How to adopt a Growth Mindset to succeed

“In a moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing to do, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing. ”

— Theodore Roosevelt

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Commit this quote from Theodore Roosevelt to memory because it is the fundamental truth in life:

In a moment of decision, the best thing to do is the right thing to do, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

Doing nothing is the absolutely worst thing you can do. This applies both to life and to business. For those of you avid readers of our blog, you’ll know that I work in the risk management profession. In 99% of assessments that my team conducts, almost always, the highest risk, is when the organisation does nothing, whether proactively or reactively. It doesn’t matter what the scenario, doing nothing is almost always the worst thing to do. You think doing nothing maintains the status quo. But that is a major fallacy. If you do nothing while your competitors are taking actions (right or wrong) then the status quo doesn’t exist.

The same thing applies in life. There is no such thing as a status quo. You might not change but your friends and family are changing. In fact, you are changing even if you don’t want to. You are constantly getting older, and therefore you start to act your age. We all know of that creepy friend or family member who tries to act like he/she is still in their 20s and yet they are in their 60s. Don’t be that person.

There is a very old and meaningful Chinese quote, which arose during Confucius’ time:

Life is like a boat on a river. The current is always going against you. You have to row just to stay in the same position.

WHAT IS THE GROWTH MINDSET

I can hear what you’re thinking already. What is the mindset that you should have. If you haven’t read the book already, I highly recommend the book MINDSET by Dr Carol Dweck. As a Standford University professor, her research over the last decades has been on what delineates successful people. Unsurprisingly, it comes down to the mindset people adopt. And there are only two mindsets:

• Fixed mindset: those who believe that they can’t improve any further. Success is based on talent, luck, and gifts that you are born with. You reach a ceiling in life and that’s it.

• Growth mindset: those who believe that with a little effort and the willingness to learn and trial new actions, you can push past the ceiling and onto the next phase of your life.

Now, it’s not a simple case of saying, just change your mindset. The mindset you have adopted is based on your life experiences and events in your life. Most people adopt the fixed mindset because of our innate focus on pain avoidance. As we grow up through life, actions we take result in consequences, and if those consequence are negative enough, we learn not to take that action again (e.g. you draw on the walls when you’re a child and your parents punish you so you never draw on the walls again). By the time you’re in your late 20s, you’ve arrived at a set of behaviours and reactions that minimises the chances of you experiencing pain. Over time, you protect these behaviours and reactions since they’ve worked so well and you end up with a fixed mindset. Why change right?

But holding onto behaviours and reactions that’s worked for you means you end up creating barriers for yourself. You don’t try new actions and you don’t take risks. You end up not growing and adapting as the world around you changes. You form an incorrect view of your own capabilities and limitations. Opportunities come up and your reject them because you’ve had one incident in the past where you tried something and it failed. Is your self worth really so cheap that one past event (or several) is enough for you to say that you can’t do it for the rest of your life?

You are limiting yourself with false beliefs about your capabilities based on scant evidence. If drug companies claimed that a drug successfully manages an illness based on a sample of one patient over one test, would you believe them? No, absolutely not. You’d ask for a massive sample size, over a long enough period of time, before you’d believe them. So why do you not do the same with your own limitations?

HOW TO ADOPT THE GROWTH MINDSET

So how do you adopt the growth mindset? Like all things, it comes down to simple straight forward actions that you do consistently. Change won’t happen over night, but when practised consistently over time, change will happen.

ACTION 1: Do one small things differently. Self improvement is not about “crushing it” or taking “massive action”. It is about taking small actions one at a time. Just like the best diet is the one you’ll stick to not one that gets you the quickest results because you’ll just put the weight back on. Find something small that you normally do and then change it. Simple things like just say something extra to the barista when you’re order coffee. Just one extra sentence more. Pretend to ask a stranger for the time. Ask the shop assistant about a product (which you don’t intend to buy). Do this just for a few weeks and I promise you’ll look like and realise what was new and scary is now just normal for you. You’ll also realise that you can change.

ACTION 2: Repeat to yourself the truth about failure. You only fail if you stop trying. Failing and trying again is called learning. Nobody gets it right the first time. Babies don’t well. But they keep trying until it becomes normal. You know how t walk because you’ve fallen over many, many times. It’s the same concept. So keep at it.

ACTION 3: Realise that nobody cares if you fail. Time and time again, I have made mistakes, said stupid things in meetings, and made bad decisions. In that moment I felt pain and I played the scenario back in my mind over and over again. Even months afterwards. But when I asked others in the room, even just a week later about what I did, most people can’t remember what happened or it was nowhere near as bad as I had imagined it to be. Why? Because other people have their own problems to deal with. Your mistakes and temporary failures don’t mean anything to them. What does this mean? You can trial new actions and behaviours, safe in the knowledge that people won’t hold it against you if it doesn’t go well.

So for the month of January, I want you to identify one small action that you’ll do differently. Write it down and mark it off each time you do it. I promise you, at the end of the month, you’ll feel so proud that you’ve made the little change, you’ll want to make another change.

Then set up a reminder three times a day to remind yourself of actions 2 and 3. That’s it. Just remind yourself of these two fundamental truths. Again, by the end of the month, you’ll start to see that you brain starts to remember evidence or events it’s seen to support them. Soon, it’ll be ingrained in your mind and you’ll start to develop a growth mindset.

If you want a quick reference to the key points about a Growth Mindset, you can watch Dr Carol Dweck’s presentation to Stanford University in the video below.

If you want a more simplified and less academic presentation, you can watch the video below from Brainy Dose.

Blog Photo by Bruno Cervera on Unsplash