This is fabulous guest post by my new friend Clarissa Cabbage. Clarissa’s a teacher, coach, and adventurer living in Hawai’i. She has a Masters in Exercise and Wellness and is on a mission to help people develop the healthy habits and growth mindset necessary to achieve their goals and find their own brand of happiness.
What Is The Growth Mindset?
In her groundbreaking book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Psychologist Dr. Carol Dweck described two distinct mindsets. She introduced the growth mindset and the fixed mindset.
The main difference between these two mindsets is how people view their traits, talents, and skills such as intelligence, creativity, athletic ability, personality, etc.
People with the fixed mindset believe that these traits are “fixed” – meaning that they can not be developed over time, no matter how much effort you put in. Fixed-minded people essentially believe that they are stuck with the hand they were dealt by their genetics.
In contrast, people with a growth mindset believe that their traits, talents, and skills can be developed over time through effort and learning. Dr. Dweck acknowledges that while some people may have been dealt a better hand, how they play that hand still matters.
For example, some people are born with more natural athletic talent than others. But those born with less natural talent can still work hard and improve their athletic ability through effort.
This very simple belief about whether traits are fixed or can be developed, has a huge trickle down effect on the way a person views the world, and approaches challenges.
The table below, illustrates the characteristic difference between the growth and fixed mindsets.
7 Ways The Growth Mindset Makes You A Better Entrepreneur
There is nothing easy about being an entrepreneur and forging your own path. It takes a certain type of person.
Below, I’ll take you through some of the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs, and how the growth mindset can help develop these characteristics.
1. The Growth Mindset promotes confidence & drive
An entrepreneur must be confident and driven. To give something everything you’ve got, there’s no room for doubt.
An entrepreneur must have the confidence to continue on when others say, “it can’t be done”. They must have the drive to work through the long nights and weekends and make the necessary sacrifices to get a business off of the ground.
The growth mindset promotes this necessary confidence and drive. People with the growth mindset value effort and hard work above all else.
Because they are willing to put in the effort, they tend to learn quicker and progress further in their endeavors.
Progress then leads to confidence and even more motivation and drive. The more progress, the more motivation and determination to science a goal.
2. The Growth Mindset develops risk tolerance
An entrepreneur must be willing to take risks. They cannot be successful by doing things the way they have always been done. Instead they must be willing to take risks to try out new ways of doing things.
With great risk often comes great reward. There are failures, setbacks and even complete start-over’s along the way, but if you don’t risk something, you’ll never gain anything.
Adam Toren
The growth mindset helps develop this risk tolerance.
In order to be able to take risks, one must be comfortable with the fact that failure is a possibility. People with a growth mindset aren’t afraid to fail. For them, failure is not permanent – it is simply a lesson to be learned.
By seeing failure as a temporary state, and as a valuable source of learning, entrepreneurs with a growth mindset can learn to become more risk tolerant which allows them the freedom to experiment, innovate, and think outside the box.
3. The Growth Mindset creates challenge-seekers
Most people tend to avoid challenges and seek the path of least resistance, it’s human nature. But in order to achieve something great, we must strive to overcome that nature and seek out challenges.
There is nothing easy about building a business from the ground up, so an entrepreneur must be up for a challenge.
They must be willing to venture outside their comfort zone without looking back in order to achieve their goals and objectives.
Adopting a growth mindset can make people less adverse to challenges. Growth-minded people see value in challenge because they know it is the only way to grow and develop their skills.
If an entrepreneur is able to adopt a growth mindset, it will allow them to see the opportunity in challenging situations, where others see only difficulty and hardship.
4. The Growth Mindset allows adaptation to unfamiliar situations
An entrepreneur must be highly adaptable.Things very rarely go as planned in business, and if a person isn’t able to form alternate plans and take action quickly, they will have trouble keeping up in the business world.
People with the growth mindset are better able to adapt to unfamiliar situations. The reason for this, is that they do not have the same fear of failure as other people, since failure is simply a learning opportunity for them.
Without the fear of failure, the growth-minded entrepreneur is able to avoid panic when something doesn’t go as planned. They are able to roll with the punches.
It is this ability to keep a level head that allows them to quickly react and adapt to a new situation.
5. The Growth Mindset cultivates a love of learning
An entrepreneur must be a life-long learner. If they become complacent when they reach the top, they will quickly be made irrelevant by competition that is constantly learning and innovating.
Adopting a growth mindset can help entrepreneurs fall in love with perpetual learning.
The growth-minded entrepreneur views themselves, and their companies, not as a finished product, but as a work in progress – always.
Growth-minded entrepreneurs continue to look for new and more efficient ways of doing things even when they’re on top, making it more likely that they will stay there.
6. The Growth Mindset makes taking feedback easier
Many businesses fail because they spend all their effort, time, and money building a product or service that nobody really wants.
An entrepreneur must be willing to take feedback and constructive criticism in order to learn what their audience truly needs.
Adopting a growth mindset can help make constructive criticism a little easier to swallow.
This is because growth-minded people don’t feel the need to constantly prove themselves right. They are able to receive constructive criticism as it was intended, for learning, rather than as a personal insult.
An entrepreneur who is able to ask for feedback and use constructive criticism for learning and improving their product or service will be ahead of the game.
7. The Growth Mindset gives rise to resilience & perseverance
An entrepreneur must be resilient in order to deal with the ups and downs of business. They must be willing to pivot if necessary, to not give up after their request for funding has been denied multiple times, etc.
The growth mindset helps build resilience and perseverance. Instead of giving up when things get tough, growth-minded individuals tend to buckle down and work even harder.
They are able to do this because of their strong belief that effort leads to success, and that more effort means more success.
By adopting a growth mindset and the beliefs that go along with it, entrepreneurs give themselves the tools needed to stand by their labor of love through all of the ups and downs, to overcome the odds and build a successful business.
Wrap up
Being an entrepreneur isn’t for everyone. It is a long and treacherous uphill climb – but a climb that can offer great satisfaction and reward for those who aren’t too afraid to undertake the journey.
Adopting the growth mindset gives entrepreneurs the tools necessary to navigate this difficult climb by building the necessary qualities needed for success.
Recap: The Growth Mindset
- Promotes confidence and drive.
- Develops risk tolerance.
- Creates challenge-seekers.
- Allows adaptation to unfamiliar situations.
- Cultivates a love of learning.
- Makes taking feedback easier.
- And gives rise to resilience and perseverance.
If you would like to learn more about HOW to adopt the growth mindset, check out Clarissa’s amazing post 9 Ways To Start Developing A Growth Mindset Right Now over on her blog. You can also find her over on Twitter.
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