fixed Mindset Become Poisonous?

A fixed mindset will hurt you in the long run.

Why? Because it actually impacts all aspects of your life. You tend to believe that - now that you’ve learned a few skills, got your college degree, and have worked in a certain position for a comfortable business - this is all you can achieve.

By limiting the value of educational improvement, the fixed mindset turns humans into automatons. It is a deceitful belief that congeals progress and makes humans believe that skills are like the fate of a Greek tragedy: a consummate event, a destiny, and an immutable thing.

There is an interesting story that you should get to know right about now. Some years ago, Carol Dweck invited an array of different people to visit the brain-wave lab at Columbia University, in New York City. The idea was to actually understand how the group’s different brains behaved while they went along and answered a series of questions, later receiving some feedback.

What did Carol Dweck find?

That those who had a fixed mindset were:

• Not interested in hearing feedback
• Turned off when given valuable information that could help them improve
• Not concerned about hearing the right answers to questions they’d gotten wrong
• Quick to believe the questions they had failed to answer were irrelevant

What about the individuals who showcased a Growth Mindset?

In Carol Dweck’s study, these people were:

• Super-attentive, receiving all the new info
• Ready to learn more and expand their skill set
• Prepared to prioritize learning without being concerned with failure or success

Why is it Important to Promote a Growth Mindset?

Promoting a Growth Mindset is invaluable for people, employees, and corporations.

Why is that? Because it allows people to be set free. No longer will they stagnate and get trapped in the belief that it’s impossible to succeed doing something that they think they can’t do. In fact, if people really aim for it, they can actually cultivate different qualities, maintaining a positive outlook on life.

This means they will be forging a path that puts Francis Galton to shame.

Who was Francis Galton? He was the remarkably important - and still widely appreciated - Englishman who came up with the idea of Nature Vs Nurture.

This theory is an unending debate between those who believe that human ability is determined by a specific environment and those who swear that a person’s gene pool and genetically given abilities are the only important aspect - the only way to explain awesome success or harsh failure to achieve potential. Francis Galton was a psychologist and his theory proposed to explain that a specific human being was the result of two mighty important factors that both influenced and informed us all.

Nature consists of the things that we are born with. It is basically the genetic makeup which you were lucky to receive from your parents as soon as you became a fetus. It has to do with biological aspects such as your height, the color of your hair, the shape of your eyes, and the firmness of your muscles.

Moreover, Nature would also assume that your brain matter, physical abilities, oratorical gifts, mannerisms, and idiosyncrasies were all genetically contrived.

What about Nurture? Nurture has to do with all the other aspects which affect you on your path. It can be your education, your social relationships, the surrounding culture, your upbringing, the way you were affected by events in your childhood, the way your parents raised you, the things that impacted you as you grew and developed your senses.

How does the Growth Mindset fit in all of this? Carol Dweck’s phenomenally powerful theory postulates that, even though Nature is obviously important, Nurture is the most important thing.

This means that, either you are blond or brunette, tall or short, the son of a PhD or the daughter of a plumber, there’s something truly special about you: the ability to tap into your incredible potential, improve every aspect of your life, learn new skills every single day, and become the best version of yourself through believing you can effectively do it.

Now that we know what the Growth Mindset is all about, and the benefits of having a Growth Mindset, we should go ahead and read about 6 different ways to develop it to the max. These techniques can be supercharged by you in your personal life or in the context of a business.

6 Effective Ways to Develop a Growth Mindset

1. Challenges Matter

Those who see challenges as opportunities to improve will master the Growth Mindset.

Every time a challenge occurs, this revolutionary thought process will allow you to understand the following: even though it may be tiresome and harsh to have to get out of your comfort zone, the end game will allow you to reach the land of self-improvement, learn something new, and become a better professional in the process.

2. Failure is Balderdash

One of the most important precepts of this psychological game is that failure doesn’t exist.

What is failure, then? An exciting opportunity to learn something new, whether it be how to use Excel or create a sales pitch.

By taking full advantage of the philosophy of this mindset, you will be able to murder the word “failure” once and for all. In the not-so-distant future, you’ll start to perceive “failure” as “learning.”

It may seem like an irrelevant change but it’s a crucial step to take if you’re serious about fueling this mindset.

3. Results are Relative

The greatest flaw of people who have a fixed mindset is that they chase the result and tend to forget about the process.

But what is the process? A chance to put the Growth Mindset into practice and learn something new that can actually help you in the long haul. This means that intelligent folks should go ahead and actually enjoy the specificities of the learning process, rather than cutting corners, failing to learn something new, and asking for someone else’s help so as not to have to be bothered to acquire a new skill.

It may be painful to admit you have a fixed mindset but trust me: it will liberate you and allow you to understand that results - even though important - should only come once you’ve truly achieved your full potential.

4. Criticism is Positive

One of the key issues people tend to have with this specific mindset is that it will bring about a lot of opportunities for shameful failure. Since people are ready to dive into an unknown skill and really learn something that takes them out of their comfort zone, this can be the case.

However, the trick here is simple: to criticize others in a positive way. You shouldn’t tell a colleague that their brand positioning strategy is hopeless. You shouldn’t tell an employee that they’ve done something wrong - you should acknowledge their effort, will to learn, and value the things in which they have been able to improve.

Some people will take a longer time to improve while others will smash the learning curve. It doesn’t matter.

What does? The fact that you should always portray criticism as a way to ignite more passion and incite even more will to learn from your colleagues and employees.

5. Take Ownership

This type of psychological mindset isn’t something to dive into lightly. Once you’ve acknowledged that you want to develop a Growth Mindset, you should understand that ownership comes with the territory.

This means you should see yourself as someone who has a growth mentality and happens to be happy that you can count on it to guide you on your professional and personal path.

Will you make mistakes that other employees will see as a burden? Sure.

But you will also become better, more resilient, more skillful, and ready to empower your CV with new ideas and lessons that will make you the best professional you can be.

6. Set Goals

To stop setting goals is to decide not to move forward.

One of the fundamental things about this mindful technique? You need to aim for something and have a certain objective as you go along.

You can decide to explore an SEO course, a degree in Irish History, learn more about CRM, or even attend a Gardening master class.

Whatever it is that can make you more skillful and better informed? Make sure it becomes a concrete goal you can perceive, smell and taste.

Setting goals allows you to:

• Understand that everything is relative
• Believe you will achieve a milestone every single month
• See how you’ve improved
• Analyze your progress as you go along

Time to Grow

By getting fully inspired by the Growth Mindset, you will be able to improve, learn new things, and become both a better person and professional. The Growth Mindset will help you become what you are supposed to be, set goals that will always make you work harder, accept criticism as a path to greatness, and enjoy the process of learning to maximize your full potential.

In the future, employees who value hard work and who understand that there’s always room for improvement won’t be important: they will be crucial pieces of the corporate puzzle that business leaders will fight hard to galvanize, since they guarantee a sharper company culture, better results, and a resilient will to improve every single day.