Mindset Tool

A Fixed Mindset is the belief that your skills, intellect and talents are fixed and unchangable. Striving for success and avoiding failure at all costs become a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled.

A Growth Mindset reflects the belief that your skills, intellect and talents can be  developed through practice and perseverence. This mindset embraces challenges and sees failure not as evidence of unintelligence but as a positive springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities. People with this mindset believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training

A great deal of our behavior, our relationship with success and failure in both professional and personal contexts, and ultimately our capacity for happiness come from our mindset.

Shifting to a growth mindset – Choose to tell yourself a different story

There’s a lot of power in the story we tell ourselves. What do you tell yourself – do you have a choice, are you smart enough to learn new things, do you feel challenges lift you up or bring you down?

When we come across hard problems or difficult situations, how we interpret and react to them is based on our own story. Our actions are nothing but a manifestation of our beliefs.

The first step to enable a growth mindset is to learn to catch yourself in the moment, make a choice and shift the language you use.

Instead of telling yourself,

• I am not good at it / I can’t do it

• I do not have the ability to learn / It’s better to stick to what I know

• I have fixed potential

• This is frustrating / This is hard

• I am who I am

Choose to say,

• I can do better / I can do it

• I want to try and not give up /I want to explore new ideas

• I believe in myself

• It’s ok to fail / I can learn from my mistakes

• I just don’t know yet