Scaling Your Mind & Business
What’s your spirit animal? Kidding!
How about your learning animal? Ok, I don’t think there is such a thing, but I want you to be a learning animal. You pick the animal.
As founders and CEOs scaling your business, you must scale your mind at the same pace. You need to have a growth mindset.
Let’s start with a definition. What do we mean by a growth mindset?
It’s the belief that one's skills, intelligence and personality are not fixed. A belief that you can become smarter, more productive, more talented with effort and perseverance. A belief that talent can be nurtured, intelligence fostered, creativity and leadership developed.
Love to Learn
Failure
Fail fast, fail often. Iterate. Experiment. That is the life of a founder, the key to growing your business. Being open to making a mistake and learning from it which will, in turn, create momentum, forward motion.
Those with a growth mindset look at failure or mistakes as opportunities to learn. They take the time to do a post-mortem, see what can be done differently next time, what other information they need to make smarter decisions, what assumptions were wrong, etc.
Similarly, they encourage and reward their team for taking risks and failures. Leaders that embrace their mistakes and talk openly about them are saying ‘it’s ok to fail’.
Challenges
Having a growth mindset means believing that challenges offer the potential for amazing, valuable experiences and a chance to expand knowledge.
Get out of your comfort zone. Growth is only possible when we get uncomfortable, take risks, and put ourselves in situations where we are out of our element.
Having a growth mindset impacts the way we handle pressure and setbacks. It’s a belief that perseverance and effort will lead to success. It’s grit. The effort you are willing to put in and the drive you have even when your goal is still out of reach. The motivation to keep going because you know that you will get there, that you will get it done.
Feedback
Unlike those with a fixed mindset who become defensive, take feedback personally, or tend to blame others, someone with a growth mindset embraces feedback and works to implement it in a meaningful way.
They are not looking to prove themselves; they are looking to improve themselves. (I can’t take credit for the clever phraseology).
They embrace change. Feedback is a way to make changes – to make personal changes, to improve processes or systems, hire or fire team members, and, perhaps, pivot the business.
In his book, The Ride of a Lifetime, Robert Iger, former CEO and now Chairman of Disney, tells leaders to ask the questions you need to ask, admit without apology what you don’t understand.
Fixed Triggers
You can have a growth mindset but have pockets of fixed thinking. Situations that trigger a fixed mindset.
Do you have a fear of failure that prevents you from seeing failure as an opportunity?
Are you worried about appearing vulnerable, not the smartest in the room, of being found out as not having all the skills necessary to be a great CEO? Hello, most founders have never been CEOs before, it’s a steep learning curve. You are not alone.
If you adopt a growth mindset, then you also know that mindsets are not fixed, that you can work to dismantle limiting beliefs.
Ready to come full circle…
I was listening to an episode of Culture Factor 2.0, a podcast hosted by Holly Shannon, with guest Christina Eanes, a former FBI analyst, author of three books, a YouTube and podcast host, and host of leadership programs on developing a growth mindset.
During the episode she shares an exercise to highlight a fixed mindset. She asks people to draw an animal (could be in your mind or paper). What is the first thought that went through your head? Was it about your artistic ability (yessss, I suck at Pictionary), not the animal? Pay attention to what voices are triggered.
Building a growth mindset starts with being self-aware and managing your self-talk.
Want to expand your mind? Build habits to bring about growth? Setup a 30-min, no commitment, strategy call.
