This week I want you to ask yourself this essential personal growth question – do you have a growth mindset or fixed mindset? Now, before you answer, let’s dig a little deeper because your ability to answer this question with total honestly is essential for your personal growth, your development as a leader, and ultimately, who you are as a person. So here we go…

What Is Growth Mindset?

Let’s start with the basics. In Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck describes a growth mindset as:

The belief that your most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just a starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.

Carol Dweck

So a growth mindset is essentially adopting the perspective that anything can be overcome, while a fixed mindset is characterized by the acceptance that basic qualities like your intelligence and strength will always be the same. People who have a fixed mindset believe that talent alone contributes to success and that people are either born with certain talents or they are not. Now before you say, “I definitely have a growth mindset,” let’s dig a little deeper.

How Fixed Mindset Sneaks In

A lot of us adopt a fixed mindset for at least some portion of our lives, and we can look back on our past and see this clearly (say when you’re an unruly teenager who knows everything there is know). That’s especially easy to see and admit twenty, thirty or forty years later when we’ve grown a lot as people and have committed ourselves to personal growth.

But if we are being 100% honest with ourselves, we don’t just adopt fixed mindset for… well… a fixed period of time. We all tend to have blindspots where we have a fixed mindset that we’re not consciously aware of – this is particularly true when we’ve made growth central to our lives and we see growth as part of our identify and fundamentally who we are as a person. However, fixed mindset sneaks in with some of our strongest beliefs about ourselves because that’s where it hides most easily.

It’s hard for me to lose weight because… I can’t fix that relationship because… I’d love to write a book, but… I can’t get my business to the next level because…

And not only do we have these areas where we have a fixed mindset, we tend to fight very hard to defend them, sometimes without even realizing it. These fixed thoughts provide us a safe bubble to live in where we can’t expect too much from ourselves – and the alternative can seem daunting, scary and even threatening to those fundamental beliefs we have about ourselves.

Switching from a Fixed Mindset to a Growth Mindset

Angela Duckworth, author of Grit, shares some words that I think will be reassuring to anyone hesitating or struggling to embrace a growth mindset:

Not only is a growth mindset a more accurate view of human nature, it’s also adaptive. For instance, a growth mindset inclines you to embrace challenges as opportunities to develop your abilities. And after you make a mistake, it helps you look for lessons rather than protect your ego.

Angela Duckworth

Yes, you become responsible for your own success (or lack thereof) when you adopt a growth mindset, but failure is no longer this internalized, terrible part of you — every failure, every challenge, becomes an opportunity!

So now I’ll ask you again… do you have a growth mindset or fixed mindset or a bit of both?

If you noticed you have a fixed mindset in a certain area, how do you make the switch to a growth mindset? You can start by look at the language you use to talk about challenges and successes. Are you framing your experiences as a complete success or failure, all or nothing, win or lose? Or are you talking about evolving, adapting and growing with each set back and win?

How you describe your own successes and failures to yourself will help you get clear on what mindset you’re embracing in any given moment. Pause and get behind that voice in your head. Is it building up your ego when you have a huge win and is it tearing you down when you have a big, public failure? The ego will always have a fixed mindset. It’s your job to create space – awareness – between you and that voice. Then you can get curious about the successes, the failures, the lessons, the gifts, the evolution and yes… the growth. When we come from this place of experiencing, learning and evolving, then you know you actually have a growth mindset.

And you’ll probably notice that once you’ve shifted into a growth mindset in one area, something else will hit your stuff and you’ll catch yourself being hooked by the ego and defending a fixed mindset. That’s okay. No judgement. Just repeat the process and with continued practice, you’ll begin to notice that fixed mindset has less of a pull on you and growth mindset becomes the norm. And that’s when the real growth begins!

What strategies do you use for switching from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset? What tips do you have for others? Let us know below!

Want more on this topic? Head on over to our podcast Business Meets Spirituality for a more in-depth discussion on growth vs. fixed mindset.