The entirety of your existence; the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the songs you listen to – all result from your mindset.
Your mindset shapes and influences your thinking and living in its entirety. Your mindset can also be a cultural thing; just as people have the mindset that blue is a great color for boys and red is the feminine color. A mindset can be built over a period of time. Your mindset affects your view to life and successful living.
This is why it is essential to build a great mindset and have a positive perception to life. There are two basic mindsets to life; the fixed and the growth mindset.
The fixed mindset believes attitude and knowledge is fixed. In the fixed mindset, intelligence, attitude, knowledge are seen as unchanging. The fixed mindset does not consider growth and learning as a factor of knowledge. The fixed mindset sees life as either “I know it or I don’t” or “I can do it or I can’t.”
On the other hand, the growth mindset sees everything as a challenge. It sees a place of learning and improving. Growth mindset acknowledges that intelligence; attitude, ability, and knowledge can be worked upon and improved. Growth mindset sees unknown opportunities as challenges they can be better at. A person with the growth mindset thinks “I can’t do it now but I can learn it” or “Practicing it makes me better so I will keep practicing”. A person with the growth mindset believes in the development of their ability through learning and practicing.
A lot of people practice the different mindsets unconsciously. People move around, performing day to day activities while building on the mindset they carry.
Here is the importance of adopting a growth mindset
1. It is empowering:
Dweck asserts that a growth mindset empowers people to believe they can develop their abilities. It builds the love for learning in an individual and the will to learn. The growth mindset helps you think “If I learn it, I will know it and I can be better”.
2. It Increases Creativity:
Growth mindset helps you view difficulties as challenges that need to be solved. This allows you think outside the box and enhances creativity, talent building and development.
3. It Helps an Individual Build a Positive Mindset.
People with the growth mindset believe that no situation is permanent and all problems can be solved. That helps them because they don’t see failure but are always seeing positivity in all things.
In conclusion, an effort to grow ones mindset isn’t as easy as it sounds. It will take a whole lot from you, but it’s sure worth the effort and time you dedicate to it. To develop a growth mindset, there’s the need to first alter your perspective and then cultivate a habit of self-acceptance, as approval from others and fear of embarrassment can prevent you from developing a growth mindset.
Along the process of learning new things, embrace challenges. They are only a catalyst to growth. Likewise, view mistakes and errors as lessons. By doing all these, you are redefining failure and in the end your patience eventually pays off.
