How A Growth Mindset Becomes A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Being a sounding board for executives, after my lengthy career as a CEO, I often hear comments that they feel they are a little bit stuck. Intuitively these leaders know that they can and should continue to improve in their leadership.

It is always a delicate balance between driving results nurturing your team and developing yourself — a daunting proposition. The big question is often — When will I ever find the time to pursue personal growth?

“The concept is the growth mindset and internalizing it will allow you to improve, and increasingly thrive, in perpetuity.” — Douglas Conant

Busy leaders can take small steps to try to maximize their impact.  However, a growth mindset lightens your mental load. Once you understand it, you make the time to continue to evolve regardless of your busy schedule or responsibilities. You continue to build your talent stack and enhance your career capital.

What Is a Growth Mindset?

“Mindset change is not about picking up a few pointers here and there. It's about seeing things in a new way. When people...change to a growth mindset, they change from a judge-and-be-judged framework to a learn-and-help-learn framework. Their commitment is to growth, and growth takes plenty of time, effort, and mutual support.” ― Carol Dweck

Ms. Dweck, a leading expert in motivation and personality psychology coined the term “growth mindset.” Her research shows that everyone has one of two basic mindsets.

• Fixed mindset — You believe that your talents and abilities are set in stone--either you have them, or you do not. You need to prove yourself over and over, trying to look smart and talented at all costs. This mindset is the path of stagnation.
• Growth mindset — You understand that talents can be developed and those terrific abilities are built over time. This insight guides you on your path of opportunity and success.

Dweck demonstrates that your mindset unfolds in childhood and adulthood and drives every aspect of your life, from work to sports, from relationships to parenting. A mindset is not a personality quirk. It:

• creates your whole mental world
• explains how you become optimistic or pessimistic
• shapes your goals, your attitude toward work and relationships, and how you raise your kids
• predicts whether you will fulfill your potential

You can change your mindset to achieve success and fulfillment

Your creative genius is an application of your growth mindset to produce results. With a growth mindset, you believe that intelligence can be developed and improved. It is a fundamental belief in your ability to get better.

Whereas an individual with a fixed mindset believes that intelligence is static and cannot grow or evolve. He or she sees no point in putting in the effort because their abilities will remain the same either way. Moreover, they avoid challenges and achieve less.

“I reserve the right to be smarter today than I was yesterday.” — Abraham Lincoln

Dweck’s research shows that people with a growth mindset,

• believe in their ability to improve
• tend to put in more effort
• understand intuitively that their effort will result in positive change
• have a tendency to achieve more

With a growth mindset, you will embrace ambiguity, welcome reflection exercises with open arms, learn to develop high-impact practices, hone your leadership model, and use all your learnings to a profound effect on your organization.

Do you have a growth mindset?

Personal Assessment

One way is to find where you may have a fixed mindset tendency so that you can work to become more growth minded. Moreover, we live in a continuum, and consistent self-assessment helps us become the person we want to be. Dweck offers a free eight question Mindset Assessment on her website. Interestingly, the tool can be reapplied to show you how your mindset is changing over time.

Develop a Growth Mindset Response

Learn the facts about the mindsets and listen for your fixed mindset voice. You have a choice in how you view your challenges and setbacks. Counter your fixed mindset voice with a growth mindset response. Reflect on your learning every day

Make sure to absorb everything you learn throughout the day. Moreover, this means writing down the main points at the end of the day or doing a little bit more research on a topic that held your interest the most that day.

Do not let your lessons from the day float away. Write it down in a bullet journal or make some other form of permanent record. Reflect on the following five questions until they become second nature.

1. What did you learn from today’s performance?
2. What steps did you take to make you successful today?
3. How did you keep going when things got tough?
4. What are some different strategies you could have used?
5. What can you learn from others who did it better today?

Formal Education Does Not Equate to Growth

“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.” ― Cynthia Occelli

The results you get at your organization, do not care if you went to college. Highly educated people need to be open to learning from team members. In my experience, as counterintuitive as that may be, despite all their schooling and degrees, these folks tend to be a bit more set in their ways.

Just because a person has an advanced degree or has reached a milestone in their career, it does not indicate they have a growth mindset or have a predisposition to learning. They not necessarily are more equipped or more deserving than you of opportunities. You are just as worthy.

If you think you can achieve something, if you believe it, and take steps towards carrying it out, chances are, you will.

The best leaders are always learning, improving, growing, and pushing themselves out of their comfort zone. Putting your growth mindset in working, you believe you can get better — and you will. Understanding this is the most reliable way for you to improve and advance your career.

It is secret to becoming the leader you want to be and the surest way to unlock your vast potential.

The Four Stages of Failure

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” — Albert Einstein

It is hard to know when to keep going and when to move on. Moreover, perseverance and grit are touted as being essential to achieving success in any field. If you want to build a successful business, then “sticking with it” is an excellent trait to own.

However, telling someone never to give up is terrible advice. Successful people give up all the time. With a growth mindset, when something is not working — revise, adjust, pivot, or quit.

James Clear provides a useful framework that helps clarify things by breaking down challenges into four stages of failure:

Failure of Tactics. These are HOW mistakes. They occur when you do not build robust systems, forget to measure carefully and get lazy with the details. A Failure of Tactics is a failure to execute on a good plan and a sharp vision.

Failure of Strategy. These are WHAT mistakes. They occur when you follow a strategy that does not deliver the results you want. You can know why you do the things you do, and you can understand how to do the work, but still choose the wrong strategy to make it happen.

Failure of Vision. These are WHY mistakes. They occur when you do not set a clear direction for yourself, follow a vision that does not fulfill you, or otherwise do not understand why you do the things you do.

Failure of Opportunity. These are WHO mistakes. They occur when society does not supply equal opportunity for all people. Failures of Opportunity are the result of many complex factors: age, race, gender, income, education, and more.

Getting started

Even if you have a great foundation, there may be some areas where you could receive help from learning how to cultivate your growth mindset practices. I find learning feedback to be immensely helpful.

The technique makes the most of the negative feedback and encourages you to seek it. However, if you want to enhance your growth mindset, learn to give, and receive constructive criticism.

Think of criticism to learn

If you have an area of weakness and someone can point that out to you, think of it as a gift that makes you aware of your faults so you can focus on them to improve.

It is important not to take constructive criticism personally. Often, people are trying to help, and are therefore doing you a favour rather than trying to cut you down.

At the end of the day, learning how to help others develop growth mindset thinking is excellent for your growth. Mental exercise makes your brain grow smarter—the same way that working out makes an athlete stronger and faster. By always learning new ways to work smart, you continue to build your mind.

It is demanding work, but you can gain a lot by deepening your understanding of growth-mindset concepts and the processes for putting them into practice. It gives you a more vibrant sense of who you are, what you stand for, and how you want to move forward.

How to develop a growth mindset:

Cultivate a sense of purpose

With a growth mindset, you can look for opportunities to fully use your career capital and fulfil your micro-motives.

Ask yourself on a regular basis what the purpose is of the work that you are doing. Are you doing it because you enjoy it, or is it part of a bigger goal? Always work with a purpose, so you have the motivation to keep working.

View challenges as opportunities

You face important decisions regularly. Taking on these challenges is a big part of developing as a person. The more you challenge yourself, the more learning opportunities you will create.

NEW CHALLENGES = NEW OPPORTUNITIES

Embarking on a new challenge may be frightening due to the risk of failure. This may result in avoiding various challenges and continuing down the usual path, holding onto excuses that you tell yourself so you can remain in your comfort zone.

The truth is, staying in your comfort zone because you are scared to venture out can become uncomfortable. If you avoid challenges, you will not be provided with opportunities to learn and grow. Instead, you will be troubled by the sense that things are not exactly right.

Know your learning style and use the right learning strategies

By finding the best ways that you learn, you can optimize your time.  NC State University offers the Index of Learning Styles. It indicates your learning preferences on four dimensions (active/reflective, sensing/intuitive, visual/verbal, and sequential/global) of learning styles.

The free instrument was developed and validated by Richard M. Felder and Barbara A. Soloman.  It takes about 10 minutes to answer the 44 a-b questions. You get the results at once.

Your learning style profile shows strengths and tendencies or habits that might lead to difficulty in learning environments. Your profile does not reflect your suitability or unsuitability for a role, discipline, or profession. We provide this through a career assessment. NC State’s four-page handout “Learning  Styles and Strategies”  explains the results.

Various learning styles can work together for people who have a growth mindset, and learning styles allow people to blend and combine their bits of intelligence into many different patterns.

Learning styles relate to different learning approaches that individuals find to be the most effective for them, so once these are found, people can feel that their knowledge is expanding, and they are getting better at what they are studying.

Remember that the brain can change throughout life

Your mind forms new connections throughout life that allow it to adjust when you are faced with new situations or an unfamiliar environment.

Neuroplasticity explains how your brain can be retrained and reorganized, showing that there is always room to grow. If you are aware that your brain is constantly changing, then you are more likely to adopt a growth mindset. Remember that if your brain is not fixed, then your mind should not be fixed either.

Acknowledge and embrace your weaknesses

If you know that you tend to put things off until the last minute, try to plan around that by making modest goals and giving yourself a reasonable amount of time to do them. When know the behavioural traits that high performers have in each role.

With our career assessment, we can guide your development to manage the areas where you may not be as strong as a top performer. This insight is extremely valuable.

Prioritize learning over seeking approval

When you are more concerned about getting approval from other people than about learning new things, you are giving up your own potential to grow. Do not worry about what other people think about you, and instead focus on bettering yourself for your own benefit.

Focus on the process instead of the result

People who have a growth mindset are often very in tune with their intelligence and willingness to learn.

They understand that any growth is going to be a process and make their own process goals to help them reach the end of the process. It is essential to enjoy the learning process, so you can get the most out of it and be open to the process continuing beyond the expected period.

One of the most important things about the process of learning is the unexpected lessons that you may pick up along the way.

Choose to learn well over learning fast

This approach goes back to focusing on the process of learning instead of the result. Learning is not something that you can rush. You must go through some mistakes to indeed find success, and none of that will come easy or quickly.

Reward effort and actions, not traits

Let other people know when they are doing something creative or exceptionally smart rather than just telling them that they are smart in general. This helps people strive to continue to do smart things rather than make them feel like they have already carried out the end goal of being smart.

Need for improvement does not mean failure

Just because you need to improve in one area does not say you have failed. It means that you are on the right track, you are just not there yet.

Concluding Thoughts

No matter what your background, schooling, or journey looks like so far — if you are willing to remain open to possibilities and always push yourself, the world is more likely to reward you with a journey of perpetual ‘becoming’ an infinite forward motion.

A growth mindset changes how you feel about yourself and your future. Understanding your behavioural DNA helps you know where to focus. Top performers in each role share a set of behavioural traits: Underwing the competencies you need to manage and the one you need to leverage — your superpowers.

Your belief in your ability to improve usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. People who think they can get better, often do. So just by acknowledging that progress is possible, you are already one step ahead.

Just remember, some people think they have nothing left to learn. Those people stay stagnant. However, other people know they are never done learning. Be one of them. You will get unstuck, thrive, and transform continuously throughout your life.