Transcript
How to develop a growth mindset? Well, it’s a great question. And what I love about the question is, you know, it looks at the solution, right? How can we move from a fixed mindset, if we have one. To start with, it’s hard work, whatever we want to change in terms of creating new habits, it’s always hard work. But when we look at the exponential potential of our brains and us as human beings, it’s totally worth it. As parents, we can start by raising our kids that way. That means whatever our kids cannot do, it’s about telling them you are not yet able to do it and really see life as a learning process. But of course, this goes on. How about we’re adults, and maybe we were raised by you cannot do this. We cannot do this. Money mindsets! “In our family, nobody’s successful”. These are classical things that can be deeply rooted in our minds. And, there, it’s really about rewiring our brain.
There is a lot of publications about that, luckily, so people have started researching on our mindset and the potential of our mindset. Little steps we can take is really writing down what are the things we think. And, when you write it down, it starts a special process. It’s not just thinking “oh, I cannot do this, I cannot”, once you have written it down, black on white, on paper, look at it and think, well, why do I think this? Do I maybe in the back of my mind, hear my mother’s voice, my father’s voice saying “hey, we cannot do this” or “is it my own voice?” So first of all, we can split up, where is the mindset really? Our own? Where is it that we just got it? Because we grew up with it and we never reflected on it.
Then, let’s go one step further. And question it. Is it really that way? Am I always unsuccessful? And suddenly we’ll realize, I know but wait, there’s an exception. There is an exception. I tried this, it was hard and it worked. And that’s really important to develop this reality check of our own mindsets of our own thinking. And this just as an oversimplified way to tell you in my coachings, of course, I usually work with that. Let’s say over six months and I meet the person for maybe 10 times for an hour or so. So, it is of course, a process that takes longer. It’s hard work, as I said, but there is so much potential on it. And then linking this, of course, to companies or company culture, which is very important. Well I realized that many companies make it quite difficult to have what we call a “failure culture”.
And what hinders them is often politics and trust. Because if you don’t trust someone, if we don’t trust our teammates, our superiors, we’re not likely to admit any mistake, let alone show ourselves vulnerable. These two things, showing ourselves vulnerable because we’re all vulnerable beings. Admitting that we’ve made mistakes so we can actually gain feedback to better learn from it. That’s key to have a growth mindset, and the team with a growth mindset.
