A growth mindset is the full acceptance of ourselves as learning and changing humans: in this context, every relevant experience we collect is a piece of information that we acquire towards our success. One of the most important results of a growth mindset is that failing becomes just one of the many steps of a learning process: no blame, no (not too much) guilt. These two cumbersome feelings subtract a lot of energy from our body and mind and chip away at our self-esteem.
Wisdom and skills can be developed with each new experience – even failure. And ideas, beliefs and ways of being can evolve at any stage of our life. We are human beings, after all.
ACKNOWLEDGING AND EMBRACING OUR IMPERFECTION GIVES US BACK CONTROL OF OUR LIFE, MAKING US READY TO BE BACK IN CONTROL OF OUR OWN NARRATIVE.
- Believe in your future: our qualities and skills are the result of the way we invest our time. We change, grow and evolve, and sometimes we even regress, losing what we thought would have being there all the time, ready to be used. Our brain changes continuously and this means we change too.
- Keep in mind the outcome: adopting a growth mindset doesn’t mean just praising efforts and spinning wheels without a strategy. The final goal is still important. For this reason, every effort we choose to take should be evaluated, efficient and productive toward what we want to achieve.
- Don’t just fail fast. Reflect: certain Silicon-Valley inspired gurus have adopted a motto that sounds like “fail often, fail fast”. Do we really need to even fail fast? If failing is a learning process, then we should take the time to do so and reflect. As human-beings, we need to lick our wounds before being able to look forward clearly.
- Embracing discomfort: closing our eyes, envisioning our future as the starting point of a wonderful life where we finally express our full potential and seize all the opportunities is not enough. Adopting a growth mindset shouldn’t just be lip service. What we learn every time we fail or succeed should be noted and integrated into our plans and kept ready to tackle future challenges. That’s learning.
Questions for you:
- What might be possible if you gave yourself permission, and the opportunity, to learn through your failure?
- What epic learning could you then access?
- What can you learn from your biggest recent failure to get back on track stronger?
Deeper learning: Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, 2006
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