Mindsets can be categorized as either ‘growth’ or ‘fixed’. People with fixed mindsets believe their talents and abilities are pretty much unchangeable, whereas people with growth mindsets believe their talents can be cultivated and changed with hard work and focus. And mindset applies to everything and anything in life – at home or at work.
Only a relatively few people have the mindset of winners. People with a winning mindset have powerful mental strength. They refuse to be a victim or shout ‘it’s not fair’ and they choose to be accountable for what they do or don’t do in their personal and professional lives.
They also tend not to complain about things over which they have no control. But these people aren’t superheroes and everyone has failures from time to time. That’s interesting of course because failure is absolutely part of winning. What that means is that those who have a winning mindset will take failure as part of a learning process. They will learn from failure and believe that eventually, they will achieve.
Stephen King had hundreds of rejections before he got his first story published, Thomas Edison had thousands of failures before his light bulb moment and the same with James Dyson except that his failures numbered many, many thousands. Walt Disney, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, J.K. Rowling, Bill Gates, and Colonel Sanders – all failed (a lot) before they succeeded. Richard Branson is on record as saying that he tried businesses that didn’t work (notably Virgin Cola) and most successful people will say that risk and failure are important aspects of achievement and winning.
Having a growth mindset means that you must be ready for a challenge, but you must see that challenge as an opportunity rather than a problem. Yes, we all have real problems – of course, we do, large or small. However, meeting challenges will teach us something new and invariably imply that there is an opportunity to do something to meet what’s in front of us and overcome it or succeed at it. It’s important to remember that people with a winning mindset don't grow through success. They grow through what they go through to be successful.
The process of achieving a growth mindset may take time, so patience, hard work, and keeping your endgame in mind are key. A winning mindset is about changing any negative aspects of your personality. It’s also about ditching any beliefs that you’ve had forever and perhaps need refreshing or abandoning. That’s not always easy to do and we may need help to achieve it. And there’s no shame in seeking out a mentor or someone who can support this need to change and grow.
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