David in Penang Malaysia Relaxing After a Busy Day At Business Conference
Creating and growing your own succesful business is more about mindset and attitude than the mechanics of doing it. If your mindset is wrong, your chances of success are really not very high.
Your thoughts and beliefs determine your destiny.
Your life or your business will not be a positive experience if you have predominantly negative thoughts.
This is because the messages you are giving your sub-conscious mind are negative, and your sub-conscious mind creates what your thoughts tell it. It is unable to differentiate between whats actually true and your thoughts, so tell it what you DO want, not what you DON’T want.
We can’t control the thoughts that pop into our heads, but we can control how we deal with negative thoughts when they arise.
As soon as you recognise a negative or undesirable thought, simply dismiss it instantly. I usually laugh and say something like “that’s not true, or “that’s rubbish”.
Your success, happiness and prosperity depend on this.
What’s on your mind?
I wrote this article to share with you how to get the right mindset to give you the best possible chance of succeeding in creating and growing your own succesful business – or for that matter, success in any aspect of your life.
As I said in the introduction, creating and growing your own successful businesses is more about mindset and attitude than the mechanics of doing it. If your mindset is wrong your chances of success are really not good.
Unfortunately, many people underrate their own personal intelligence and ability. It seems we are our own worst critic.
We have an underlying fear of failure and these thoughts create a lot of anxiety that can wear you down over time, and cause a lack of action to improve your situation. This in turn leads to an overall lack of fulfillment in our business and our lives in general.
In reality, we are all capable of being, or doing just about anything we really want to do. It all boils down to having the right mindset, belief in yourself and having the confidence to take action in areas outside your comfort zone – in unfamiliar territory.
So in fact, you have the ability to overcome any concerns you might have by changing your limiting beliefs and thoughts (which are untrue in any case) and adopting a new mindset to approach challenges such as learning new and valuable skills and exploring exciting new opportunities.
So here is a proven model for getting the mindset you will need to succeed if you are serious about starting or growing your own business.
The Growth Mindset for Success
The “growth mindset” was explained by Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University, whose research into mindset and success has been published in her book “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success”. You will find a link to the book in Amazon at the end of this article.
According to Dr.Dweck:
“There are basically 2 types of mindset; fixed and growth. People who believe that your personal human characteristics cannot be changed have a fixed mindset, whereas people who believe they can be positively changed have a growth mindset.
Or looked at another way, people are either learners or non-learners”.
We all start with the same mindset, but as we go through life, our circumstances and environment will mould our mindsets in one direction or the other.
So how do you decide which of these two is predominant in your life right now?
If you don’t already know, which you probably do if you think about it, Dr. Dweck asked 4 simple questions to help you decide:
Read each statement and decide whether you mostly agree or disagree with it:
- Your intelligence is something basic about you that can’t be changed very much.
- You can learn new things, but you can’t really change how intelligent you are.
- No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit.
- You can always substantially change how intelligent you are.
You won’t be surprised to learn that questions 1 and 2 are typical of the fixed mindset belief system, and that questions 3 and 4 reflect the growth mindset.
If you favour the Fixed Mindset approach, dont worry – It’s not true, and its possible to change. Read on for details.
Growth Mindset
The growth mindset stems from a belief that your talent and intelligence are just the starting point, and that success comes as a result of belief in yourself, effort, learning, testing, and persisting.
There are very few overnight successes, and no get rich quick strategies that work. If anyone tells you otherwise-and they will when you research opportunities online – they are probably lying!
People with a growth mindset are more resilient, work harder, and almost always achieve greater success than those with a fixed mindset, because they are motivated by the desire to grow and learn, and a strong belief in their own ability.
When they embark on a new project or business venture, people with a growth mindset will do research to find out who the experts with proven success in that field are, and study exactly what those experts are doing and use it as a model for their own venture.
They are also not afraid to reach out to others with more experience than they have for guidance.
Tip: Find a mentor that has been there and done what you want to do and has proven success.
Fixed Mindset
People with a fixed mindset believe that you are either born with talent and intelligence or you are not, and that it is not possible to change how talented or smart you are.
As a result, they are afraid to take risks for fear they might make a mistake – which would just confirm in their mind that they have limited intelligence. In other words a fixed mindset leads people to remain in their comfort zone.
As many wise people, including Albert Einstein, have said; “all success is achieved outside the comfort zone“ So, if you continue to do the same old things over and over, you will get the same results as you did before.
People with a fixed mindset also tend not to seek help from other people as they believe that those people will see that as a sign of weakness, and just confirm in their own minds that they really do lack intelligence.
Dr. Dweck’s research, unsurprisingly confirmed that people with a fixed mindset are less “successfull” than those with a growth mindset.
But it also found that, you can overcome fixed-mindset thinking and develop a growth mindset. Although learning new things requires effort and action. Your brain is capable of learning new things you never dreamed you could learn.
So How Do You Develop the Growth Mindset?
You can train your brain to think positively
Scientists have discovered amazing things about the human brain in recent years, and can demonstrate that as you learn new things, your brain creates new “neural pathways” to embed that new learning.
The picture on the left shows human brains cells, called neurons. The lines joining the cells are called synapses. They can be created by the brain to share new information among the cells. The overall structure of neurons and synapses are known as neural pathways.
The other good news is that age is not a factor in this process; so older people are as capable as younger people when it comes to learning and retaining new skills
According to Dr Dweck:
“the brain can be re-modelled into the growth mindset by changing one’s point of view. When a dilemma comes up, take a step back and look at how you are viewing it. Are you looking at the problem with a fixed mindset or a growth mindset?
A growth mindset accepts new challenges and strategises a way to solve the challenge and then keeps working until the challenge is solved or achieved. A person with a growth mindset learns from setbacks and keeps moving forward”
Here is a phrase I use in my personal daily affirmations that may help:
Every problem or adverse situation contains within it the seeds of it’s own solution.
The secret is to focus on the positives in any situation or circumstance, not on the negatives.
If you think hard enough, the positives will come to you; they are always there. Just write down whatever comes into your head, then re-examine what you have written, thoughtfully. It may contain or at least some clues to the solution or answer you are seeking.
Dr Dweck defined a 4 step process for your growth mindset development and implementation.
I have reviewed the 4 step process (see below), and I believe it is a good framework to follow. It will be important not to miss a step but you may wish to add some additional steps. We are all different and our work experience and background may influence how we approach this.
I have gone into a fair amount of detail and added as an example, a hypothetical project to set up your own home based internet marketing business. I personally find it helpful to have a structure defined as a base to work with.
You may also want to invest in Dr Dweck’s book; I have added the Amazon link at the end of this post (P.S. this is not an affiliate link).
4 step process for your growth mindset development and implementation.
Step 1. Become Aware of Your Fixed Mindset Thoughts
It is important to acknowledge that we all have fixed-mindset thoughts sometimes. The key is to recognize when the fixed mindset arises, because that is the essential first step in the process of change.
Then analyse the circumstance carefully and ask yourself: If I was addressing this with a growth mindset, how could I view it differently?
Pay close attention to the situations that trigger your fixed-mindset thoughts and try to find a pattern. Notice the words that crop up in your mind that represent your fixed mindset e.g.:
- I can’t do that
- This is way too hard.
- I’m not good enough.
- I give up.
You might even think all of the above in this exact sequence.
Step 2. Make the decision that you are going to change.
Like many habits or practices you have adopted, consciously or unconsciously, at some stage in your life, if you want to change, you have to actually make a decision to do so.
So you now need to make a conscious decision to change your mindset.
Create your own affirmation and say it to yourself at least once a day, in the morning or evening, and also when a situation arises that may initially trigger a fixed mindset thought in your head. Dismiss that thought, say your affirmation and look for a growth minded point of view instead.
With practice this will become easier and easier, and eventually your positively re-wired brain will take control and think with a growth mindset automatically.
Document your successes
It will also help, for a period of time to record your growth mindset decisions in a journal where you document your successes and outline the process you used to create that success.
Not every growth mindset decision you take will be a success. But your success rate will improve with practice.
Every highly successful internet marketer shares their story; the many failures they had on their journey before becoming successful.
But this is not exclusive to internet marketers. I am quite sure that every successful businessman in almost every industry will have had projects that they put time and money into, that didn’t succeed.
There is actually no such thing as failure, only ideas that provide valuable learning but no financial return.
In fact having “failures” along the way is a good sign. It demonstrates that a person or a company is actually doing things outside their comfort zone and taking calculated risks that will lead to greater future success. So don’t be discouraged when things don’t always work out the way you planned.
As Thomas Edison, the inventor of the telephone famously said when he was questioned over the fact that he openly admitted that it had taken 11,000 experiments before he finally discovered the secret of electric light bulb:
“I did not fail once, what I did was eliminate 11,000 possible solutions that didn’t work”
Step 3. When, where and how will you enact your growth mindset plan
Having cultivated and embedded it in your neural system (brain), you need to decide what you are going to do.
In the context of starting your new business, that might be something like:
“Within the next 3 months I intend to learn the basic skills required to set up my new business, to be clear who I am serving and how I am going to provide solutions to resolve their problems and concerns.”
Step 4. Define how you plan to keep working on your growth mindset plan so that you don’t slip back into the fixed mindset
So you will need to develop a more detailed plan for the time you need to spend on your new business as well as other activities.
Having some powerful affirmations around your new mindset that you read to yourself daily is an essential and surprisingly powerful element of your success.
I hope you find this article useful. If you want to learn more you can get Dr Dweks book from Amazon here
I have also pr0vided links to some other useful material below
Copyright © 2019 DA Web Enterprises
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Mindset: The New Psychology of Success Dr Carol Dweck:
14 Powerful questions to help you overcome negative thinking;
http://www.coachingpositiveperformance.com/14-powerful-questions-help-overcome-negative-thinking/
The power of a positive attitude:
http://www.franksonnenbergonline.com/blog/the-power-of-a-positive-attitude/
Informative, interesting and immutable.