Mindset: Taking control of your growth
At a personal development retreat I attended years back, our group of 20 was asked to define the term growth, as it meant for each individual. We landed up with over 15 starkly different thoughts — each influenced directly by the writer. The common thing everyone unanimously agreed on is that growth is continuous, incremental, and not something that’s short-term.
While the word growth applies to different individuals differently, depending on careers, leadership positions, personal lives, resource availability, motivation, and so on, the one thing that runs in common is the desire for competitive advantage. While there are enough and more resources in our respective areas, the philosophy of continuous, incremental improvement has been a major life-changer for me whenever I got bogged down by the feeling of becoming stagnant.
Identify the small changes you can make today
If you want tomorrow to be different, you have to disrupt the cycle today. Locating the area of focus and changing something (anything at all) to make it slightly better is the way to start. Doing three things slightly better tomorrow than today will change how your day is a week from now. This is the starting point of having a growth mindset — focusing on your incremental achievement every day.
Show up
Knowing what you want to do is one thing, forming a natural flow pattern (not just a repetitive habit) to do it willingly and happily is another. Heroic efforts and quick fixes are exciting to talk about and often what seems like a breakthrough, is rarely one that is achieved overnight. When you put in the work day in — day out, you start understanding it better and opportunities start being visible. Show up and trust the process.
Small improvements add up
Trust and faith are critical when it comes to holding on to the improvements you make. Without them, it’s easy to become a hostage of your brain’s ‘fight or flight’ response mechanism and lose control of your gains. I have never been diligent at writing down my successes on paper, but it is important to mindfully take stock of your improvements, trust your optimistic thoughts and double down on what is working for you.
In conclusion — Focus on the attraction
All of us are chasing multiple goals, often more than one at a time. We need to focus on what attracts us towards them, and not what repulses. Not enough attraction sets you for giving up, sooner or later. Growth isn’t an event, it is setting higher goals as you achieve existing ones.
