Buisness Bites: Growth Mindset
A Growth Mindset allows us to see challenges as an opportunity to develop further. Dr. Carol Dweck developed the growth and fixed mindset framework. A growth mindset is the idea that intelligence can be developed and is something that you don’t know yet. This difference in framing can have a powerful impact on success. Subscribe to this podcast today so you never miss an episode!
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Welcome to Business Bites. My name is Sara. This is the podcast for busy professionals who want the quick hits of business terminology, historical context, and strategies for integration. Today we'll be talking about growth mindset.
Growth mindset came from Dr. Carol Dweck, who's a Stanford professor who focuses in educational psychology. When thinking about a growth mindset, it's important to understand the different types of mindsets as she frames them. First, we have a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset integrates the idea that intelligence is static. You either know something or you don't know something. A growth mindset is thinking about the idea that intelligence can be developed and it's something that you don't know yet.
When we're thinking about growth mindset, I love this quote from Dr. Carol Dweck; important achievements require a clear focus, all-out effort, and a bottomless trunk full of strategies plus allies in learning. When we're considering a growth mindset, it's often helpful to think about it as a comparison to that fixed mindset before. For example, a fixed mindset might think of challenges and how to avoid them, but a growth mindset might think about how that challenge could be an opportunity and how to embrace it in the moment. For example, thinking about effort, how much effort are we going to put in might be a consideration of a fixed mindset and assessing whether or not it'll be worth it. Instead, a growth mindset would think about effort and the needed effort to complete a task as being on the path to mastery. How is me putting in the effort helping me towards that goal?
Next, let's think about criticism. Someone with a fixed mindset, again, with that idea that intelligence is static, might ignore or push aside negative or critical feedback because it's not helpful to the existing state. But in a growth mindset, we learn from criticism and decide how can we use this feedback to help us going forward. And lastly, considering the success of others. With a fixed mindset, again, that static intelligence, we might feel threatened by the success of others because it is a direct comparison to us. Whereas with a growth mindset, we might find the lessons and the opportunities that we can glean from other people.
When you're trying to think about how to integrate growth mindset or this way of thinking into your work, there are different types of questions or ways to consider certain examples. For example, instead of focusing on what might have gone wrong today or what might have been a failing of the day, what are some of the steps that you took to make today successful? What are some of the different strategies that you could have used to accomplish that goal? What were some of the things that you tried when things got difficult or when things got tough today? If you're providing that feedback to another colleague or to a coworker, while I know this might be a challenging concept for you to learn, I know and believe that you can master it. Yes, you may not have gotten that skill yet, but you will if you keep working on it and plan an action. It's okay that we take risks. This is how we learn and develop forward.
This has Sara with Business Bites. And you can reach me at [email protected]. We would love to hear from you and other terminology that you would like to hear bite-sized. As always, give us a quick rating on your platform of choice and share this podcast with a friend.
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