How Do You Cultivate a Growth Mindset?

What sets successful people — entrepreneurs, businesspeople, athlete and students — apart from the average person? We might think it boils down to our talents and abilities, but Professor Carol Dweck, a world-renowned Stanford University psychologist, reveals to us from her research and experience that our mindsets have a stronger influence over our motivations to reach our goals. For Dweck, how we approach our goals — with either a fixed or growth mindset — will affect how we reach our professional and personal goals.

What you need to know

Having a growth mindset means believing that abilities can be cultivated. But more than holding beliefs and wishful thinking, such beliefs motivate growth-minded people to be action-driven and wanting to improve themselves. People with a growth mindset constantly stretch their abilities and thinking, get excited from what is challenging and hard, and most importantly, value progress over obtaining immediate perfection. For growth-minded people, becoming is better than being.

People with fixed mindsets, however, tend to believe that efforts for improvement are pointless, and this limits achievements. This is because people with fixed mindsets tend to believe that the qualities they possess are more or less permanent, that there’s nothing much they or others can do to improve their qualities.

People with a growth mindset constantly stretch their abilities and thinking, get excited from what is challenging and hard, and most importantly, value progress over obtaining immediate perfection.

But while we’ve been speaking about the two mindsets as distinct mindsets that a person can have, the fact is that everyone has a mixture of both fixed and growth mindsets. For example, we might have a growth mindset when it comes to personal matters such as learning a new hobby, but we might also have a fixed mindset in our professional lives. Someone with a fixed mindset may feel already quite comfortable with their abilities at work, but when given constructive feedback by a colleague or superior the person with a fixed mindset feels threatened. This person just missed an opportunity to grow. That said, if we have a mixture of both mindsets, where does one begin to cultivate the right one?

What you can do

Start with embracing your fixed mindsets. It might sound counterintuitive, but embracing your fixed mindset is the first step to letting it go. Since we all have different mindsets in different areas, it is better to acknowledge them and be aware of when we do find ourselves being driven by a fixed mindset, we’d have the opportunity to orient ourselves toward having a growth mindset instead.

You’ll know that you’re under the influence of a fixed mindset when you notice some of the following about yourself:

• You give up easily when a task becomes too challenging.
• You see effort as fruitless or meaningless.
• You ignore useful negative feedback from others.
• You feel threatened by the success of others.

Continue to learn and set frequent goals to achieve. Once you’ve identified areas in which you have a fixed mindset, you’re now in a position to start cultivating a growth mindset. Here, having a growth mindset entails that one desires to learn from their experiences. To this end, it is helpful to first think about where or what your opportunities for learning and growth are. Is there a new skill you want to pick up, a new language you’d like to speak, or someone you’d like to strengthen your relationship with? Whatever the opportunities for learning are, you’d then have to form a plan and ask yourself how you’d embark on it.

Be strategic with how you want to grow. It is easy to fall into the trap of having a false growth mindset, or in other words, having wishful thinking. So, rather than just believing having a growth mindset is the way to go, one reason why successful people with a growth mindset are successful is that they also have what psychologists call a “strategic mindset”. A recent study suggests that having a strategic mindset is an important psychological factor behind the success stories of entrepreneurs, students, and athletes. The findings show that people with a strategic mindset are the ones who, in the face of challenges or setbacks, ask themselves: “How else can I do this? Is there a better way of doing this?”. In light of reflecting upon such questions, people with a strategic mindset were more effective in using strategies that ensured their goals were achieved.

Links and books

Of course, we’d recommend you read Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, **to fully appreciate the concept of the growth mindset and how you can personally cultivate having a growth mindset in your daily work and life. The revised and updated version of her book includes new material on organisational mindsets and on opening yourself to growth.

In recent years, Carol Dweck has also spoken up on “false growth mindsets” and how some misconceptions of the growth mindset are dangerous, especially when applied to children’s education. Read more about false growth mindsets here in an interview done by The Atlantic with Dweck.

Some say that having a growth mindset entails other qualities as well. One of such qualities is grit. In Angela Duckworth’s book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Duckworth explains why talent alone is hardly a guarantor of success. Rather, other factors can be even more crucial such as identifying our passions and following through on our commitments.