What if you could create the life you wanted? It just required you to do one thing: to master your mind and expand its horizon.
The moment you realize that you actually have the power to transform your life in the way that you desire is an epiphany. Personal growth is not simply developing or sharpening skills, it is growing as a human. But that doesn´t happen without having a look inside ourselves.
The biggest challenge is figuring out how to operate your mind.
How to use it as a vehicle with you in the driver seat, instead of your mind driving you, your feelings and your behaviors, most of the time unconsciously. Negative limiting beliefs, life scripts of how live should be, the programming we received from our environment while growing up …
If we could just weed this garden in our head, pulling out these plants belonging to the mindfuck family and plant some new and better ones instead, success and happiness would start to flourish.
Is your thinking flexible or rigid?
Stanford Professor Carol Dweck introduced two types of mindsets we can have: the growth mindset and the fixed mindset. A mindset is the collection of powerful assumptions we believe to be true.
In which one do you recognize yourself?
The FIXED MINDSET is run by fear and characterized by:
- thinking that talent is innate, you either have the natural skills or you don’t and will never learn it
- believing failure is a limit of ability
- trying to avoid mistakes at all costs
- hiding your flaws
- valuing performance as more important than the process
- disliking challenges and changes
- sticking to what you know
- feeling threatened by the success of others
Whereas the GROWTH MINDSET is characterized by:
- believing you can cultivate skills through your effort
- valuing process as more important than performance
- seeing failure is an opportunity to learn and grow
- embracing challenges and change
- finding inspiration in the success of others
- being eager to learn new things
- welcoming feedback and criticism
How we feel about our environment and tackle life and its challenges all depends on what is going on inside our head.
Don’t worry if you have recognized yourself in the first one. Most of us start out having a fixed mindset. The good news is: You can cultivate a growth attitude. The moment you change your believes to seeing mistakes as an opportunity to learn instead of a sign for failure, oh boy, life becomes so much easier.
Neuroplasticity and the growth mindset
Our brain destroys and creates neural pathways constantly, forming the thought and behaviour patterns our decisions and actions are based on. Neuroscience has shown that a growth mindset nurtures new neural pathways to grow and build connections that weren’t there before, instead of just running the same old program over and over again (fixed mindset). It´s called neuroplasticity. That is not only setting the ground for learning new information faster but also for more life gratification.
