​Throughout my personal and professional journey, I have noticed some common trends for people who seem happy, successful and fulfilled — and one of them is that many of these individuals have learned how to embrace a growth mindset. Now we are all going to be faced with challenges and setbacks in our careers and in our lives, but it is how we respond to these situations that makes all the difference.

Our mindsets can dictate whether we take steps in the wrong direction after a hardship or whether we use obstacles and unexpected twists and turns as stepping stones to get to where we aspire to be. Unfortunately, having a growth mindset does not always come naturally. It can take effort and intention to begin to approach situations in a new way.

Regardless of where you currently are on your journey, there are certain steps you can take to start developing a growth mindset that will level up your happiness and success.

1. Embrace the "No Excuse Rule"

I speak about my "No Excuse Rule" in my keynote talk, Find Your Imperfect Happy, and it is meant to help you wake up and reclaim your power over your happiness and well-being. If you take a moment to reflect on the areas of your work and life where you feel frustrated or stifled, there may be an eye-opening truth that comes into your awareness.

Often, we unintentionally fight to keep ourselves stuck. We make excuses and focus on all the reasons that we should be left in the exact same situation we are unhappy with — from struggling with taking time for yourself and justifying it by saying, "I just don't have time," to being annoyed with a portion of your job and complaining about it instead of making adjustments that could help you have a more positive experience.

Adopting the "No Excuse Rule" means that you choose to put your energy and focus into finding solutions instead of unintentionally advocating for all the reasons why you should stay stuck in the problem. When you adopt this rule, you are taking a step to regain control over your happiness, well-being and success in your work and life.

2. Embrace change

There's no doubt about it. Change can be scary. Our brains like it when things are predictable and expected. Our minds will try to convince us that continuing with an unhelpful pattern makes sense because it is familiar, and it requires less energy. Getting off autopilot requires awareness and intention.

Seeing setbacks and challenges as opportunities for change, growth and innovation takes effort, but the rewards are huge. Using techniques like reframing can help shift your perspective to a more productive place in areas where you feel stuck. If you are someone who used to say, "This is too hard," with reframing, you may find yourself saying, "How can I approach this in a new way?"

3. Focus on getting better, not being perfect

One surefire way to keep yourself from embracing a growth mindset is to think that you need to be perfect. When you are trying new things and getting out of your comfort zone, there is going to be a learning curve.
When you let go of trying to be perfect, you will be more open to receiving feedback, which is a crucial component of knowing what is working and what isn't working. So, build self-compassion. Let go of striving for perfection, and instead focus on doing the best you can while adjusting as you learn, adapt and grow along the way.

Cultivating a growth mindset is a powerful tool for achieving happiness and success. By embracing the "No Excuse Rule," welcoming change and prioritizing progress over perfection, we can turn challenges into stepping stones and unlock the potential for greater happiness, success and fulfillment in our personal and professional lives. Remember, challenges are inevitable, but it's your response to those challenges that makes all the difference.



Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com
​Image Credit: Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

What is a growth mindset?
​Stanford University psychology professor Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Ballantine Books, 2007), who coined the term, defines a growth mindset as "the belief that an individual's most basic abilities and skills can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point." In contrast to a growth mindset, Dweck said, a fixed mindset is "the belief that an individual's basic abilities and skills, their intelligence and their talents, are just fixed traits." Dweck concluded that people who believe they can develop their talents through a combination of hard work, good strategies, and input from others have a growth mindset. She noted that people with a growth mindset are likely to achieve more than people with a fixed mindset because they put more energy into learning and aren't as concerned about appearing smart to others.

How to Create a Growth Mindset
How do you know what mindset you have? If you believe that intelligence is innate to a person's nature and can't be changed, you have a fixed mindset. But recognizing this is the first step toward building a growth mindset. A growth mindset requires that you accept and celebrate failure as part of learning and growth—not as a sign that someone isn't intelligent. Once you understand that intelligence and skill develop with time and experience, you can give your team permission to experiment (and maybe stop being so hard on yourself). To consciously adopt a growth mindset, you must do some personal soul-searching and make the following changes:

Acknowledge Your Weaknesses
When you stay in your comfort zone and make excuses for unacceptable results, you won't grow personally or professionally. If you give yourself a reason to get beyond your fixed mindset, such as learning a difficult new skill, it's easier to set an overall goal and specific milestones, such as passing a product certification exam. See Challenges as Opportunities If you see challenges as an opportunity to grow and learn, you won't be afraid to push yourself outside your comfort zone. Even if you fail, the experience can show you to look for a different path to take. Exploring different ways to do things for yourself and for your business can lead to new opportunities—and prove to be more lucrative.

Learn to Accept Failure
You can't explore your options without learning to accept failure. Sometimes things just don't turn out the way we hope they will, and it's only after some time has passed that hindsight will show us how the failure has affected us, for good or ill. For example, you may have wanted to partner with a big company and kicked yourself after it fell through. But six months later, you learned that the company just went bankrupt, which would have threatened your company's survival. So in the long run, that failure turned out for the best! Don't Seek Approval People with a fixed mindset worry about what other people think about their intelligence and talent. This is especially true for those in a position of authority, who want to appear infallible to people who rank lower in the hierarchy. But people with a growth mindset don't worry about whether they're the smartest person in the room. Indeed, one maxim of leadership is to hire people who are smarter than you and let them work. Then you can focus on your own learning and growth.

Accept and Use Criticism
People with a fixed mindset are easily offended by criticism, but when you have a growth mindset, you don't see criticism as negative. Instead, you see it as an opportunity to learn and improve your product. Businesspeople with a growth mindset encourage feedback, ratings, and reviews from customers and employees alike. But how does that happen with performance reviews, which are dreaded by so many employees and managers because the judgments seem so final? Managers with growth mindsets don't have formal performance reviews at a given time. Instead, managers provide specific feedback in the moment, even if it's bad news. Ongoing and timely feedback encourages employees to double down on good behavior and blunts the shock of any bad news, and that makes your employees more likely to want to do better. If you still want to have a review, you can put it at the end of the year and talk about positive things like setting goals and growth targets for the upcoming year.

Focus on the Process
When you have a growth mindset, you're more interested in the process of achieving a result than in the result itself. When you enjoy the learning process, you'll focus on improving it, and the result will take care of itself. You may also find that you get an even better result than the one you originally hoped for.

Create a Reflection Routine
If you don't take the time to reflect about what went well and what didn't, you won't understand the underlying cause of any problems you're having. This is especially important when it comes to reviewing your own actions. Carve out some time at the end of each day to ask yourself what went well, what didn't, and what actions you need to take the next day.



Source : https://www.entrepreneur.com

There are several steps in personal growth that go along with growing a successful business. From self-awareness to risk tolerance, many of the buzzwords in entrepreneurship actually come from popular psychology. Having a working knowledge of how an entrepreneurial mind processes information is a good start to figuring out whether — and how — starting a business is best for you. Perhaps the biggest step is going from being an employee at someone else's business, to deciding that you truly want to lead your own.

Crossing the bridge to business ownership requires an entrepreneurial, adaptable mindset. First, understand that you'll be going from a 9-5 mindset to one that is on 24/7, 365 days a year. It may feel overwhelming, but it's something every successful business leader cultivates. Second, you'll be going from following orders to leading other people, which requires another shift in perception. Third and most importantly: To grow a business, you need a growth mindset.

Know yourself
Self-awareness is the most basic and essential attribute for an entrepreneur, which is why it's become a business buzzword. Surprisingly, a study reported in the Harvard Business Journal found that "even though most people believe they are self-aware, self-awareness is a truly rare quality," and estimate that only 10% to 15% of the people surveyed actually have the self-awareness necessary for a managerial position.

To gain self-awareness and determine a path to successful entrepreneurship, take an honest look in the mirror. What are your strengths and weaknesses? What motivates you? Looking inward leads to decision-making about whether being an employee is the best fit or if you have the core mindset to be an entrepreneur — and, for an entrepreneur, self-awareness is also the power for cultivating a great team.

Leaving the comfort of an organization to start a new venture requires overcoming fear, building fortitude and taking a leap of faith. Going from an employee mindset to an entrepreneurial one may be the biggest emotional jump — but it will be the first of many.

Creating an adaptable mindset
Having an adaptable mindset is one of the key elements of creating and growing a business. What is an adaptable mindset? It's what the brain does behind the scenes to help us learn from mistakes and overcome setbacks to find solutions and move ahead, instead of accepting failure.

This resilience can't be underestimated in entrepreneurship. Not only does business survival depend on the ability to learn and overcome difficulties, but it allows a business owner to seek and leverage new opportunities.

There was a groundbreaking book on this very subject published in 2006 by psychologist Carol Dweck titled Mindset: The New Psychology of Success that explores the concept of growth and fixed mindsets, terms that the author coined. Examining brain processing activity, her team measured brain activity as students reviewed their mistakes on a test. They found some students had more brain activity, demonstrating a growth mindset, and others had none — a fixed mindset. She postulated that a fixed mindset prevents you from learning from mistakes, while a growth mindset can empower you to perceive mistakes as learning opportunities.

Is it possible to train oneself to create a growth mindset? Absolutely. It's a matter of transforming thinking from a one-size-fits-all to an adaptable mindset. Here are a few tips:

1. Be human: Humans are flawed by nature. Accept imperfection in yourself and those around you and embrace the uniqueness that makes you, you.
2. Be brave: Overcome fear by seeing new challenges as opportunities. Fear is a natural emotion, and having the ability to forge ahead with a can-do attitude will take you through many crises and allow you to operate in a high-pressure environment. Think of business as an adventure and achieving success as a climb along a rocky, winding trail to the mountain top.
3. Be mindful: Give consideration to what you're thinking and saying. There's an old song recorded by crooner Johnny Mercer in 1944 titled Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive that allows us to, as the lyrics go, "eliminate the negative," which holds true. Self-censor the negative thoughts in your head, and don't let them exit your mouth. The more you focus on the good, the less the bad will concern you and the results will be self-respect, ethical behavior and the ability to reach higher to achieve loftier goals.
4. Be creative: If you can dream it, you can do it. Your brainstorm needs a clear vision about what it is, and the need it fills. Envision what success will look like and create a detailed business plan to achieve it. When we started our food truck business our goal was to offer amazing fresh Mexican food in a casual atmosphere. We knew that success for us would be an escalation to more trucks, then brick-and-mortar locations and finally a franchised business model.
5. Be real and realistic: Take a deep dive into what you want to achieve in business. Is it fame or fortune? Is it a dollar amount? A number of locations? Goals are essential, but just as important is a realistic plan to reach any objective. Time, funding and knowledge each contribute to the capability to reach any goal.

​The need to know
Establishing an adaptable, growth mindset is a core element of entrepreneurship. But what you fill that same mind with is just as essential. Being familiar with the ins and outs of business and acquiring top leadership skills are the basics. Business knowledge will help to create a better employee environment provide a better chance of success in business, greater personal development, more adaptability and enhances communication skills in the workplace

One of the best places to begin when seeking financial literacy for starting a business is the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA). This government organization is dedicated to bringing "financial literacy not only to America as a whole, but specifically to small businesses and future entrepreneurs." They offer a Money Smart for Small Business toolkit that provides an introduction to small business management topics.

Transforming from an employee to an employer, overcoming fear and gaining knowledge all contribute to developing a growth mindset. With adaptability and a positive outlook, anything is possible, especially business growth and success.


Source : https://www.entrepreneur.com

We hear it all the time: If you’re serious about growing your company, you need to be ready to hustle and grind out 80-hour work weeks. I disagree. In fact, I believe that attracting a team of people who believe the opposite—as I do—has been one of the key drivers of rapid growth for my company.

I founded vChief, a fractional executive staffing company with a focus on the chief of staff role, in 2016. In the last four years, we’ve grown from six to eight figures in revenue and from one to 20 employees. While I’m very proud of this growth, I’m most proud of having achieved this while still maintaining a great work-life balance for myself and my employees.

I’ve built my business around three core values, and it’s resulted in a company culture that allows me and all of my team to focus on the people and passions in our lives. Here’s a look at how these core values play out in business and how you can take a similar approach:

Work is not the most important thing in our lives.

While I love my job and the business I’ve built, family and travel are my highest priorities. I’ve worked hard to build a company culture that allows my employees to also balance a rich personal life with their job duties.

The commitment to balancing work and life has led us to adopt a 32-hour work week. All of our internal staff have the option to work a four-day week or to work reduced daily hours over five days.

In my experience, working long hours under high pressure leads to unhappy, burned-out staff and doesn’t result in better work. We find the compressed workweek, which people see as a huge benefit, results in using our time more efficiently. Our overall work quality actually improves.

Our team cites our 32-hour week, unlimited PTO and remote work as some of the top perks that attracted them to vChief. I believe these employee-centric policies are the reason why we have very low turnover, which has also helped us achieve growth.

We don’t set unrealistic growth goals.

I don’t believe that employees achieve more when they’re pushed to achieve unrealistic growth goals. To me, that’s a setup for low morale. Even when targets are clearly unrealistic, and everyone knows it, people still feel a sense of failure for not achieving them. A rushed, pressured and stressed-out staff makes mistakes. It's not worth it.

That’s why I recommend launching new offerings with realistic revenue growth goals. Give yourself time to integrate changes and effectively enhance your business offerings. In other words, go slow to go fast.

I’ve seen many other companies do the exact opposite and launch a new product with huge expectations, which comes with an expectation of putting in long hours and setting aside your personal life. But I’ve learned that emotionally healthy and balanced people—the kind of employees you want to be around—don’t stay in high-pressure, high-stress environments very long.

Trust is granted rather than needing to be earned.

I trust my employees to do good work. Period. I don’t care how many hours it takes them to do it or when they do it. I believe smart people can make their own decisions—especially the ones I hire! If I’ve delegated something, I trust that person to seek out the information they need and to reach out for help when they need it.

I keep reading about new ways companies are monitoring their employees’ work—both at home and in the office. There are software products that allow employers to monitor every keystroke and web page view of their remote employees. Personally, I think that’s absurd, offensive and even creepy. It’s a violation of trust, and I’ve built my whole company around trust.

I would encourage business leaders to never monitor or spy on an employee to see what they’re doing. They’re either doing great work or they’re not and the proof will be in the outcomes they achieve.

If you want to build a business that’s still around in five or 10 years, I believe balancing your life and your work is the smartest way to grow both your impact and revenue. When you value and respect employees and allow them to develop a healthy work-life balance, you’ll attract the best and most emotionally healthy people. Those are the people who will help you grow your company in a balanced, sustainable way and stay with you for the long haul.



Source: https://www.forbes.com
Image: GETTY