To quote the great playwright George Bernard Shaw: "Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." Whenever we make changes in our lives, whenever we strive for personal growth, we are engaging in an act of self-creation. A new you constantly being forged out of the old. Change can be a habit- a practice- in its own right, one that you can get better at over time. All it takes is cultivating a growth mindset.
What is Growth Mindset?
Growth mindset is a concept coined by a Stanford professor, Carol Dweck, who specializes in child psychology research. Through her work, she identified a division between students in terms of how they responded to failure. That division is the binary of growth mindset versus fixed mindset. In short, the key difference between them is that people with a fixed mindset view their capabilities and limitations as “fixed” and unchangeable. A person with a fixed mindset who is “bad at math” believes that this is “Just How They Are” and nothing can fix it. Someone with a growth mindset sees themselves as mutable and transformable, able to learn new skills and correct their blind spots with effort. A person with a fixed mindset says, “I’m not good at this and I never will be;” a person with a growth mindset says, “I’m not good at this… for now.”
Growth mindset is about adaptability. It’s about seeing failure as an opportunity to learn versus a disincentive to continue working on yourself. Developing a growth mindset can make you more willing to challenge yourself, to move beyond your limitations, to become more resilient in the face of adversity. Like many soft skills and social behaviors, it’s something that can be improved and built up over time like a muscle. The more you practice having a growth mindset, the more that mentality will become second nature for you.
Know Your Limits
If you want to grow as a person, you have to know where you fall short. You need to know your limitations. What skills need to to be sharpened? What are your blind spots? Do you have social skills like leadership or public speaking that you want to improve? What is a weakness you want to turn into a strength? Give yourself an honest self-assessment. Where are you at in your life, personally, professionally, academically? Where do you want to be? What’s holding you back, and is it something that is within your power to address? What realistic, achievable steps are you able to take to improve yourself? Think of it like giving yourself a reality check. One useful framework to adopt for your goal-setting is the S.M.A.R.T. system of goals. S.M.A.R.T. stands for: Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
Be realistic with the goals you set for yourself, or you run the risk of demoralizing yourself because you fail to score a win that is beyond your reach. If you’re worried that you’re missing something about yourself, talk to your friends, family, and/or co-workers (a mentor would be very helpful for this sort of thing) to see if they notice anything about you that you’re not picking up on.
“Failure is a point of growth,” said Dr. Melanie Abts, Rio Salado College's Counseling Faculty Co-Chair. “We learn so much from our mistakes! The things I remember most are my mistakes and what I learned from the mistakes.”
Stop Seeking Approval
It may seem counterintuitive but seeking the approval of others could be a detriment to your personal and professional growth. A big part of growth is failure; you have to venture outside your comfort zone and do things that risk damaging your ego, that may well make you look inept or foolish to others. You have to get over any concern about looking “stupid” if you want to grow. A person who is afraid of admitting their flaws or revealing their ignorance won’t ask the sort of questions they NEED to ask to understand something. Sometimes people will judge you for not already being at the level you “should” be at with whatever you’re trying to do. Don’t let that stop you from putting the work in.
What this also means is that you need to practice self-acceptance more often. Seek approval from yourself; do not seek validation from others.
Be Open to Criticism
While you shouldn’t be defined or fueled by the approval of others, you should seek out honest criticism from them. When you get feedback from people, be open to it. People with a fixed mindset tend to be defensive, sometimes even hostile, when confronted with criticism. Criticism gets perceived as an attack on their person. Part of having a healthy growth mindset is understanding that feedback is a learning opportunity. Sure, it may not feel good to be told you messed up and did something wrong, but that can be useful information to learn. You can’t improve if you don’t know you’re doing something wrong.
Pursue New Experiences
Growth requires the breaking of habits. You have to get out of your comfort zone and expose yourself to unfamiliar environments, people, and situations. It’s in these moments where you truly confront your limitations and your ability to adapt. Accept your status as the newcomer, the outsider, the rookie, when doing something new. The pursuit of the new doesn’t have to be just centered around wellness or work; even something as small as sampling a new kind of cuisine or taking a day trip to a new city can be a revelatory experience. You have to plant yourself in many different kinds of soil to see what experiences or environments nourish you the most and spur on your growth.
Start Small
Change doesn’t have to be dramatic. It can be small, gradual, incremental. As you establish your goals, set some modest ones. Goals that you can achieve on a consistent basis (maybe it’s saving a certain amount of money every month, or doing a new social activity every week) are good for giving you a sense of momentum and feeling of accomplishment that can sustain you while you work on much larger and more difficult tasks. Exercise can be great for this, as you can feel yourself getting stronger or lighter as you go (depending on your goals). You can see a tangible result from your hard work.
Article by Austin Brietta
Read About Wellness
Check out more of our Wellness and Student Success stories: