Growth Mindset Versus Fixed Mindset: How to Cultivate a Growth Mindset
Do you desperately want to change your life but feel that positive changes are impossible in your life?
If it applies to you, then you have a fixed mindset. Having a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset can change the course of your entire life. As the ancient Bible verse says, The Truth Shall Set You Free.
Fortunately for you, having a fixed mindset is entirely within your control.
This is because the human brain is constantly changing. Scientific evidence that the brain is continually growing new neurons throughout an adult’s life.
This is excellent news for you because it means that you can rewire your brain at any age so that you can become the person that you want to become.
Where Did the Fixed Mindset Come From?
Did you know that you weren’t born with either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset? In fact, you were born with a mind that’s an empty slate.
How you view yourself, the world, and your life all comes down to how you were conditioned from the time that you were born.
As you grew up, you modeled the behaviors of your parents, other children, and older adults. Beyond socialization, the media and various other external factors became powerful influences in your psychology.
Because your brain is constantly changing both internally and externally, your mindset is continually evolving.
Why do you need to know this? Because knowing that you weren’t born with a negative attitude is the first step towards developing the mindset that you want to create for yourself.
6 Easy Ways to Condition a Growth Mindset
Are you ready to eliminate the fixed mindset once and for all? Here are six easy strategies that will help you to condition an empowering growth mindset so that you can annihilate your own fixed mindset.
1. Reframe Your View of Failure
Did that failure is an incredible gift in disguise? You see, whether any event in life is a failure or a success all comes down to mindset.
If a “negative” event takes place in your life, you automatically decide whether or not it is a failure or a success.
A person with a fixed mindset will find the bad in everything. For example, if a person with a fixed mindset gets written up at work, they’ll automatically view themselves as a failure.
On the other hand, a person with a growth mindset will make a decisive decision to become a better worker, get a better job, or build self-esteem.
Having a growth mindset versus fixed mindset determines your perspective on every event of your life, whether or not it’s good or bad.
2. Reward Yourself for Tiny Progress
A person with a fixed mindset is always hard on themselves. No matter how much they achieve, they still haven’t done enough.
At first, it might seem like being harsh on yourself is the key to improving, but the opposite is true. Success breeds success, and focusing on your failures breeds more failure.
A winning recipe for becoming more successful in any area of your life is to focus on and reward yourself for every bit of progress that you make.
For example, if your goal is to eat a healthier diet, start rewarding and acknowledging yourself for something as easy as drinking a glass of water.
By constantly rewarding yourself for little progress, your brain associates pleasure with taking action (even small actions).
When you get addicted to the joy of making progress in your life, you’ll find that succeeding becomes easy and automatic over time.
3. Transform Your Self-Talk
The words that you speak to yourself have a significant impact on whether or not you have a growth mindset versus fixed mindset. Your self-talk becomes your reality whether you like it or not.
Don’t believe me?
Observe a negative person that you know is losing in life. This person could be a coworker, friend, or family member.
If you carefully listen to their self-talk, notice how disempowering their words are towards themselves. They use their own language to break themselves down instead of building themselves up.
Furthermore, observe a person that is highly successful. They always say, “I can do this!” or “I got this!”. They use their words in a way that is empowering and uplifting.
Start noticing the way that you talk to yourself every day, both externally and internally. If you see a lot of negative self-talk within yourself, that’s okay.
Remember, developing that awareness of yourself is the first step to changing your self-talk. Then, start challenging yourself to swap out negative self-talk with empowering self-talk.
The next time that you say that you say that you can’t do something, tell yourself that you can do it.
4. Change Your Self-Image
Your self-image plays an incredible role in your mindset and is a critical factor in developing a growth mindset versus fixed mindset. One incredible that I ever read is Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz.
What I’ve learned from his work is that your results in every area of life come from your mental pictures.
If you see yourselves as somebody that is always stuck, dumb, and never moves forward, that will become your reality. Your identity is created by the mental pictures that you have of yourself.
How do you change your self-image? A great exercise that I learned from Psycho-Cybernetics is to spend at least 30 minutes every day visualizing yourself as a person being a person that believes in himself or herself.
You can use the same exercise for adopting any behavior that you want to have in your life. Whatever you are afraid of in life, see yourself conquering every fear that you have.
5. Face Your Fears
A massive component of the fixed mindset is the act of running away from your fears. Every time that you run away from a particular fear, the more that the fear takes over your life.
Vice versa, every time that you face a fear, you build courage and get out of your comfort zone.
The comfort zone and fixed mindset go hand in hand. People with fixed mindsets rarely tackle the fears that are holding them back in their lives.
Start challenging yourself to face your fears every day, and you’ll build courage, confidence and build a growth mindset.
6. Feed Your Mind — Daily
Another problem that is common amongst people with fixed mindsets is that they waste their time watching TV, gossiping, and feeding their minds negativity every day.
If you want to get away from the fixed mindset crowd, you need to feed your mind the wisdom of people with a growth mindset every day.
This means reading books by successful people, educational programs, audiobooks, and so forth.
Every time that you consume content from a person that has a growth mindset, you begin to take on their attitude.
Your psychology adapts to it, and you effectively condition yourself to become a person with a growth mindset.
Over to You
A fixed mindset is a terrible disease that stops most people from achieving the life that they want.
If you’ve had enough of the mindset that has held you back your entire life, you have the God-given potential to start overcoming it today.
Start challenging yourself to build new empowering habits every day that will completely wipe out your fixed mindset over the course of time.
It will change your life, and before you know it, you’ll automatically be the type of person that has an expansive mindset that enables you to overcome any obstacle and achieve any goal.
Ready to overcome the fixed mindset? Comment below to let others know that you are committed to a growth mindset so that we can all support each other!
