Adopt this mindset, and watch your business take flight
How such a small change can radically change your life
Towards the end of my university life, I accidentally picked up a Tony Robbins book, called Awaken the Giant Within. I was never a big reader, but after the first chapter of this book, I couldn’t put it down.
I started to adopt some of Tony’s teachings, and within days my life had changed for the better. Now, this change was not necessarily visible to other people, rather my outlook and attitude towards my own life had shifted. Mentally I was in a better state of mind.
When applied every single day, this small shift in mentality has substantially improved my life, and what I have been able to achieve since.
Because of the impact of Tony’s book on my life, I suddenly had a burning desire to understand how the human mind worked, and how by adopting various mind ‘hacks’ we could transform our mentality and therefore our lives.
By combining some of Tony’s teachings, and the teachings of another great mind, Carol Dweck (the author of one of the top personal growth books of all time — Mindset), we can trace every one of these hacks down to one common trait…
Growth.
For the purposes of this post, let’s silo the growth mindset to a business setting, and see how we can adopt this mindset so that we can achieve everything we have every wanted to in our professional life.
Accept and own your failures — then turn them into learnings
“ I don’t divide the world into the weak and strong, or the successes and failures… I divide the world into the learners and nonlearners” — Benjamin Barber
Once we enter adulthood, we suddenly have this ability to evaluate ourselves, and with that we sometimes become afraid of challenges, because we’re afraid to fail. We’re afraid that if we do not succeed, that we’ll be labelled as incompetent, so we do not try at all.
Most have heard the saying “if you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always gotten…” therefore challenging thyself and stepping out of the comfort zone is a key ingredient to growth.
Because: growth = personal and professional success.
Now, when we take on such challenges we obviously set out to succeed. There will be times however, where we miss our end goal (note, I have not used the word fail). When this happens — and trust me it will — it’s important that we do the following:
- Analyse the missed challenge
- Why we didn’t achieve the challenge
- How we could achieve it in the future
And, most importantly, we must have faith that we will eventually succeed. There is an opportunity to learn in any given situation, so even when we miss our goal, we learn.
And when we learn; we grow.
Take action!
In relation to the point above, in order to achieve a goal, we need to make a number of decisions which ultimately point us in the direction of the overall goal.
For those who feel that such decisions will measure their capabilities (e.g those with a fixed mindset) they often become indecisive and in some cases do not make a decision at all.
The impact of not making a decision on ones business can be detrimental.
If you need an example of what this can do to your business, then please look into the history of companies like Blockbuster, Nokia and Kodak. You will quickly understand what a lack of action can cause.
So, rather than viewing our decisions as a definition of our intelligence, see it as a vehicle of growth. On occasion we will make the wrong decision — we will make mistakes — but as long as we learn from such, we will grow and we will succeed.
Simply look at the mistake that you have made, ask and use feedback, and alter your future strategy accordingly.
With this mindset, as time passes our judgement and decision making will improve, ensuring that our professional and personal lives improve also.
Lose the ego
To reiterate what you have already read, through every ‘wrong’ action and decision that we make, we have an opportunity to learn.
However, in order to learn we must first be open to the possibility that we could make a mistake. We have to lose our ego.
If you have read the book Good to Great (if you have not, I suggest that you should…), then you may remember that every single company that reached greatness and stayed there, had a humble leader at the helm. These leaders would admit when they were wrong. They would confront their failures with brutal answers and bring in the right people to help solve such failures, knowing that they personally do not have all of the answers. They believed that a team would always triumph over an individual. They had no egos.
On such a note, it’s important to recognise the power of human development — that someone else may be better than you at a given task or at least more suited to it. Surround yourself with these people — those who have skills that you are yet to acquire.
Learn from them so that you grow as an individual.
The growth mindset is not just something that we apply to given situations. It’s a way of living. It’s the understanding that we can learn from every situation, and that this learning will develop us into a better person.
I hope that you have found this article is some way useful. For more insights on related topics, check out some of my other articles, and follow my activity on Medium.
About the Author:
Mike is the CEO of JRNY.ai and a public speaker. You can connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
