As business owners, particularly those managing small to medium-sized teams, our mindset can significantly impact our success.
The way we approach challenges and opportunities often determines the outcomes we achieve.
So today I’m writing with the purpose of helping you to understand the power of how shifting from a fixed to a growth mindset can transform not only your business, but as I’ve seen with many, many of my clients, your personal life too.
As a business owner, your natural desire is to strive for growth, success and fulfillment.
But most businesses share a significant challenge: the mindset you choose to bring to your daily operations and long-term goals – and often it’s hard to recognise this without truly stepping back from the day-to-day and asking yourself these types of questions.
One of the most pervasive challenges is having what I refer to as a fixed mindset.
This is the belief that our abilities, intelligence, and talents are static and unchangeable.
When we operate from a fixed mindset, we avoid challenges, give up easily, see effort as fruitless, and feel threatened by the success of other. This mindset can effectively create a ceiling for your business, limiting your potential and stunting both your business and personal growth.
And so I’m here today to help you firstly to recognise, and secondly, to try and shift this pattern of thinking!
Embracing a growth mindset, where you believe that abilities and intelligence can be developed through dedication and hard work, is crucial. This way of thinking and behaving fosters a love for learning, resilience in the face of setbacks, and a belief that effort leads to mastery and growth.
So here’s a simple five-step plan to shift from a fixed to a growth mindset:
- Recognise Your Fixed Mindset Voice: Start by becoming aware of the fixed mindset thoughts that pop up in challenging situations. These might sound like, “I’m not good at (numbers, sales, etc),” or “I can’t improve.”
- Reframe Your Thoughts: When you catch a fixed mindset thought, reframe it into a growth mindset perspective. Instead of saying, “I can’t do this,” say, “I can’t do this yet…but I can learn.”
- Embrace Challenges: Seek out challenges as opportunities to grow rathe than threats to your competence. This could mean taking on a new project, learning a new skill – stepping out of your comfort one in some way.
- Learn from Criticism and Failure: View constructive criticism and failures as valuable feedback and learning opportunities. Ask yourself, “What can I learn from this experience?”
- Celebrate Effort and Progress: Focus on and celebrate the effort and progress you and your team make, not just the end results. This helps reinforce the growth mindset belief that effort leads to improvement and success.
Now, it’s time to take some action!
Start implementing these steps into your daily life and business operations. Reflect on how you approach challenges and setbacks, and consciously apply the growth mindset principles.
Avoiding the shift to a growth mindset means staying stuck in the same patterns, limiting both your personal and professional growth. You risk missing out on opportunities for innovation, improvement and success.
However, by adopting a growth mindset, you open the door to a world of possibilities. You’ll become more resilient, adaptable, and better equipped to lead your team through challenges.
Your business will benefit from a culture of continuous learning and improvement, driving sustained growth and success.
Crucially, be really careful when hiring to look for team members who have growth mindset an an interview process to filter out those with fixed mindset. At the same time ‘weeding out’ the latter from your existing team so you can build a growth mindset culture over time.
Sir Clive Woodward, who achieved immense success as a leader in both business and sport, talks extensively about the benefits of having a team full of Sponges (Growth Mindset) versus Rocks (Fixed Mindset).
Any business with a team full of ‘Sponges’ is an order of magnitude easier to grow and so much more enjoyable for everyone on the growth journey.
Through my coaching, I have routinely tackled fixed mindset thinking in leaders and their teams to help them move forward. Whenever I hear “I’m not good at (fill in the blank: numbers, sales, marketing, communication…) I will challenge it and work on the element that’s missing (limiting belief, lack of confidence, knowledge or skills) as each of these disciplines are crucial to long-term business success and we have to remove the real barrier in order to move forward.
One example that comes to mind is a business owner who avoided looking at the numbers in his business because as a child, he was told he was rubbish at maths.
So this limiting belief was ‘wired in’ at an early age based on an experience some 30+ years ago. Step-by-step, we put the building blocks in to address it so that the business owner now is confident reviewing regularly all the numbers and KPI’s through a dashboard and management accounts to know how well his business is performing and able to spot any potential issues or opportunities for further diagnosis and analysis.
He will never be the Chief Financial Officer, but he knows enough to lead and manage the finance team in a £20m+ fast growing business, and hold his own with other stakeholders connected to his business in strategic discussions – lenders, accountants, investors and business brokers etc.
Ready to make the shift? Let’s work together to cultivate a growth mindset in your business!
Schedule a free 45-minute coaching session with me today, and let’s see what we can do to take those first steps!
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