Whether you believe in Growth mindset or Fixed mindset, both of them are the natural thought processes of human brain. Growth mindset is a state of mind, in which you believe that you can increase your intelligence and ability through your effort and focus to learn new things. On the other hand, if you are a person with fixed mindset, you will believe that everyone is born with a limited amount of intelligence, which can never be developed through learning; and therefore, if you are weak in any skill, you can never be good at it, no matter how much you try to learn. This fixed mindset actually creates the urgency for you to continuously prove yourself and your success to the society at any cost. And in order to maintain the impression of being smart or to display a certain moral character, or a specific personality, people sometimes rely on fixed mindset. You may have seen several business owners with fixed mindset. They evaluate every situation to find out if they have won people’s approval or lost it. Apparently it may seem to you that fixed mindset is somehow good. But truly speaking, people’s insatiable hunger for others’ approval, forces them to avoid new challenges instead of embracing them, which ultimately becomes harmful for their business. However before coming to a conclusion about which mindset is beneficial for your business, try to analyse some reasons to choose wisely.
Growth Mindset Helps To Retain Your Potentiality
People with fixed mindset, most likely ignore criticism and continually look for praise. While a person with a growth mindset can achieve success because of his or her determination to prove themselves to the world, their inability to see challenges and obstacles as learning results in early downfall or less growth after a certain point in their entrepreneurial journey. They end up achieving less than their full potentiality and are constantly threatened by the success of others. On the contrary, growth mindset helps to use full potentiality of a person. Because they remain focused in learning new things and avoid merely proving themselves to the criticisers.
Carol Dweck Proved Why Growth Mindset Is More Important, Through Her Experiment On Kids
Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology in Stanford University, carried out extensive research on how a fixed and growth mindset affects the paths people take in life and the success they enjoy. In order to find out how early these mindsets start taking form, Dweck and her colleagues offered four year old children a choice: to redo an easy jigsaw puzzle or to try a more difficult jigsaw puzzle which they had not solved before. Children displaying a fixed mindset promptly chose to redo the easy puzzle. For them, it was the safer option to assert their existing abilities and the belief that smart kids don’t make mistakes. Kids who displayed a growth mindset were surprised on why would a person choose to solve the same puzzle, instead of learning something new. So, kids with the fixed mindset wanted to make sure they succeeded so that they are perceived as smart children while those with a growth mindset wanted to stretch themselves because for them, the idea of success was all about becoming smarter.
Now Place Yourself In The Position Of These Children And Respond Honestly To Yourself, Which Choice Would You Have Made?
Business owners who are overshadowed by their competitors in the market are often found to have harbored a fixed mindset, which did not allow them or their business to grow successfully. Since a fixed mindset makes people see risk and effort as one of those things that may bring their inefficiencies under spotlight, they only lean towards a path that has the least obstacle or they regularly find a way to avoid challenges instead of persistently working hard to overcome obstacles and setbacks. Sadly, many of them are unable to see how bad a fixed mindset could be until it eventually leads them towards failure and even then risking a new enterprise may seem difficult with a fixed mindset. Inculcating a growth mindset over time brings a desirable change in business owners helping them embrace challenges and to work with an unrelenting attitude even in the face of setbacks.
Growth Mindset Creates An Ocean Of Opportunity To You
When you begin to harbor a growth mindset, you see the world as a sea of opportunities where every difficult situation that you are placed in becomes the starting point for development. Lesser time is spent trying to constantly prove your intelligence or abilities to others. Instead, your mind becomes the breeding grounds for learning new skills, innovatively solving the challenges you face in your business and positively work with criticism to improve your personality and behavior.
Final thoughts
However, an absolute transformation from fixed to growth mindset requires time. A good place to begin is by understanding what growth means to you and why do you need this growth. Does your idea of growth mean improved brand reputation or more revenue for the business or a higher market share? Analyze why you need this growth. Putting a clear definition to what you actually want is very important to drive yourself into it. Remind yourself continuously of how challenges present new learning opportunities on your way to growth and how persisting in the face of setbacks are not a sign of weakness or failure as a leader. Instead, it shows to your clients, your employees and your business partners that achievements arise from continuous learning and relentless effort and you embody these values in yourself and your business.