Success Is All About the Growth Mindset
There’s a lot of hype and buzzwords around growth, growth hacking, or growth mindset, and it’s sometimes difficult to select between the true and false. However, one thing all growth driven people know well is that it all starts with the mindset.
You need to train yourself and keep practicing a growth mindset towards any topic or challenge that you face.
Tackle challenges with excitement, dedication, and passion. You will start noticing changes in the way your mind is stimulated. You will feel more positive, invigorated, healthier, and younger.
Mental health is dependent on mental exercises and an active mind to stay healthy and inspired for a longer and fulfilling life. Here’s 8 ways to help pave your way towards a growth mindset:
1. Be curious
We should think back to our times as youngsters with inquisitive minds. The world was a continuous timeline of discoveries. Our desire to know and understand our environment was limitless. Yet, as we mature and get caught up in balancing our lives, we forget to be children again.
To truly grasp a growth mindset, you need to always explore. Your mind should be filled with a desire to learn and constantly improve yourself. The more you know, the more you can use and expand on your skills.
In your quest for knowledge, remember to not over-step your boundaries. Curiosity can often render you reckless and mistakes happen. Which leads us to accepting both our failures and successes.
2. Celebrate your failures and winnings
People tend to celebrate successes only. We can be cheesy and say that life in its entirety is a celebration, yet that would not be correct. You certainly experience a rush of dopamine when you win. But, you gain even more from celebrating a failure.
After accepting and learning from your failures, it’s essential to see how being grateful to them will benefit your life. If we don’t allow ourselves to make mistakes, how else will we be able to succeed?
Celebrating, accepting, and learning from all your failures and victories will set you on the path for more winnings and achieving a growth mindset.
Next time you send an important e-mail to the wrong person, relax, analyze the situation, and learn to pay better attention next time.
3. Keep yourself hungry… for knowledge
This comes without saying — yet, many people seem to overlook the power of constant learning. Our brains are working, developing, assimilating information at all times.
At the end of the day, much of that information is ephemeral. We are bombarded with images, words, sounds that distract us, rather than keeping us focused on what we love.
So, isn’t it better to nurture our brain with things that interest us, that help us grow?
Read and study skills that have always interested you and continuously improve on your existing skills. Love food but aren’t that good with cooking? Ask one of your talented friends for advice! Are you good with data analysis but struggle to interpret it? Sign up for a class (by the way, we can help with that)!
Regardless of what your skills and interests are, try to spend a few minutes every day on developing and growing them.
4. Rapid Experimentation for a Rapid Growth Mindset
After you finish all the studying, it’s time to put what you’ve learned in practice.
Achieving the full potential of a growth mindset requires constant experimentation. Even if the first try fails, you do it again with a fresh attitude.
As mentioned before, we need to learn from our failures and celebrate them. You will probably have 7/10 experiments that fail.
Yet, the satisfaction and impressive results from those 3 that will succeed is beyond measure. Trust us.
5. Never stop networking
Communication is the path to recognition. It can get you promoted, expand your support network, open doors to new opportunities, and make you more visible.
You can find the root of all successful relationships in effective communication, from business to personal and public speaking. Yet, being a good communicator is often easier said than done. Here’s a few tips to help you on this self-improvement journey:
- pay attention to body language, both your own and your conversational partner’s;
- if in a heated argument, don’t let your emotions take over and try to keep a clear head;
- be concise, but engaging (we know some details are relevant to a story, but the fact that the sun was shining might not add anything to it);
- listen.
Which takes us to our next point.
6. Learn to listen
As Michael Ray Thompson wisely states,
‘connecting with others starts and stops with your ability to listen’.
Due to the excess of distractions surrounding us on a daily basis, it’s difficult to focus. When someone is speaking, most of the time we tend to zone out or catch something in the conversation that we really want to give our opinion on.
Being a good listener doesn’t mean you have to sit quietly, stare at the person who’s speaking, and think of what you’ll have for dinner. It requires attention and cooperation.
Be sincerely curious about what your companion is talking about. Study their body language and learn from their experiences. Good listeners periodically ask questions that promote discovery and insight.
Finally, making suggestions and giving advice clears your and your companion’s thinking. It helps you reach a positive resolution.
7. Breathe
In a world full of distractions, stress, social cues, intimacy, business projects, and what not, we can become completely overwhelmed. So, we couldn’t emphasize this enough: take a moment, relax, and breathe.
At present, we lead quiet unhealthy lifestyles where food comes fast and sitting on a chair or couch is how we spend most of our time. We forget how to properly breathe, which requires deep breathes — the kind that we avoid because it expands our bellies and ‘makes us look fat’.
Inhaling and exhaling fully brings us into a state of awareness. It’s not surprizing that yoga and meditation techniques involve breathing exercises. By controlling our breath, we take charge over our mind and over our responses to everything that’s happening.
The next time you’re angry at your boss and want to snap at them, remember: just breathe.
8. Fully dedicate yourself
Last but not least, to fully grow you should dedicate yourself to the task at hand, whatever that is.
We know the current technological and social climate make it difficult for us to be focused on one task only. But, you shouldn’t let your mind distract you.
Employers claimed the use of smartphones is the number one distraction in the workplace. So, see that your phone is on airplane mode (unless the task requires you to communicate with someone), you have enough water, your chair is comfortable, and your knuckles are cracked. It’s time to get to business.
You will notice that productivity increases significantly when you fully dedicate yourself.
Finally, remember to take regular breaks each hour so you don’t get exhausted. Walk around for a few minutes, have a snack, relax your eyes, and get back to it with fresh ideas.
You will smash it.
